Notebooks

A notebook is a place to keep passages you want to return to: for a lesson, a talk, or a question you are studying over time. You save passages from your search results, put them in order, and write notes alongside them.

Notebooks need an account. If you open the Notebooks page while signed out, you are sent to the login page and back again afterwards. See Signing up and signing in.

Creating a notebook

On the Notebooks page, click "New notebook" and give it a title. The title is required, and you can rename it later. You can also create your first notebook from a result card: when you have none yet, the save dialog offers "Create your first notebook", which creates the notebook and saves the passage in one step.

Saving a passage

Every result card has a bookmark icon in its top-right corner, labeled "Save to a notebook". Click it, then pick a notebook from the list, or type a title under "Or create a new one". A toast confirms Saved to "...", and the passage goes at the end of the notebook.

• A passage can be saved to as many notebooks as you like, but only once in each. Saving it again to the same notebook says "That passage is already in this notebook."
• Once a passage is in any notebook, its bookmark icon shows filled in.
• Signed out, the bookmark asks you to sign in, then returns you to your search.

Inside a notebook

Saved passages appear as the same cards you see in search results: copy the passage with its citation, open the original source, or expand the card to read the text around it. See Reading a result card. The X on a card removes the passage from the notebook at once. There is no undo.

Drag a card with the mouse to change its place in a column or to move it to another column, including one you have emptied. The arrangement is saved as soon as you drop the card, and removing a card leaves the others where they are, so the notebook reopens as you left it. There is no keyboard shortcut for reordering.

The arrangement belongs to the number of columns your screen showed when you made it: three on a wide window, two on a medium one, one on a phone. With a different number of columns the cards are dealt out in the same order, read row by row, and going back to the original width brings the columns back. Dragging or removing a card at another width with two or three columns makes a new arrangement for that width instead. Reordering on a phone, where there is only one column, saves just the order and replaces the columns; removing a card there keeps them. A passage you save later joins the end of the shortest column. See Arranging results for how the grid works.

Notes

Each notebook has one "Notes" panel, beside the passages on a wide screen. Notes belong to the notebook as a whole, not to individual passages. The toolbar offers Bold, Italic, Strikethrough, Heading, Bullet list, Numbered list and Quote.

Notes save themselves about a second after you stop typing. A status label tells you where things stand: "Saving...", "Saved" or "Unsaved changes". Notes can hold up to 100,000 characters.

Pin, rename and delete

• The star next to a notebook's title pins it, so it sits at the top of the sidebar list and the Notebooks page.
• The pencil next to the title renames it.
• To delete a notebook, use the trash icon on its card on the Notebooks page. You are asked to confirm, and every passage saved in it is deleted with it.

There is no limit on the number of notebooks or on the passages in each. To pass a notebook along, see Sharing.