Notes & the notebook

Press Cmd/CtrlJ to summon the notebook: a slim companion that folds out along the right edge of the window. It holds pages, and a page is just a panel living in that zone, so a note, a document or a file tree can all sit in it. Press the chord again to fold it back to its spine.

Each page holds on in one of three ways:

• Transient pages arrived for a glance. They fold away with the notebook, and the notebook brings them back when it reopens, still as transient pages that never earn a named tab of their own.
• Pinned pages are the ones you curated. They keep a named tab on the spine, are always one click away, and come back after a relaunch. Right-click a page in the rail and choose Pin Page.
• Anchored pages keep the notebook open permanently. As long as one page is anchored the notebook never folds itself away, which is what you want for a reference you are reading from all day.

The spine is deliberately short. Anchored pages come first, then pinned ones, then the freshest transient page keeps its own name so you can get back to what you were just looking at. Everything else collapses into one counted chip.

Notes are files, not panel contents. Every note lives as a markdown file in a folder called the vault, which means a note is not owned by the workspace you happened to write it in: the same note is reachable from any workspace, and closing the panel showing it closes a view, never the note. Deleting a note is a separate, explicit act.

By default the vault sits inside Deska’s application data folder. You can point it anywhere under Settings → Workflows → Notes → Vault. Leave the field blank for the default, or aim it at an existing markdown vault (an Obsidian vault, for instance) and edit the same files from both apps. Deska preserves frontmatter it did not write, so hand-authored metadata survives an edit.

Writes are debounced while you type rather than fired on every keystroke, so a long note does not turn into a stream of disk writes.

Library is the panel that browses the whole vault. Every workspace carries one from birth as the notebook’s home page, so there is always somewhere to start looking, and it does not count as content you put there when Deska decides whether a workspace is still empty.

The panel is search first. Type to filter across every note in the vault; without a query, quick captures made from the ambient dock surface as an inbox to title or grow, and everything else lists by recency with a one-line preview. Clicking a row opens that note as a stop on the Library’s own trail, so reading never takes you away from where you were browsing, and the + button creates a draft as a new stop on that same trail.

A sticky note is a canvas-side view of a vault note: a small colored panel you can drop anywhere on the canvas. Five paper colors ship (yellow, pink, green, blue and lavender), and the Aa format menu offers Title, Heading, Body and Monospaced so a note can hold a little structure without becoming a document.

Right-click a sticky note and choose Anchor to to tie it to another panel. Deska then draws a dashed connector between the two and the note reads as a comment on that panel rather than a loose scrap. Unanchor releases it. Because the text lives in the vault, the same note can be open as a sticky note, as a stop on the Library’s trail in the notebook and in the dock at once, and all three stay in sync.

Other small canvas widgets (todo lists, the pomodoro timer, the scratchpad) are covered in Browser & widgets.

In the bottom-left corner of the canvas sits a small keychain of three chips: a note, the pomodoro timer and the music player. At rest they collapse into a fanned stack hugging the corner; hovering unfolds them. Whatever is actually happening fronts the collapsed stack, so the note you are writing beats a running timer, which beats a playing track, and a glance at the corner tells you the truth without the dock ever growing.

The chips are fixed to the screen rather than placed on the canvas, so they follow every zoom, pan and workspace switch, and they are always there without occupying canvas space.

• The note chip shows the color of the note you touched most recently. Clicking it opens a small card with a full editor bound to that same vault note, which is the fastest way to jot something without breaking your layout. Hovering the unfolded chip lists your recent notes to jump between, or creates a new one. From the card you can hand the note off to the canvas as a sticky note, or open it in the notebook.
• The pomodoro and music chips are the same timers and player you can open as full panels, in miniature. The timer keeps running whether or not its panel is open, so the chip is a readout of the one session, not a second one.

Think of the dock as the always-available version and the panels as the full-attention version. Use the chip to capture or to check, and open the panel when the thing itself is what you are working on.