Varlig Guide
Get more out of every note.
Write notes in plain Markdown and work out the numbers right beside the plan: a trip, a shared bill, a recipe or a quote for a job. Take the tour, borrow an idea, or look up exactly what Varlig understands.
# Weekend in Lisbonhotel = €145 * 2 gives €290.00flights = €89 * 2 gives €178.00food = €60 * 3 gives €180.00total = hotel + flights + food gives €648.00total / 2 gives €324.00Plain Markdown, neatly styled
Headings, checklists, tables, links and tags are ordinary Markdown. Type the symbols or press a shortcut, and Varlig styles the note as you write, with a calc block wherever the numbers are.
# Moving day
Keys handed over on **Friday**, so the van is booked for ==8 am==. #home/move
- [x] Book the van
- [ ] Redirect the post
- [ ] Ask [[Sam and Ana]] about the sofa
```calc
van = £85
fuel = £36
(van + fuel) / 3
```Moving day
Keys handed over on Friday, so the van is booked for 8 am. #home/move
- Book the van
- Redirect the post
- Ask Sam and Ana about the sofa
van = £85 gives £85.00fuel = £36 gives £36.00(van + fuel) / 3 gives £40.33Write it the way you’d say it
Discounts, conversions and speeds read the way you would write them on paper. Names you define, like hotel above, carry through the rest of the note, so changing one number updates every answer that uses it.
20% off £80 gives £64.002.5 hours in minutes gives 150 min5 km / 25 min in km/h gives 12 km/hGet started
New to Varlig? Five minutes here and you’ll know your way around.
Ideas
Real plans you can copy into a note and make your own: the shop, the trip, the party, the car, the week.
Little things to try todayShort lines worth knowing, grouped by the moment you’d reach for themBudgets, bills and shared costsMonthly budgets, yearly subscription costs, fair bill splits and checking sale discountsPlanning a tripTrip budgets in any currency, shared costs, arrival times and driving costsCooking and recipesScale recipes, turn cups into grams, convert oven temperatures and price portionsParties, hosting and get-togethersHow much to buy per person, scaling a cake tin, oven timings and sharing the costCars, driving and the school runFuel and charging costs, what the car really costs a month, and leaving on timeHome life, family and petsAges and birthdays, pocket money, the household week, the pets and the energy billPhotos, files and everyday techStorage and backups, download times, battery life, screen sharpness and data plansRunning and fitnessPace, finish times, splits, weekly distance and a training plan counted from race dayHome and garden projectsPaint, flooring, gravel and seed quantities, with costs and DIY conversionsFreelance work and invoicesTimesheets to invoices, day rates, VAT, deadlines in workdays and project quotesStudy and sciencePhysics with units, statistics on lab results, equation solving and quick maths checks
Writing
Plain Markdown, neatly styled: headings, todos, tables, pictures, code and more.
Markdown at a glanceEvery kind of formatting in one place: what to type, what you get and the shortcutHeadings and text stylesHeadings, bold, highlights and their colours, quotes, callouts, footnotes and datesLists and todosBulleted and numbered lists, nesting with Tab, and todos you can tick offTablesInsert a table, move between cells, add rows and columns, and set alignmentPictures, files and linksAttach pictures, PDFs and files, find text in them, and add web links and link cardsComments and captionsRemarks anchored to the words they are about, and captions that travel with your picturesSaved text transformationsSaved find-and-replace rules you apply from the Format menu, with a preview before anything changesCode, formulas and diagramsCode blocks with syntax colours, TeX formulas, Mermaid diagrams and front matter
Organise and find
Tags, links and search, so every note is a moment away.
Tags, links and backlinksGroup notes with nested tags, connect them with links, follow backlinks backFinding anythingJump to notes with Quick Open and narrow search with tags and filtersRemindersRemind yourself about a note, a task or a passage, and see everything in one listTemplates and daily notesReusable notes with placeholders, today’s note and a month at a time in JournalReview and On This DayA few older notes each day, with the reason each one turned up, and what you wrote a year agoWeb clips and highlightsSave a page for offline reading, refresh it later, and bring in Readwise and Kindle highlightsReading several notes togetherRead chosen notes as one document, reorder them and save the arrangement as a reading list
Make it yours
Settings, themes, fonts and shortcuts, so Varlig works the way you do.
SettingsEvery option in Settings, pane by pane, with what it does and its defaultThemes, fonts and iconsChoose a theme, set fonts, size and line width, pick a layout and an app iconThe menu-bar scratchpadA small panel over any app for quick sums, with answers you can copy or save to a noteKeyboard shortcutsEvery Varlig keyboard shortcut in one place, grouped by what you’re doing
Your data
Keep private notes private, sync with iCloud, back up your library and take notes anywhere.
Privacy and lockingWhere notes live, note passwords, locking the app and exactly what goes onlineiCloud sync and shared notesKeep your library on every device, see what sync is doing, and share a note with peopleVersion history and automatic backupsBrowse and restore earlier versions, and keep dated copies of your library without thinking about itImport, export and backupsBack up and restore, move to a new Mac, and bring notes in from other apps or take them outPublishing a snapshotWrite chosen notes as a folder of read-only pages, update it later, and what it cannot doEditing Markdown files in placeOpen a .md file from anywhere, edit it where it is, and handle changes made on disk
iPhone and iPad
Your notes and calculations on iPhone and iPad, synced with your Mac through iCloud.
Getting started on iPhone and iPadInstall Varlig, sync with your Mac, and find your way from the library to a noteThe library, lists and tagsTiles, tags and places, date sections and the gallery, and choosing several notesReading and editingThe reader, the formatting bar, completion, links, folding, find and version historyComments, footnotes, highlights and tablesComments, footnotes, highlight colours, writing direction, transformations and table gridsCalculations on iPhone and iPadCalculator keys, names as you type, Function Help, the answer menu and the scratchpadNew notes, scans, photos and sharingNew Note, Scan Document, photos, sketches and files, text you can search, and the share sheetJournal, reminders and recordingsThe month calendar, daily and weekly notes, reminders with alerts, and audio with markersNote Info, Back and the link graphStatistics, contents, comments, highlights and backlinks, Back and Forward, and the link graphProtected notes and app lockPasswords and Face ID for single notes, locking all of Varlig, and what stays hiddenWidgets, controls, Shortcuts and SiriPinned notes and live answers on your Home Screen, Control Center, the Action button and SiriThemes and Settings on iPhone and iPadThe theme gallery, typography, the editor, calculations, sync and privacy, page by pageExport, import and sharingShare or export notes, import Markdown, share a note with people and check the libraryWhat stays on the MacThe features only the Mac has, what to use on iPhone and iPad instead, and why
Calculations
Every kind of calculation, with examples you can paste straight into a note.
Writing a calculation lineOne sum per line, comments and labels, naming values, and if/then conditionsHow an answer was readSee the names, units, dates and rates behind an answer, and find a working example for an errorNumbers and notationThousands, decimals, 5k and 2.5M, numbers in words, constants and other basesOperators, comparisons and conditionalsOrder of operations, remainders, comparisons, and/or/not and bitwise mathsPercentagesPercent of, on and off, discounts and tips, and “what percent is…” questionsRoundingDecimal places, whole numbers, rounding to a step, and rounding up or downWord-based mathematicsHalves and doubles, factors and primes, roots, combinations and random picksUnits and conversionsConverting units, maths with units, feet and inches, temperature and your own unitsMoney and currenciesAmounts and symbols, adding money, converting currencies, pinned rates and prices per unitWeather and placesThe weather, sunrise and distances, looked up for a lineRates, speed, pace, fuel and transfer timeRates per hour or per kilo, speed and distance, running pace, fuel and downloadsDates and the calendarWriting dates, days until and since, workdays, weekdays and date formatsClock times and durationsClock times, adding hours, time between times, timesheets and lap timesTime zonesThe time elsewhere, converting a meeting time, summer time and zone namesVideo timecodes and framesTimecodes, frame rates, clip lengths and changing frame rateFinance, inflation and taxSavings growth, loans and mortgages, returns, inflation, tax and tipsCooking, sound, screens and mechanicsCups to grams, notes and frequencies, screen pixels, torque and time savedLists and statisticsLists of values, averages and spread, and transforming listsShopping lists and budgetsTick items off inside a calculation and keep planned, purchased and remaining totalsVectors and matricesVectors, matrix maths, solving simultaneous equations and decompositionsComplex numbersWriting and combining complex numbers, their parts and functionsSummation, equation solving and calculusSums and products, solving equations, derivatives and integralsYour own functionsDefining functions like tip(bill) once and reusing them through a noteSharing values between notesKeep rates and formulas in one note and use them from any otherNatural-language phrasesHow Varlig reads everyday phrases, splitting bills, and what it can’t read
Reference
Look things up: every function, phrase, unit and currency the calculator knows.
Built-in function referenceEvery built-in function, grouped by what it doesPhrase referenceEvery everyday phrase Varlig understands, by topicUnit catalogueEvery unit symbol and name, family by familyCurrency referenceEvery currency and cryptocurrency code, and how amounts are shownHolidays and time-zone namesNamed holidays and the time-zone codes and places you can useReading results: display and precisionHow answers are rounded, shortened and formattedAdvanced maths: features and limitsWhat the lists, matrices, solving and calculus features can and can’t doErrors, diagnostics and limitsWhat error messages mean, and the size limitsKnown quirks and gotchasLines that don’t do what you expect, and what to write instead
Help
When something isn’t working, start here.
TroubleshootingMessages you might see and what to do: calculations, locked notes, imports and moreWhat’s new in Varlig 0.0.1The first release on iPhone, iPad and Mac: everything in it, at a glanceWhat’s changedCommands and shortcuts that are new or work differently, for anyone used to an earlier build