Notes

Notes is for writing that should still be useful next month: meeting notes, a plan, a list you keep adding to, a thought you want to find again. iPhone and Mac share the same notes, the same folders, and the same links to tasks.

The library

• iPhone. Open the drawer and tap Notes. One title, one menu: tap the title to pick All notes, a folder, or a tag, and to choose the sort. Today's daily note has its own row at the top.
• Mac. Click Notes in the sidebar. The sidebar turns into the Notes library: Today, then Recents once you have them, All Notes, Daily Notes, Folders, and Tags. The Kept row at the top, with its back chevron, returns you to the rest of the app.

On Mac, All Notes shows your standalone notes plus today's daily note, and earlier daily notes live in Daily Notes, so a year of journal entries never buries your other writing. On iPhone, All notes includes past daily notes too, with today's note in its own row at the top. On iPhone the default sort is Opened: pinned first, then the notes you last opened; the sort menu also offers Edited, Created, A to Z, Open checks, and a Pinned only filter. On Mac, All Notes runs by last edit, and Recents keeps what you opened close at hand.

Search the list and Kept finds words inside long notes, not only titles. On Mac, ⇧⌘F puts the caret in Search notes; the library shows only matches while you type.

Make a note

Tap the Capture button while you are in Notes and it opens straight to a note, skipping detection. On Mac, ⇧⌘N starts a note in the folder you are looking at, and New note in the toolbar does the same.

A new note starts at its name. Type the title, press Return, and you are in the body. Or start from a template: the templates Kept ships come in as ordinary blocks you can edit like any other writing.

Put a picture in a note

Choose Image from the block palette and pick a photo. Kept holds the space the picture will take the moment you pick it, so nothing under it jumps once the pixels arrive.

A picture sits on the page like a paragraph: it starts on the same left edge your words do, with no frame, no tint and no controls around it. Click it on Mac, or tap it on iPhone, and the picture takes a thin outline and its verbs appear: a strip across the bottom of the picture on Mac, the bar above the keyboard on iPhone. Press Escape, or click or tap anywhere else, and they go again.

The verbs are the same on both, minus one. Alt describes the picture for VoiceOver, and the words under a picture are already its caption, so Kept does not ask you for a second one. Open shows the picture at full size, zoomable on iPhone and in Quick Look on Mac. Delete removes it, with Undo. Mac adds S, M and L: small, medium, or the full width of the writing column. iPhone honors the size you chose on the Mac and does not offer to change it, because on a phone's column small and medium have nowhere to go.

If a picture cannot load, it says so in the space it already reserved and offers Try again.

Folders and tags

Folders are places; tags are threads that run across places. A note lives in one folder and can carry any number of tags.

Kept can suggest a tag for a captured note, but only when your own words name a subject. It never invents one. Add or remove tags from the note's tag control any time. A daily tidy pass standardizes capitalization and spacing on tags and merges exact duplicates; it never removes a tag because it is missing from the text.

On Mac, switch the library to Manual order from its menu and drag folders into the order you want; the default Recent order sorts itself. Nested folders stay expanded together as you browse.

Pin what you keep coming back to

Right-click a note, folder, or tag on Mac and choose Pin to Sidebar. It appears under Pinned in the main sidebar, one click from anywhere in the app. Unpin the same way. On iPhone, pin from the note's menu; pinned notes sort first under the Opened sort.

Delete a note

Delete a note and Kept offers Undo for a moment before the removal syncs. Let it stand and the note leaves your account on every device, along with its revision history. Only you can delete your notes, and deleting one never touches another.

Share a note

Choose Share from a note's menu. Kept shows you what the page will carry, its title, highlights, and images, before it makes anything. Create a link, choose whether recipients may view, comment, or edit, and decide whether search engines may find it; that switch starts off. Anyone with a view link can read the note; comment and edit require the recipient to sign in. Change a link's permission or revoke it from the same sheet. Revoking blocks new requests immediately, though it cannot recall a copy someone already saved.

Export in the same menu writes the note out as Markdown, plain text, or PDF.

Where notes show up elsewhere

• Calendar shows a quiet link to an existing daily note on its date, so a day you wrote about is one tap away from the day you planned.
• Tasks can link a note as reference, and a checkbox written in a note becomes a real task.
• The assistant, with Cloud AI on, can search your notes by keyword or by meaning, read one in full, and append to today's daily note.

Next: Writing in the editor.