Comments, footnotes, highlights and tables

The Mac’s writing tools come with you: comments beside a sentence, footnotes, highlights in five colours, right-to-left paragraphs, saved transformations and tables you edit as a grid. They write exactly the Markdown the Mac writes, so a comment added on your phone is a comment on your Mac.

Comments

Select the words a remark is about, then choose Add Comment… from the menu that appears over the selection. With nothing selected, Add Comment… in the Insert menu under More Formatting attaches a comment to the point where the cursor is. On a keyboard, press ⌥⌘A.

Write the comment in the sheet and tap Add. Varlig stores it in the note as CriticMarkup, {==the words==}{>>your comment<<}, just as the Mac does. See Comments and captions.

In the note, commented words are underlined with dots and followed by a small badge. Tap the badge, while reading or writing, to read the comment, change it and tap Save, or Delete Comment; deleting keeps the words it was about. With the cursor inside commented words, the menu offers Edit Comment… and Delete Comment too.

Note Info › Comments lists every comment in the note in reading order. Tap one to jump to it.

A comment and its words have to be on one line, and comments can’t go inside code or maths; Varlig says so when you try.

Footnotes

Choose Insert › Footnotes › Footnote under More Formatting, or press ⇧⌘E on a keyboard. Varlig adds the next number at the cursor, such as [^2], and a line for the footnote at the end of the note with “footnote text” selected, ready to type over.

The same menu holds Renumber Footnotes, which numbers them in reading order again after you’ve moved things around, and Go to Footnote or Reference, which jumps from a number to its footnote or back. While reading, tap a footnote number to jump to it, and the footnote’s label to come back.

Highlights and their colours

Select some words and choose Format › Highlight under More Formatting, or press ⇧⌘M. Format › Highlight Color picks Default, Green, Red, Blue, Yellow or Purple, each shown in your theme’s own shade. With the cursor inside a highlight, choosing a colour changes it; with nothing selected, it starts a highlight for what you type next. The colour is an emoji after the opening ==, such as ==🟢Done==, as Highlight colours explains.

Note Info › Highlights gathers every highlighted passage in the note under its heading, with its colour. Tap one to go to it, or Copy Highlights to copy them all as a Markdown list.

Writing direction

For Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left writing, Format › Writing Direction sets the paragraphs you’re on to Right to Left, Left to Right or Automatic. The editor lays them out that way, and so does the Mac. Code, tables and maths keep their own direction.

Transformations

Transformations, under More Formatting, changes the selected text, or the paragraph you’re on: UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, Sort Lines, Unique Lines and Trim Trailing Spaces. Each shows a preview of what will change first, with how many lines it removes and inserts, and nothing happens until you tap Apply. One Undo takes it back.

Your saved transformations follow the built-in ones. Text Transformations…, at the end of the menu, or Settings › Editor › Text Transformations, lets you add, name, order, duplicate or delete them and choose the selection or whole note as their scope. The list follows iCloud between your devices. See Saved text transformations.

Tables

With the cursor in a table, tap Table on the formatting bar, or choose Edit Table… from the menu over the text. The table opens as a grid: tap a cell to type in it. Tap Table anywhere else to insert a new one.

A column’s menu adds a column before or after it, moves it left or right, aligns it left, centre or right, or deletes it. A row’s menu adds a row above or below, moves it up or down, or deletes it. Add Row and Add Column add one at the end, and Copy copies the whole table as Markdown, CSV or TSV.

Done writes the table back into the note, as one step you can undo. A table inside a quote or a list, or one whose rows are wider than its header, stays as text, and Varlig says why.

Select a range of cells

Select Cells, at the bottom of the grid, lets you work with several cells at once:

• Tap a cell to select it, then drag the handle at its corner to grow the selection. Extend Selection to Here, in another cell’s menu, does the same, and so do Shift and the arrow keys on a keyboard.
• Copy Cells, Cut Cells and Clear Cells work on the selection. Clearing keeps the table’s shape.
• Paste fills cells from the selection’s top-left corner, adding rows and columns if it needs them.

Copied cells are tab-separated text and a Markdown table, so they paste into a spreadsheet, or into a note as a table of their own. See Tables.

A table of contents in the note

Insert Table of Contents, in the … menu while you’re editing, writes a list of links to the note’s headings below the line you’re on, and Update Table of Contents rewrites it after the headings change. It’s the same list the Mac writes; see A table of contents in the note. To jump around a long note without writing anything into it, use Note Info › Table of Contents.