The Binder

The left-hand panel is the binder — a tree view of your project folder, one of the dockable tool windows described above. It’s .gitignore-aware, and documents are shown without their .md extension.

• Navigate by keyboard: click a row (or Tab to it) to give it focus, then:
  • Up/Down moves between rows
  • Left/Right collapses/expands a focused folder
  • Enter opens the focused document
• Drag and drop a file or folder onto another folder to move it there. Drag it onto another document instead to reorder — dropping it just before that document, within the same folder — without changing which folder it’s in.
• F6 (the remappable “Toggle Binder/Editor Focus” shortcut) jumps keyboard focus back and forth between the binder and the editor/preview, without touching the mouse.
• Right-click a row for a context menu:
  • New File / New Folder / New From Template (folders only — see Templates) — each prompts for a name (Enter to confirm)
  • Rename — also prompts for a name, and updates any [[wikilinks]] elsewhere in the project that pointed at the old name
  • Delete — shows a native confirmation dialog; if a Trash folder is configured, it’s worded as a move to Trash rather than a permanent delete
  • Restore (on a trashed item) — moves it back to its original folder, offering to recreate that folder if it’s gone since
  • Folder Role / Dropdown Source / Empty Trash (folders only) — see Folder Roles and Dropdown Source Folders
• A folder with a role assigned shows a leading icon instead of a text label: 🔍 Research, 🗑 Trash, 📋 Templates, 📖 Manuscript
• Click the root row (the project itself, at the very top of the tree) to switch the Metadata dock over to project-wide fields — see Project Metadata. The row gets the same persistent highlight a selected document gets, and clicking it also toggles the whole tree open/closed, the same as clicking any other folder row does
• Click any other folder row to switch the Metadata dock to that folder’s own metadata instead — the same Type/Status/POV/Word Count Target/Tags fields and form documents use (see Document Metadata), just without a live word count of its own since a folder has no body to count. The form’s heading reads “Folder Metadata” instead of the document’s title, so it’s always clear which kind of row you’re editing

Binder Background Coloring

Binder rows — documents and folders alike — can be background-colored to make status, POV, or progress toward a word count target visible at a glance without opening the Metadata dock for each one. Four modes are available, switchable via View > Color Binder By, the remappable “Cycle Binder Color Mode” shortcut (default Ctrl+Shift+C, cycling through the modes below in order), or by clicking the mode indicator that appears in the status bar once a mode other than Off is active (clicking it cycles too):

• Off — no background coloring at all. The default, so a new project’s binder starts uncolored until you opt in.
• Status — colors each row by its own status value, using whatever color you’ve assigned that status (see below).
• POV — colors each row by its own pov value the same way.
• Word Count Progress — a red→yellow→green gradient toward word_count_target: a document uses its own word count against its own target; a folder uses the combined word count of every document nested inside it (computed on a background thread alongside the Word Count panel’s own total, so it never blocks the UI) against the folder’s own target.

A row with nothing relevant to the active mode — no status/POV assigned, or no target set — simply shows no color; there’s no fallback to a different mode.

Status and POV colors themselves are assigned from the Metadata dock: next to the Status:/POV: row (on both the document and folder forms), a color swatch button appears as soon as that field isn’t blank — click it to open a color picker. Each status/POV value’s color is shared project-wide, so coloring “draft” or “Alice” once colors every row carrying that value, document or folder alike.

A file with uncommitted git changes (when git integration is on, both app-wide and for the project) also gets a trailing “•” marker after its name — a folder shows the same marker if anything nested inside it is dirty. This is independent of the coloring modes above: it’s a plain text suffix, not a color, so it shows alongside whichever Color Binder By mode is active rather than competing with it.