Notebooks and stacks

File your notes in notebooks, and group notebooks into stacks.

Every note lives in one notebook. A stack is a group of notebooks, the way Evernote has them: it holds notebooks, not notes, and folds away in the sidebar like any other list.

See your notebooks

Your notebooks and stacks are listed in the sidebar under Notebooks. The number beside a notebook is how many notes it holds. A stack shows no number, because its contents are notebooks, not notes.

The star in the corner of a notebook's book icon marks your default notebook, wherever a notebook is listed. To choose which notebook it is, go to Settings ▸ Notes ▸ Default Notebook.

The Notebooks header has two halves. Click the arrow to fold or unfold the list in place. Click the name, Notebooks, to open the table of all your notebooks. Sort the table by clicking its column headers; for a stack, the Contents column says how much is in it.

To fold a stack, point at its glyph — it turns into an arrow — and click it.

Open the table of all your notebooks from the Notebooks name in the sidebar, and sort it by its column headers. For a stack, the Contents column says how much is in it.

See everything in a stack

Open a stack to see every note in every notebook in it, in one list — newest first, with pinned notes on top.

Click the stack's name. Its glyph still folds it.

In Notebooks, tap the stack's row to open it. Tap the chevron at the right-hand edge of the row to fold it.

A shortcut to a stack, and a stack opened from the Notebooks table, show the same list.

Make a notebook

To make a notebook inside a stack, right-click the stack in the sidebar or in the Notebooks table and choose New Notebook in "…". Type the name, and the notebook is made in that stack.

You can also make a notebook while you move a note: every list of notebooks ends with New Notebook… (see below).

Two notebooks can't share a name. If you create or rename a notebook with a name that is already in use, NotaBene tells you and leaves the name as it was. Capitals don't count — Work and work are the same name.

A name pasted with a line break in it becomes a single line, for notebooks, stacks and tags alike.

Give a notebook a color and an icon

Every notebook has a color and an icon: a colored circle with a white symbol, in the sidebar, in the Notebooks list and beside the note's title. A notebook you have not changed gets a color of its own and a book.

Right-click the notebook in the sidebar or in the Notebooks list (on the iPhone and iPad, touch and hold it) and choose Show Notebook Info.
Change the name if you like, pick one of the twelve colors, and pick an icon.
Click Save (on the iPhone and iPad, tap ✓). Cancel (✕) leaves the notebook as it was.

The color and the icon go to your other devices with the notebook.

Move a note to another notebook

Right-click the note and choose where to move it, or drag the note onto a notebook in the sidebar.

Swipe the note and tap the blue move button, or touch and hold the note and choose to move it.

Then choose the notebook. Type a few letters to narrow the list.

To move several notes at once, select them and use the bar at the foot of the list. See The note list: pin, sort, select.

Wherever you choose a notebook, the list is in alphabetical order and has a filter: type, and the list narrows, so a hundred notebooks are as quick to get through as five. The sidebar keeps its own order, the one you drag it into.

The chooser is a sheet with a search field and the list. ＋ New Notebook… sits beside Cancel. ↑, ↓ and Return work in the list.

The chooser fills the screen: ✕ and ＋ at the top, the list, and the filter field at the bottom.

To file a note in a notebook that doesn't exist yet, choose New Notebook… at the end of the list, type the name, and the note goes straight into it. It is there in every place a note can be moved from — the swipe, the note's menu, the bar over selected notes, the notebook name in the editor, and ⓘ ▸ Filing. The last two show which notebook the note is in, as a menu.

See Also: Tags · Shortcuts · Swipe actions