Writing

Where the marks went

A Markdown heading is ## Heading and bold is **word**. Most editors leave those hashes and asterisks in front of you all day and open a second window to show you “what it will look like”. Folding Mirror doesn't.

Here, the marks are always in the file, they just aren't displayed: a heading is heading-sized, bold is bold. Only when the caret lands on a line does that line show its marks so you can edit them — move away and it sets itself again. So there is no “preview” button: what you are looking at was always the finished page.

To see the whole file as source at once (to check whether some formatting came out crooked, say), press ⌘/ for source mode, where the whole document becomes plain text. Press it again to come back.

Three routes to formatting

The same thing can be done three ways, and none of them requires knowing the syntax.

One: shortcuts

Select some text and press ⌘B for bold, ⌘I for italic, ⌘K for a link. Turn a whole line into a heading with ⌘1 through ⌘6, and back into body text with ⌘0. The defaults match Typora, so nothing has to be relearned coming from there; the full table is here, and every row can be rebound with a click.

Two: type “/”

Type / on an empty line or after a space and a menu appears listing what can be inserted: tables, images, links, code blocks, formula blocks, rules, task lists, headings of every level, quotes and lists.

• Keep typing to filter: /tab narrows to the table.
• ↑ ↓ to choose, ↵ to insert, esc to cancel.
• A mistyped letter is harmless — delete it and the menu is back. Writing and/or, 24/7, a URL or a slash inside a code block never triggers it: it only counts at the start of a word.

Three: right-click

Right-click in the text and the top row of the menu is bold, italic, strikethrough, inline code, highlight and link; below that come Turn into (body text, headings one to six, quote, code block) and Insert (table, link, image, drawing, diagram, formula block, rule), and below that clear formatting, cut, copy and paste. Select first, then right-click — the action applies to what you selected.

The formats you'll use

This table is for reference, not memorising. On the left is what you press; on the right is what the file actually contains — open that .md in any other program some day and the right-hand column is what you'll see.

Written out as a file, an ordinary document looks roughly like this:

Lists, quotes and tasks

• Lists continue themselves. Press ↵ at the end of an item and the next line is the same kind of list, with numbering kept in order. To end the list, press ↵ again on the empty item.
• Indent with ⌘[, outdent with ⌘]. That is all a nested list is.
• Task lists are called “Task list” in the “/” menu and are written - [ ] something in the file. Ticked, it becomes - [x], and in Folding Mirror you tick it by clicking the box.
• A rule lives in the “/” menu and under right-click → Insert, and is a line of --- on its own in the file.

Split view and source mode

The sliding switch on the right of the toolbar has two positions: live is the single sheet you write on, and split folds it in half — numbered source on the left, the page on the right — with one keystroke on the left showing immediately on the right. The divider between them can be dragged to change the balance.

When to use split: you pasted Markdown from elsewhere and want to see what it actually says, you are tuning a complicated table, or you are checking link paths.

How it differs from ⌘/ (source mode): split view is two columns side by side, source mode turns the whole sheet into plain text. The first is for editing while comparing, the second for reading the source through.

Find and replace

• ⌘F searches this document; ⌘G / ⇧⌘G jump to the next and previous hit.
• ⌘H opens replace, one at a time or all at once.
• The find bar has three switches: match case, whole word, regular expression. Leave them off unless you need them — on, they are a good way to find nothing.
• Searching the whole library is a different key: ⇧⌘F. That belongs to the library page.

Selecting, copying, pasting

Copy something from elsewhere and what lands on the page is plain text — a web page's styling doesn't come into your document with it. There is one welcome exception: copy a block of cells from Excel, Numbers or a web page and Folding Mirror lays it out as a Markdown table, so you never fill in the pipes by hand.

Getting what you wrote into another program — or out as a PDF — is a different matter; see exporting and publishing.

Focus and typewriter modes

Both switches live under the button at the left of the status bar, and both have a key:

• Focus mode (F8): everything but the current paragraph is dimmed. Good for revising — your eye doesn't get pulled into the next paragraph.
• Typewriter mode (F9): the line you're writing stays in the middle of the screen, so you're not reading along the bottom edge. Good for long stretches of new text.

They work together. For something even quieter, collapse the sidebar with ⇧⌘L and go full screen with ⌥⌘F.