For full text search please use the '?' prefix. e.g. ? Onboarding

Creating Notes

Summary

While we call it the Lookup Bar, you can also use it to create notes that don't exist. When you lookup for a note that hasn't been created, Dendron will create it for you.

To try it yourself, bring up the lookup bar. Type hello and hit Enter.

Creating new note

When looking up a note that does NOT have any special characters [" ","|","*","^","$","!","=","'"] (note: space is deemed as special character), and does NOT yet exist, Create New will bubble up to the top of query results to make it convenient to create a new note.

A new note will be created when you hit Enter while Create New is selected.

Creating Notes with template applied

Similar to how you can create a new note, you can create a new note and select a template to be applied upon creation.

If you hit Enter while Create New with Template is highlighted, you will be prompted again to select the template to be applied. If you hit Enter again after selecting the template, a new note will be created with the template already applied.

Lookup modifiers that can conflict with the template application will be disabled when you create notes this way.

This means selectionExtract will have no effect even when selected.

Lookup modifiers that apply templates or modify the note themselves in any way will disable this behavior.

This means Create New with Template will not appear if you are creating a task note

Creating Special Notes

Dendron has builtin notion for certain types of notes with pre-defined hierarchies. These notes can be created by toggling the corresponding note button on the lookup menu or by using the respective builtin shortcuts.

  • values:
    • none (default): create a regular note
    • journal: create a journal note (cmd/ctrl + shift + j)
    • scratch: create a scratch note (cmd/ctrl + shift + s)

Creating Notes with a Selection

If you have text highlighted while creating a new note with a lookup, the new note will be created using the text selected. How the text will be used depends on the dendron.defaultLookupCreateBehavior setting.

  • values:
    • selectionExtract (default): create new note with text from the old note. remove text from the old note
    • selection2link: create new empty note and turn selection into a link referencing the old note

Vault Selection for New Notes

If you have multiple vaults in your workspace, you can control the behavior of which vault your new note will be placed in:

From Multi Vault Setup
Go to text →

Vault Location when Creating a Note

When creating a note in lookup, Dendron will try to create your note in the correct vault. By default, it will place the note into the same vault as the currently opened note. But if it detects that the new note matches an existing hierarchy in a different vault, you will get prompted to pick the destination vault:

Prompt for Vault Selection Each Time

From Configuration
Go to text →

lookupConfirmVaultOnCreate

This setting is scheduled for deprecation 📆

Use confirmVaultOnCreate instead.

With this set, you will be prompted to select the vault location each time you create a note when you have multiple vaults in your workspace.

To enable, add lookupConfirmVaultOnCreate: true in the Dendron configuration. Instructions to do so below.

  1. Dendron: Configure (yaml)

  2. add lookupConfirmVaultOnCreate: true so your configuration looks like the following:
version: 0
...
lookupConfirmVaultOnCreate: true

Moving Notes Between Vaults

This can be done with the Move Note command.

From Dendron: Move Note
Go to text →

Move a note to another vault and update all backlinks to that note.

Backlinks