The library, lists and tags

The library’s home is where every note starts: tiles for the places you visit most, your tags, and the rest of the library underneath. This page covers the home, the note lists behind it, and the ways to sort, search and tidy notes several at a time.

The library’s home

On iPhone, Varlig opens on Library. On iPad, the same page is the sidebar beside your notes.

• Tiles come first: Notes, Today, Pinned, Todo, Journal and Reminders until you choose others. Each shows its colour, its symbol and how many notes it holds; Reminders counts the reminders still waiting.
• Tags follow, each on a tile of its colour with its own icon and note count. A tag with subtags has a disclosure arrow, and Varlig remembers which ones you’ve folded.
• More lists everything that isn’t a tile as a compact row: Untagged, Locked, Archive, Review, Templates, Trash, and Shared once a note is shared.

The … button at the top holds Library Options: Edit Library…, Manage Tags… and Quick Open Tag…. The gear opens Settings.

Each place keeps its colour in every theme — Today blue, Pinned orange, Reminders red, Todo green, Journal purple — and a tag and its subtags share one.

Choose your tiles

Edit Library… decides which places are tiles, and in what order:

• Drag a tile to move it.
• The minus button turns a tile back into a row, listed under More Places; the plus button beside one makes it a tile again.
• Restore Default Tiles puts back the six you started with.

You can also touch and hold a tile or a row and choose Remove from Tiles or Show as Tile. Your choice of tiles is kept on this iPhone or iPad, so each device can have its own.

Saved searches and reading lists

Search in Notes, then choose Save Search… from the … menu to keep the query. It appears under Saved Searches on the library’s home; touch and hold it to rename or delete it.

Select notes and choose Read Together to read them on one page, then Save Reading List… to keep their order. Open the list under Reading Lists; Edit lets you reorder it, and Remove from Reading removes a note from the list without deleting it. Saved searches and reading lists follow iCloud between your devices.

Tags

Tags work as they do on the Mac: type # and a word anywhere in a note. See Tags, links and backlinks.

Touch and hold a tag for its menu:

Renaming a tag to a name that already exists would merge the two, so Varlig says so under the name as you type, and nothing changes until you’ve seen the list of notes and tapped Merge Tags. Merge Into… shows the notes it will change first too, and Remove Tag… asks before it removes anything. Afterwards Varlig says which notes it changed and which it skipped, and why: locked, read-only and trashed notes are left alone. Editing dates stay as they were.

The Tags heading has its own menu: Manage Tags…, Sort Tags By title or note count, and Reverse Tag Order. Manage Tags… starts with Recently Added, the tags first used in the last 7, 30 or 90 days, which makes tags an import or a paste brought in easy to spot. Quick Open Tag… searches your tags by any part of their name.

The note list

Tap a tile, a tag or a place to see its notes.

Notes are grouped by date, as in Notes: Pinned, Today, Yesterday, Previous 7 Days, Previous 30 Days, then this year’s months and earlier years. The date used is the one the list is sorted by, and a list sorted by title has no groups. Each row shows the title, two lines of what follows, the date and up to two tags, with a thumbnail when the note has a picture or a sketch. Pins, padlocks and the read-only and shared marks show on the rows that have them.

A list’s … menu holds:

Journal and Review keep their own order, so their menus have no View As or Sort By. Every other list remembers its own sort and layout on this device, so a recipes tag can be a gallery sorted by title while Notes stays a list, newest first.

View as Gallery shows each note as a card with its first picture, or its first lines on the page, and the title and date underneath, in the same date groups. Touch and hold a card for the same menu as a row; swiping is for the list.

Swipe and touch and hold

Swipe a note from the left to pin it, or from the right to archive it or move it to the Trash. In the Trash, the swipes restore a note or delete it for good. Touch and hold a note for everything else: Duplicate, Save as Template, pinning, archiving, moving to the Trash and, in Templates, New Note from Template and Convert to Ordinary Note.

In Trash, Empty Trash takes the place of New Note, and it’s also in the Trash tile’s or row’s menu. Delete Permanently and Empty Trash ask first, and remove the notes from your other devices too, when they sync.

Search

On iPhone, the library’s home has a search of its own that looks through every note. In a list, a search stays inside that list. Search understands the same filters as on the Mac: #tag, @todo, @title, -word, or and "exact phrase". The words in pictures, scans and PDFs are searchable too. See Finding anything.

Work with several notes

Select Notes in a list’s … menu puts a checkmark beside every row, or a round mark on every card. Tap the notes you want, or Select All, and the bar at the bottom offers:

A note that can’t take the change — a protected note can’t be pinned, for example — is named afterwards with the reason, and the others still change. Done ends choosing, and so does changing lists.

The places in the library

Review works as on the Mac: swipe a note to Mark Reviewed or Snooze it, touch and hold to snooze it for a week, a month or Until… a day you pick, or to Exclude from Review, and use Review More when you’d like more. On This Day shows what you wrote on this date in earlier years. Each device reviews on its own schedule. See Review and On This Day.