Find your way around a note

Long notes stay easy to move around in Writer Computer: an outline of your headings sits at the edge of the note, links can jump to any heading, find and replace marks every match, and the status bar counts your words.

The section rail

When a note has five or more headings of levels 1 to 3, a column of short marks appears at its right edge, one for each heading. The mark for the section you're reading is brighter, and it follows you as you scroll.

  • Hover over the rail to see the outline: every heading in the note, with the current one in the accent color.
  • Click a mark or a heading in the outline to jump straight to it.
  • Right-click a mark or heading and choose Copy heading link to copy a link to it, such as [Install](#install), ready to paste into the same note.

Every heading has an anchor made from its text, the way GitHub makes them: lowercase, punctuation removed, spaces turned into hyphens, so "Getting started!" becomes #getting-started. A second heading with the same text becomes #getting-started-2.

  • [text](#getting-started) scrolls to that heading in the same note.
  • [text](setup.md#getting-started) opens setup.md and jumps to the heading. Paths are relative to the note, and a link without an extension finds setup.md too.

A click on a link follows it; you don't need to hold ⌘. If the heading doesn't exist, Writer says so in a small notice at the top of the note. To follow links between notes by name instead, see [[wikilinks]] in Obsidian compatibility.

Find and replace

Press ⌘F to open the find panel at the bottom right of the note. It fills in the text you've selected, if any, and shows which match you're on out of how many.

  • Enter or ⌘G goes to the next match, and Shift+Enter or ⌘⇧G to the previous one.
  • Replace opens a second field, with Replace for the current match and All for every match.
  • Esc closes the panel and puts you back in the note.

While the panel is open, a thin strip at the right edge marks where every match is in the note, with the current one in the accent color. Click a mark to jump to that match.

Matching is plain text and ignores case. Search looks inside the open note; to find a note by its name, use the command palette (⌘P). Writer doesn't search the text of every note in a folder yet.

Back and forward

The ← and → buttons in the tab bar step back and forward through the notes you've opened in that tab, and so do ⌥← and ⌥→ when the cursor isn't in the note. When you go back to a note, it opens where you left off, with the cursor and scroll position as they were.

Word count

The status bar at the bottom of the note shows its words, characters and paragraphs. Markdown syntax doesn't count: a link counts as its text, and # or - at the start of a line doesn't count as a word.

Right-click the status bar to choose which counts to show. If you hide all three, the status bar goes away; turn them back on in Preferences under Status Bar.