As your notes grow, you'll naturally end up writing about the same idea in more than one place. You might create a "Mitochondria" bullet while taking biology notes one week, then create another "Mitochondria" bullet in a Daily Document a month later. When that happens, the notes you've gathered about a single concept get split across two bullets, which makes them harder to find, reference, or study from.

For example, say you have a test coming up that you know will include questions about the structure and other qualities of mitochondria. To get some extra practice, you'd like to search for the "Mitochondria" bullet in your knowledge base and run through all of the flashcards related to that concept. If your cards are scattered across several bullets in different documents, that becomes much harder. And if you've used similar names like "Mitochondrion" along the way, you'd also have to remember every other name you gave that concept just to make sure you practiced all the relevant cards.

RemNote offers a number of tools that let you link and reuse bullets across your knowledge base, such as References, Links, and Portals. The merge feature is one of these: it gives you a quick way to combine duplicates back into a single bullet. Here’s how it works.

RemNote automatically detects when you have duplicate bullets in your notes as you write. When you click into a bullet that has identical text to another bullet elsewhere in the currently open document, a small merge button appears inside it.

When you click that button, RemNote will take all the indented notes (child bullets) from the duplicates and move them under a single master bullet. When this happens, the master bullet's own child bullets stay on top, followed by the child bullets from each duplicate, in the order the duplicates appear in your document.

Alternatively, you can trigger the same merge using the keyboard. Click into a bullet you want to merge other duplicate bullets into and press Ctrl+Alt+E (Cmd+Option+E on a Mac).

Automatic merging is handy for catching duplicates as you write, but it has two limitations:

Often, though, neither is the case. Continuing our example, you might have one bullet for "Mitochondria" and another for "Mitochondrion" located in different documents, each with sub-bullets that aren't identical, but clearly refer to the same concept.

In that case, you can merge duplicates manually by using the /-menu command. Type /merge in the bullet, choose Merge from the menu and search for a bullet across your knowledge base that you want to merge this bullet with.

When you merge two bullets together, RemNote is careful not to lose any context or break the structure of your document. Here is exactly what happens to the duplicate.

The duplicate bullet is removed, but a Portal to the newly consolidated bullet is left in its exact place. If you merge the "Mitochondrion" bullet into "Mitochondria", the spot where "Mitochondrion" used to sit becomes a Portal showing the combined bullet. This keeps your original document structure intact while pulling from a single source of truth.

The name of the merged duplicate is automatically added as an Alias to the remaining master bullet. When you merge, RemNote doesn't just change the name in the text; it adds a child bullet with the Aliases Power-Up under the master bullet, so you can keep track of every name a concept goes by. In our example, "Mitochondrion" becomes an alias of "Mitochondria".

This means any existing references, and any future searches, for either term will still point to the same consolidated concept, which is especially handy for abbreviations, translations, plurals, and chemical names.