Write your first card

Create a card, write some awesome content and tag it!

Updated over a week ago

All notes in Supernotes are written as beautiful cards. This modular, short-form style of note-taking gives you greater flexibility and organisational power than files ever could. Cards look simple on the outside, but are an incredibly powerful building block for your notes, thoughts, and ideas, with a diverse feature set to help you make the most of them. 

As a rule, try to make every topic, thought or idea their own card - the more you can break down your notes into bite-sized pieces, the more flexible they can become. Our co-founder, Tobias, walks through the basics of creating cards with a previous version of Supernotes below. A few things have changed since the recording but the core concepts remain the same.


Creating a Card

To create a card, just start typing on your keyboard, or alternately you can click the "Start Typing" prompt. At this point you will be in the card 'edit mode' – none of your changes are saved until you finish editing. 

Adding a Title

When you create a new card you are prompted to give it a title. If you don't know what to call it yet, don't worry, you can skip this by pressing [tab] to go to the body of a card. To return to editing the title either click in the title field at the top of the card or by press [shift] and [tab] at the same time on the keyboard. 

Adding some Content

Now you can type to your heart's content and make full use of the Markdown language. Haven't heard of Markdown? Don't worry, its a simplified text markup language that's easy to get to grips with. Lots of apps (Facebook, Slack, and WhatsApp) already support it. Have you ever surrounded text with two asterisks (**like this**) to make text bold? That's Markdown! To help you get started, we have included a cheatsheet for you, which you can find in the 'help menu' in the bottom right of the Supernotes app.

Adding a Tag 

Tags help you quickly sort your cards, so its good to get into a habit of using them. With conventional files you might have struggled to see repeating/connecting themes/topics. But with Supernotes you can just tag them! 

You add a tag at any time, by typing [/]  followed by [#]. Alternatively, you can click the  +  button in the top right of a card and select 'Tag'. Type the tag you wish to create and then press enter to add it to the card. 

You will notice that you can change whether a Tag is 'Public' or 'Personal'. 

  • Public Tags can be seen by anyone who has access to that card (i.e. if you intend to share it in the future). If the tag you are adding is useful for everyone, such as '#summary', then add it as a Public Tag.

  • Personal Tags can only be seen by you. This is useful for categorising cards with labels personal to you. For example, if you find a particular topic difficult, you may want to Tag that card with '#difficult'. Since that only applies to you it is a personal Tag.

Finishing Up

When you are ready to finish your card, either click the finish button in the bottom-right corner of the card or just press [cmd/ctrl] and [enter] at the same time on your keyboard. Once you finish a card, it will immediately go into 'display' view. Supernotes does all of the formatting and other nonsense for you, so you can focus on writing!  

Editing a Card

If you want to edit a card you have written, click the edit button in the top right hand corner. You can also click anywhere on a card to focus on it and then press [enter] to go into the 'edit' view.

Character and Card Limits

After you've created a couple cards, you may notice that every card has a 1200 character soft-limit, to encourage you to write in a shorter and more concise way. You can go over this limit if you'd like to write more. As a free user, you have a limited number of cards you can create before you will be required to either purchase the unlimited plan or refer friends to get more cards. 

Every card that you write can be found under in your 'home', which is easily accessible from the sidebar. Once you have a number of cards, you might want to start building a card hierarchy. And if you want to collaborate with friends or colleagues, you can always join and share cards.

Want to become a markdown pro?  Read these articles to learn on how to create tables, math equations and more.

Now get typing! 

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