Documents are the main unit of organization in RemNote. Turn a Rem into a document when you want to view that Rem and its children on a separate page in the future, rather than seeing it as a bullet point under some other document.
You can create a new top-level document using the Create button at the bottom of the sidebar:
Folders
You can group your documents into folders. You can put folders in other folders, just like in your computer's file system. Folders can contain only documents, not other kinds of Rems, and your ability to edit within folders is limited to changing the names of documents and adding, removing, and moving them around.
You can create a folder from the Create link in the sidebar. Then add content to the folder using the Add Document and Create Subfolder options – or drag and drop or cut and paste existing documents or folders into it.
Documents and Folders are just Rems
In RemNote everything is a Rem – and that includes documents and folders! Any Rem can be turned into a document or folder at any time.
You can toggle if a Rem is a document or not by:
Zooming into the Rem (by clicking on its bullet) and clicking Turn into Document at the top. (If it’s already a document, this button will say Document Style; click there and then deselect Mark as Document to make it no longer a document.)
With your text cursor in the Rem, selecting
/documentfrom the /-menu.With your text cursor in the Rem, pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D (Cmd+Opt+Shift+D on a Mac).
Notice that you can create documents anywhere in the hierarchy; they don't have to be at the top level. And you don't need to carefully decide if something should be a document when you initially start taking notes; you can always make any level in your hierarchy into one or toggle it back into a normal Rem later.
Folders work very similarly to documents here; use /folder to mark or unmark a Rem as a folder.
Customizing document display
Selecting the Document Style option at the top of a document gives you several additional options.
Add Icon: Select an emoji to display next to the document’s name at the top of the page and when the document is shown in the sidebar.
Mark as Document: Use this switch to unmark the Rem as a document, if you decide you no longer want it to be one.
Hide Bullets: If enabled, the Rems that are immediate children of this document won’t have bullets next to them. This can make documents that contain lots of headings or consist mostly of prose prettier. You can always go into outline mode and add additional levels of bullet points by pressing Tab.
Wide Layout: When viewing this document, allow lines to stretch across the entire width of the screen, rather than having a maximum length with whitespace on either side. Excessively long lines make running text more difficult to read, but this may be a worthwhile tradeoff if your document contains wide tables or large images that are difficult to read otherwise.
Nested documents
If you want the ability to group documents into larger categories, like you would with a folder, while still retaining the ability to edit content within them, or mix documents and other kinds of Rems together, it's also possible to put documents directly inside other documents. These are called nested documents.
You can put a document in another document, or convert an existing Rem into a nested document, in all the same ways that you can put a document in a folder or convert an existing Rem into a folder.
Effects of making something a document
Since documents and Rems behave the same way in most respects, it's sometimes helpful to understand all the effects of making something a document.
Documents are shown with a document icon (or a folder icon; see the next section) next to their names.
Documents appear in the sidebar (if they're pinned or you've turned on the option to show unpinned Rems on the sidebar).
Documents appear in the Documents tab of the All Notes page.
Documents can have their display format customized. See the next section.
Documents are prioritized in search; if a document and another Rem both contain your search terms, the document will likely appear higher in the list.
When you search for and open a Rem, or navigate to it using a Rem Reference, the first document above that Rem is opened, and the screen scrolls to the Rem you navigated to within it. In this example, marking B as a document causes the search to zoom in to document B, rather than Top-Level Document, the second time we search for D.
Top-level Rems
Top-level Rems and Documents (or Folders) are sometimes confused. A top-level Rem is simply a Rem that has no parent Rem; it doesn't have to be a document. Meanwhile, any Rem, top-level or not, can be either a document or not a document, as mentioned in the preceding sections.