Stacks, the Spring, and the Fan
Piling notes up, tucking them into bubbles, and flipping through everything.
Stacks
Drag one note onto another and they snap into a stack: a pile that moves as one. A stack holds up to 20 notes.
- Click a buried note to pull it out so you can read or edit it. Several notes can be out at once. Use the return chevron on an individual note or Recall Notes on the stack bar to send them home.
- A capsule bar sits centered over the pile. Collapse folds the whole stack into a bubble. Compress tightens it. More opens the stack menu. Close or Unstack asks which of the two you meant, and takes the end of the row that matches the close-button side you chose for your notes. Recall Notes joins them only while notes are peeked out, and sends those notes home.
- Compress changes to Expand whenever the stack is compressed. With the Spring switched off, Collapse changes to Peek Stack.
- Double-click the stack’s title bar to compress it: the pile tightens so the front note is fully readable with a thin sliver of every other note above it. Click a compressed stack to spread it back out.
- The More menu is built for the stack in front of you: Sort Stack by title or last edited, Color Notes, window behaviors (float on top, glue to desktop, show on all desktops), and the Notel Library. Save as Folder… appears when no folder already holds exactly that set of notes, and the last item reads Unstack or Remove Stack from Desktop depending on whether a folder backs the pile. Color Notes is on the right-click menu of any stacked note’s title bar too.
The Spring
Collapse a note to a bubble (the Collapse chip in the hover rail) and the bubbles gather into the Spring: a column that rises out of a bottom corner of your screen from a disc at its foot. The disc carries a caret tinted with your default note color, and it points up while the column is tucked away. Click it to spring the bubbles out or fold them back. Click any bubble to open that note. Each bubble takes its note’s colors, and hovering shows the title.
The Spring holds up to 10 bubbles. If it is full, a new bubble is refused with a shake.
Show Spring on Mouseover (on by default) keeps the column folded into its corner until your cursor visits, then glides it out. By default it folds away two seconds after your cursor leaves; the choices are Never, 2s, 5s, 15s, or 30s. Right-click the Spring to move it to the other corner (offered while mouseover is on), tidy the bubbles, or change how it behaves. All of it lives in Settings → Fan too, including turning the Spring off entirely, at which point the Collapse chip peeks the note instead.
The Fan
The Fan shows every note at once. Open it with ⌥F, by double-tapping Option (Settings lets you pick a different key), from Fan View in the menu bar, or by clicking the floating Fan bubble if you have chosen to keep that on screen.
- Cards show live previews, badged when a note has a reminder or is a favorite. A locked note shows a lock in place of its preview, which is the point of locking it. Right-click any card to open it, file it into a folder, favorite or lock it, set a reminder, or delete it.
- The folder pill in the Fan’s control bar filters the Fan down to one folder, and a folder can be opened as a stack.
- Typing while the Fan is open goes into the centered note: your words land at the bottom. Press Return to keep the jot, Esc to discard it. Type something like “dentist tomorrow 9am” and Notel offers to set the reminder as part of the jot.
There is no search field in the Fan; typing always jots. For searching, use the Library.