The sidebar

The sidebar lists your folders and files down the left side of the window. Click a file to open it in the current tab, or right-click and choose Open in New Tab.

Action	Shortcut
Show or hide the sidebar	Cmd+Shift+L
Show the file you’re editing	Opt+Cmd+\
Find a file by name	Cmd+P
Open a file or folder	Cmd+O

Open a folder

Press Cmd+O and choose a folder, or drag one from Finder onto the sidebar. It arrives as a section header with its contents beneath it, and you can add as many folders as you like — they stack in the same sidebar.

To take one out, hover its header and click the ✕. The folder stays on disk; Inkstone just stops listing it.

Create a file or folder

Click New File or New Folder at the top of the sidebar, or right-click the folder you want it to land in.

A new folder is named right there in the tree: type the name and press Return. Esc throws it away.

A new file takes its name from what you write. It opens in the current tab with the cursor on an empty heading — type a title, then press Return or click elsewhere, and the file takes that title as its name. Press Esc instead and it’s called untitled.md; Rename… on its right-click menu changes that whenever you like.

To name files in the sidebar the way folders are named, set Settings ▸ General ▸ Editing ▸ File name binds to title to Never. The setting below it, New file starts with heading, decides whether files named that way — and File ▸ New Draft — open with a # heading already in place or completely empty.

Rename, move, delete

Right-click a row:

• Rename… opens the name for editing with the extension left off. Type a new name; the old extension is kept.
• Delete moves it to the Trash.
• Duplicate drops a copy beside it.
• Move To… lets you search for the destination folder by name. Up and Down pick, Return moves.
• Reveal in Finder and Copy Path are on the same menu.

Drag a row onto a folder to move it, hold Option while dragging to copy instead, or drag a row out to Finder.

Cmd-click and Shift-click select several rows at once, and the right-click menu then acts on the whole set — Delete 3 Items, Move 3 Items…, and so on.

If the destination already holds a file with that name, an alert says so and nothing moves. Rename… one of the two, then move it again.

Pin the files you keep coming back to

Right-click a file or folder and choose Pin. It jumps to a Pinned section at the top of the sidebar and disappears from its folder, so nothing shows up twice. Drag inside the section to reorder, drag a row onto it to pin it, and Unpin to send it back where it came from. Pins survive renames and relaunches.

Dragging a pinned row into another folder moves the file and unpins it.

Keep separate projects apart

Workspaces are the strip of icons along the bottom of the sidebar. Each one remembers its own folders, its pins, and which folders are expanded. Click an icon to switch.

• Add one — click + at the right end of the strip and pick a folder. That folder becomes the workspace’s first folder and gives it its name.
• Rename, change icon, delete — right-click its icon. Deleting throws away only Inkstone’s record of the workspace; no files are touched.
• Reorder — drag the icons along the strip.
• When the strip runs out of room, the rest collapse into a +N menu at its end. Pick one to switch to it.

Give a file its own icon

Change Icon… on any file, folder, or folder header sets an emoji or symbol. The file’s contents don’t change. See [[custom-icons|Custom File & Folder Icons]].

Opening a file that isn’t a note

Saving can reformat a file that was never Markdown. A file with no extension, or one your Mac has no name for, opens in the editor instead of a viewer, and the editor writes Markdown back out when you save — indented lines can come back as a code block. Read that kind of file and close it without saving, or right-click it, choose Duplicate, and edit the copy.

Everything else just opens for looking at:

What you open	What you get
A note — .md, .markdown, .mdx, .txt, .text	The editor
A picture	Fitted to the pane. Pinch, or hold a modifier key and scroll, to zoom; arrow keys to move around
A video or a sound file	A player. It waits for you to start it, and pauses when you leave the tab
A PDF	Every page in one continuous scroll
Anything else — a spreadsheet, an archive, a folder	A preview you can look at but not edit, the same one Finder draws when you press the space bar

The sidebar lists notes, pictures, video and sound, and PDFs. Folders always show, even when nothing inside them is listed; hidden files and folders whose names begin with a dot never do. A file the sidebar leaves out still opens from Finder, or from a drop onto a tab.

If you work with code

LICENSE, Makefile, and anything else with no extension open in the editor as text — they’re what the reformatting warning above is about. Source files and data files your Mac recognises get the read-only preview instead. Any file also opens from the command line.