Human memory and understanding is fundamentally based on connecting ideas together. You don't learn new facts in a vacuum, you learn them by connecting them to things you already know. And you remember things by first thinking of something else they're related to.

We believe that your notes and flashcards are more effective when they match the way you naturally think, so References – links between concepts, ideas, and sections of your notes – are a key part of RemNote.

You can insert a Reference anywhere in your notes by typing [[, ++, or @. A search popup will appear; find the bullet you want to reference as you would in any other search and click on it or press Enter to add it. If you want to create and link to a new bullet at the top level (not inside any document), rather than finding an existing one, you can type its full text and then select the last option in the list, labeled Create Bullet, or press Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on a Mac).

If you can already see the bullet you want to reference, you can also copy and paste it. First, click on or use the arrow keys to move to the target bullet, but don’t highlight anything. Then press Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on a Mac). A small tooltip that says Copied to clipboard will appear. Now put your cursor where you want to insert the Reference and press Ctrl+V; a reference will be pasted.

Several options in Settings > Editor allow you to control exactly what is created when you use Ctrl+Enter to create a new bullet from the reference search.

Note: If you actually want to type the characters [[, ++, or @, rather than creating a Reference, just press the Escape key afterwards.

You can also create a Reference to an image. However, this can be a little tricky if you don't know how, since it's hard to search for an image by typing on the keyboard! There are two approaches:

As with links in other applications, you can click on a Reference to navigate to that bullet. You can also hold down Shift while clicking on the reference to open the bullet in a new pane, or right-click on the reference for more options.

If you frequently need to peek at referenced bullets, consider enabling the Preview Bullets on Hover option in Settings > Quick Lookup. With this option on, when you hover your mouse cursor over the link, a preview popup will appear showing the content of the referenced bullet and its children.

If you ever change the text of a bullet, all references to it automatically update.

References, like links in your memory, are bidirectional. That is, when you're in a bullet A and reference another bullet B, a link is also created from B to A. This backwards link from B to A is called a backlink. References to a bullet appear in a small gray box showing the number of references at the far right of that bullet on the screen. Or, if you've zoomed in to the bullet, they'll appear at the bottom of the page.

See the Backlinks article for more information about this linking functionality.

References are similar to but distinct from links. Links are underlined rather than just shown in a different color. Unlike References, links can have arbitrary text, and they can link to external websites in addition to Rems in your knowledge base. Otherwise, they work similarly.