Documents and Folders

Documents and folders help you organize your hierarchy of Rems into an understandable structure.

Soren Bjornstad avatar
Written by Soren Bjornstad
Updated over a week ago

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:

Documents are just Rems

In RemNote everything is a Rem – and that includes documents and folders! Any Rem can be turned into a document 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 /document from 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.

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.

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.

Folders

There's no actual difference between documents and folders except the icon – a folder is simply a document that contains other documents. If you're writing a document and find it's growing larger than you had initially expected, you can change some of its sections into documents and the top-level document will become a folder.

Top-level Rems

Top-level Rems and Documents 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.

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