RemNote is fundamentally an outline-based note-taking tool: documents are composed of a series of bullet points which can be indented to form a hierarchy. This makes it easy to organize your notes in as much detail as you require.

Here's how to work with and talk about outlines.

To indent a bullet, press the Tab key on your keyboard (near the top-left on most keyboard layouts). This will move it a short distance further to the right on the screen, indicating that it's a subpart of the bullet above it. Note that you can only indent one level at a time; for instance, here you couldn't indent B a second level:

Instead, you'd need to add another bullet in between, and then you could indent B to the third level:

The opposite of indenting is outdenting (some other outliners call this dedenting). To outdent, press Shift+Tab. This will move the bullet one level back towards the left.

When you outdent, by default, the bullet you're outdenting will be moved up or down as necessary to maintain the parent/child relationships between bullets (see the next section). For instance, here, if you outdent B, it will be moved down to be placed after C. Otherwise, C would suddenly become a child of B instead of A, which would change the logical relationship of the bullet points to one another, and potentially what was shown on the flashcards of the surrounding bullets.

If you prefer to just indent the bullets directly, changing the relationships between them if necessary, change the Default Outdenting Behavior option in Settings > Editor to Google-Docs Style.

A bullet with children can be collapsed, meaning its children are hidden from view but not deleted. The opposite state is expanded: the bullet's children are all visible below it.

A collapsed bullet is visually marked with a filled bullet or triangle indicator, signaling that content exists below it. An expanded bullet shows its children indented beneath it as normal.

For example, here A is expanded and B is collapsed (B has children, but they are not shown):

Clicking B's triangle, or pressing Ctrl+Down (Cmd+Down on a Mac) while your cursor is on B, would expand it to reveal its children.

Collapsing is purely a display state. In most cases it does not affect the structure of your outline, your flashcards, or anything else - the hidden bullets are still there, still scheduled for review, and still part of the hierarchy.

To speak concisely about the logical relationships between bullets created by indentation, we borrow terminology from family trees.

Here, B is a child of A and A is a parent of B:

Here, B is a child of C (and C a parent of B). B does not have a parent/child relationship with A.

We can extend this same family-relations language to work with multiple levels.

Note that this definition means a parent is also an ancestor, and a child is also a descendant.

Here, both B and C are descendants of A, and A is an ancestor of both B and C. (Also, B is an ancestor of C, and C a descendant of B.):

Here, A is an ancestor of every other letter. C is a descendant of A, E, F, and G:

If you ever have occasion to, you can continue the metaphor and talk about grandparents, uncles, and so on, but such specific descriptions are rarely needed.

A top-level bullet is one that has no parent – it's at the top level of its hierarchy. It can have any number of descendants. Top-level bullets are normally either documents or concepts that are relevant in a variety of different contexts. In theory you can make anything into a top-level bullet, but if you make something that's not a document or a reusable concept into a top-level bullet, chances are you'll lose track of it, so this usually isn't a good idea.

You can make a bullet that currently has a parent into a top-level bullet by moving it (Ctrl+Alt+M, or Cmd+Opt+M on a Mac) and selecting the No parent: Turn this into a top-level bullet option from the search popup.

Top-level bullets can be, but do not have to be, documents.

Your knowledge base is your collection of content in RemNote, including your documents, bullets, flashcards, and settings. Structurally, you can think of it as all of the top-level bullet hierarchies in your workspace taken together.

Each top-level bullet within your knowledge base creates a hierarchy below it. This hierarchy can contain any number of bullets – all the way from one (just the top-level bullet by itself) to an unlimited number of descendants. And you can have any number of separate hierarchies.

These “separate” hierarchies are not separate worlds which can never meet, however; bullets that are in different hierarchies can be connected with references, tags, and portals.

You can zoom in to any bullet anywhere in a hierarchy. This makes that bullet appear like a document – the bullet you zoom in to becomes the document title in large text at the top of the screen, and its descendants appear below. The ancestors of the bullet you zoom in to collapse into the breadcrumb at the top of the page. Here we've zoomed in to the 631 Architecture bullet, and you can see that it has two folders above it:

In practice, you'll likely want to zoom in to a fairly limited number of points throughout each hierarchy. Usually these will put some large folder, concept, or category at the top of the page – maybe a subject, a class, a lecture, or a project. For this reason, any bullet that is marked as a folder or document is a “zoom point”. When you navigate to a bullet through search or by clicking on a Reference, RemNote zooms into the closest ancestor of that bullet that is marked as a folder or document and then highlights the target bullet within that view.

Here you can see that at first, searching for D zooms in to Top-Level Document and highlights D:

But when we mark B as a document, searching for D zooms in to B and highlights D:

Bullets in different hierarchies (as well as bullets in the same hierarchy) can be linked together using references and tags. References create a link to another bullet; clicking a Reference will take you to the document the bullet is contained in (see Zooming above) and highlight it. Tags indicate that one bullet is a type of another bullet (for instance, that a Cat is a type of Animal); you can jump quickly between a bullet and its tag, and a tag and all bullets that it is attached to.

Portals allow bullets from one hierarchy to appear somewhere within a different hierarchy. They solve a key problem: in traditional hierarchies, each item can only be in a single place, but sometimes the same idea belongs in multiple places in your notes. With a portal, you can put the idea in one primary location (maybe as a top-level bullet, or in the document it is most obviously related to), and then portal in the relevant bullet to every other place where they belong.

Portals have a blue line to their left when they're not selected, and a blue line all the way around them when they are selected, to indicate that the bullets within them are not actually within the current hierarchy. When your cursor is inside a portal, if the topmost bullet within the portal isn't a top-level bullet, the hierarchy where that bullet is actually located will additionally be displayed to the upper-right of the portal.