The guide

Everything the app does, in the order you are likely to meet it. It describes the app as it is today: where something is deliberately not there, it says so rather than leaving you looking for it.

Vaults: where your notes live

A vault is one folder in your own storage: Google Drive, OneDrive, or a folder in a Teams channel on a work account. Pergalino reads and writes the files in it and keeps nothing of its own anywhere else. Delete the app from your life and the folder is exactly what it was: .md files, pictures, PDFs.

Add one in Settings → Vaults, or from the sidebar when none is open. Google Drive opens Google's own picker; OneDrive opens a folder browser. Several vaults can be open at once, from either service, and they appear as separate trees in one sidebar with one search box across them.

Each vault keeps its own settings in a hidden .drivenote folder inside it: the property vocabulary, file colours, favourites, and which files were open. That is what makes a vault portable between devices, and it is why nothing about one vault is written into another. Settings → Vaults also holds Rescan (re-read the folder from scratch), Verify scope (what the app is actually allowed to see) and Remove from sidebar, which stops listing a folder and touches nothing in your storage.

The window

Two side bars around the notes. Each holds panels you can drag between them, and each panel is a tab: Files, Recent, Search, Favorites, All properties, Tags, Tasks, History and Graph. The arrangement is remembered per device. A note's own properties and its connections are not panels: they fold out above and below the text, where the note is.

• Tabs and panes. Every open file is a tab; drag one to the edge of the editor to split, and a split can hold its own tabs. A tab can be pinned from its right-click menu or by double-clicking it, and a pinned tab survives every close that does not name it.
• Only the last few files stay open. Ten by default, set in Settings → Layout. Nothing dirty, pinned or visible is ever closed for the limit, and the Recent panel is how you get back to anything that was.
• Back and forward walk the path you took — the two arrows in the header, Mod+[ and Mod+], or the bottom bar on a phone. Recent answers the other question: what has been open lately.

Writing

Notes are Markdown. The editor has two modes, switched in the note's own bar: live preview, where headings, bold, links, tables, callouts and task lines render as you type and the syntax hides itself on the lines you are not on; and Markdown, which is the file exactly as it is on disk, with line numbers. Nothing is invented in either: what you write is what the file contains.

• The format bar floats over a selection and docks above the keyboard on a phone: bold, italic, headings, lists, quotes, code, highlight, tasks, and the camera.
• Links are written in a dialog on Mod+K or the bar's ↗ button, prefilled from whatever the caret is in. Clicking a link opens it; in Markdown view that takes Ctrl/Cmd, because there the text is source you came to edit.
• Tables, callouts and code fences render in live preview, code with the highlighting of its own language. ==highlight== works too, which is neither CommonMark nor GitHub Markdown but is what other note apps write.
• Pasting from a web page keeps its formatting, converted to Markdown. Mod+Shift+V pastes plain text, and Settings → Editor swaps which of the two is the default.
• A note can be locked against typing by putting readonly: true in its properties. Saving and the properties block stay open, so you can always unlock it again: a lock whose key does not work is a trap, not a lock.

Links, tags and embeds

• [[wikilinks]] complete as you type, over notes and files: a linked spreadsheet or PDF opens like a note. A link to something that does not exist yet is marked, and the Connections panel offers to create it.
• Backlinks and near-misses. Under every note: what links here, then the links you almost made — dangling links, unlinked mentions shown with their sentence, and notes the graph puts nearby.
• #tags are chips in the text and in the properties block. Typing # completes from the tags the vault already uses, which is how #Energie and #energie stop becoming two tags. Clicking one searches for it. The Tags panel lists them all with counts, nested tags included.
• Embeds. ![[Note]] renders that note inside this one; ![[Sheet]] renders a Google file in its own frame; a PDF renders as a page. Write !-[[Note]] and the card starts folded — the state is in the text, so it travels with the note. A card's checkboxes can be ticked, and Edit on the card hands you the real editor without leaving the page.

Files, folders and attachments

• The tree is the folder. Right-click a row (long press on a phone, or the ⋯ button on it) for New note, New folder, New board, New checklist, Scan document, Rename, Move to folder, colour, and Move to trash. The chevron at the left of a folder opens and closes it.
• Folder notes. A note named after its folder — Haus/Haus.md — is that folder's own page: clicking the folder opens it, and a dot in the tree says it is there. Nothing is stored to make this work; the name is the whole mechanism, so Obsidian and Drive see the same thing.
• Colours. Colour a row from its menu, or write rules in Settings → Files: by name, by path, or by file type, first match wins. Rules live in the vault, so they follow the notes to your other devices.
• Attachments. Drop or paste a file into a note, or use /attach. It is uploaded to the vault — into _attachments beside the note by default, configurable per vault — and the link is written for you. Pictures and PDFs render in place.
• Moving and trashing take the attachments along. Move to folder offers to bring the note's own files and rewrites the links either way; trashing offers the same. A file two notes link to belongs to neither, so it is left alone.
• Merge pictures into a PDF. Select several pictures in the tree, right-click, and they become one PDF in the order you arrange them. The originals stay where they are.

Scanning paper

/scan in a note, the camera on the phone's format bar, or Scan document on a folder. The camera finds the page, outlines it, and takes the picture itself once the outline holds still; the corners can be dragged if it got them wrong. Several pages become one PDF, or a picture per page — both are offered on the review screen, and pages can be reordered there.

The name comes off the paper: the first page is read by Drive's own OCR and the file is called after the line that reads like a title, falling back to the date. What a scan writes into the note is an embed, so the page shows rather than the filename.

Gmail: mail as notes

A Gmail label can be a way into the vault. Give a thread the label Pergalino and it becomes a note in the vault's inbox folder; file the note and the label follows. It is off until you switch it on, it belongs to one vault, and it never deletes, sends or archives anything in Gmail.

Switching it on: Settings → Gmail, pick the vault, turn it on. The first time, the app asks you to allow Gmail access; Google shows its screen once, and the sync starts as soon as you are back. The label it watches is Pergalino unless you choose another name there.

• A thread labelled Pergalino appears in the inbox folder, the one Settings → Files calls the new note folder. A thread labelled Pergalino/Areas/Kitchen goes straight into Areas/Kitchen, and the folder is made if it is not there. The note holds the subject, the sender, each message as a section, and a link back to the thread in Gmail; attachments are saved to the attachment folder and linked from it.
• Moving the note moves the label: drag it into Areas/Kitchen and the thread is labelled Pergalino/Areas/Kitchen in Gmail, with the parent labels made so Gmail shows them nested. Back to the inbox, and it is plain Pergalino again. It does not matter where the move happens: in the app, on another device, or in Drive itself. If the thread was relabelled in Gmail in the meantime too, Gmail wins.
• Replies are added to the end of the note, once each, below whatever you have written in it. The quoted history every reply carries is left out, since the earlier messages are already there.
• Trashing the note takes the Pergalino labels off the thread and leaves the mail alone. Removing the label in Gmail stops the sync for that thread and leaves the note alone.
• Renaming the label in Settings renames it and every label under it in Gmail too, so every thread keeps its folder.
• How often is Settings → Gmail → Sync interval: every minute, every 5 or 15 minutes, every hour, or only when you press Sync now. Every pass is listed under Settings → Activity, and the ones that changed something say what.

Properties

The block above every note is its frontmatter, shown as rows rather than as YAML. Drive supplies created and modified; everything else is yours.

• The vault has a vocabulary. Names are declared once in Settings → Properties, and a note picks from them. That is what stops one note saying due, the next Due date and a third deadline, with nothing noticing. It is offered, never enforced: a note that already carries an undeclared name keeps it.
• Seven kinds, each chosen because it is a different control rather than a different validation rule: text, number, checkbox, select, multi-select, and two that take their options from a folder — one note out of People, or several. A folder-backed value is written as a [[link]], so it shows up in backlinks and in the graph.
• Two properties come from the app and are offered in every vault: view, which draws the note as a board or a checklist, and readonly, which locks its text. They are marked app in the picker, and the moment your vault declares one itself, it is yours.
• All properties in the sidebar lists every name the vault actually uses, with counts, and offers to adopt the ones nobody declared.

Tasks

A task is a line: - [ ] Call Hans. Pergalino draws it as a card and lets you add the rest by pointing, but what it writes is the same plain text Obsidian's Tasks plugin reads — a due date is 📅 2026-05-15, a priority is an arrow, and nothing is stored anywhere else.

• On a task line, @ picks a date, ! a priority and % a status; /due, /priority and /status do the same from anywhere. The date box understands today, friday, in 3 days, 3d, +2w, next week, end of month, 15.9 and a bare 25 for a day of this month.
• Enter continues the list with a fresh checkbox, whatever the status of the line above, and a new task lands after everything hanging under the current one. Shift+Enter writes a description line: the indented lines under a task are its own text, which is what Markdown already means by them.
• Statuses are the four the dialect has: to do, done, [/] in progress and [-] cancelled. Ticking a box stamps the completion date the same way the picker does.
• The Tasks panel collects every task in every open vault, grouped by due date, priority, note, section, tag or status, with a filter box that matches the description and the text under it. A row opens the note at its line; ticking happens in the note, where the save and the merge live.
• Hide completed tasks in the note's own menu folds finished ones out of the view without touching the file.

Boards

A board is a note with view: kanban in its properties, plus group: and filter:. It draws other notes as cards in columns. Take the keys out and it is a note again.

• Columns are a property's declared options — the vocabulary, not whatever values happen to exist — with a column for notes that have no value and one for values nobody declared. group: folder instead groups by the folder each note is in, and there a drop moves the file.
• The filter is the search language, the same one the search box speaks. Made from a folder's right-click menu, a board starts filtered to that folder.
• Cards can carry properties and a preview — cardProperties: [due, owner] and cardPreview: none|small|medium|large. Cards are in name order; a board is a view of notes that belong to somebody else's filing, so there is no hand-sorting to store.
• A drop writes the card's own note. It re-reads the note first, refuses one with unsaved work open, and reindexes afterwards.

Checklists and shopping lists

view: checklist draws the same - [ ] lines as a dense list instead of task cards: no due dates, no priority buttons, bought items dimmed and struck through. New checklist on a folder writes it for you.

• Typing an item proposes the ones you have used before, most-used first, leaving out what is already on the list. The vocabulary is kept in the vault, not in the note, so next week's list starts knowing everything and last week's can be thrown away.
• It fills itself. Saving a list adds its items; ticking one counts it, which is what orders the proposals. Two spellings of one thing are folded together, including a leading quantity: 2 Milch and Milch are one item.
• Settings → Checklists shows the whole vocabulary per vault with its counts, and removes an item that should stop being proposed. Nothing can be added there: an item earns its place by being written on a list.
• A second list keeps its own words. Add list: packing beside the view and that note draws on its own vocabulary, so a passport is never proposed in the supermarket.
• Checklist items stay out of the Tasks panel. "Milch" is not an open task in the sense that panel is asking about.

Finding things

• Search covers the title, the path, the body and the tags of every note in every open vault, and the last word you type matches by prefix. Clicking a result jumps to the line and flashes it.
• The query language: "an exact phrase", tag:home (nested tags included), path:Projects/, property:status for the notes that have one at all, property:status=draft for a value, prop: as the short form, and -exclude to leave matches out.
• The command palette is Mod+Shift+P — or a pull down from the top of the screen on a phone. Everything the app can do is in it, with its shortcut beside it. Mod+P is the shorter question: open a file by name.
• The graph draws the whole vault, in a side panel or across the middle. It settles and then stops, so a graph left open does not keep a phone warm.
• Favourites are starred files, kept in the vault so they follow you between devices.

Saving, sync and history

• Saving is Mod+S, or automatic a moment after you stop typing if you switch autosave on in Settings → Editor. A tab with unsaved work shows a dot and cannot be closed by accident.
• Changes from your other devices arrive on their own. A clean note reloads; a note you are editing is merged, and only a genuine overlap stops to ask — Review both, Keep mine, or Use theirs. Nothing overwrites a draft on its own.
• Version history in the right sidebar lists the file's revisions from your storage, shows a diff, and restores one. That is the provider's own history, not a copy this app keeps.
• Offline, a vault that has been read stays readable and searchable, and the app itself launches from its cache. Writes wait for the network.
• What the app is doing is in the status bar, and on a phone in the note's own bar while it lasts. Settings → Activity lists everything running now, what has run since the tab opened, and every run that changed something or failed.

On a phone

Add the site to the home screen and it behaves as an app: it launches from its own cache, keeps its own storage, and has no browser chrome. The layout changes with the screen rather than with the window width, and Settings → Layout can overrule it.

• With a note open there is a floating bar at each end instead of a header, a note bar and a status bar. Both step aside as you scroll down and come back on any upward movement — and they stay put while the app is busy, so a long read of a vault is never invisible.
• The side panels are drawers over the note; the two buttons in the note bar open them. One document at a time, so there is no tab strip: the count in the bottom bar opens the list of what is open, with its unsaved marks.
• A long press is the right-click, and every row also carries a ⋯ button. Menus open as a sheet from the bottom of the screen.

Settings

Two scopes, and the difference is deliberate. Device settings — theme, type size, line width, view mode, autosave, poll interval, key bindings — are about the screen you are at, and each device keeps its own. Vault settings — the property vocabulary, file colours, attachment folder, favourites, checklist words — are about the notes, so they travel with them.

• Appearance — theme, editor type size, line width.
• Editor — view mode, autosave and its delay, paste format.
• Vaults — add one, rescan, verify scope, remove.
• Properties — the vault's vocabulary and its types.
• Files — sort order, colour rules, attachment folder, where a new note lands.
• Gmail: whether a Gmail label feeds this vault, which label, and how often.
• Checklists — the words each list proposes.
• Sync — how often to ask for changes, and which account is signed in.
• Layout — which shape to draw, how many files stay open, whether the blocks above and below a note start folded.
• Shortcuts — every binding, and the ones you changed.
• Storage — what is kept in this browser, with the way to clear each of it.
• Activity — what is running and what has run.
• About — the version, the desktop downloads, and a reload that clears every cache.

Keyboard shortcuts

Mod is Cmd on a Mac and Ctrl elsewhere. Every one of these can be changed in Settings → Shortcuts, and the command palette shows the current binding beside each command.

• Mod+Shift+P — command palette
• Mod+P — open a file by name
• Mod+Shift+F — search every note
• Mod+, — settings
• Mod+S — save
• Mod+[ and Mod+] — back and forward
• Mod+B and Mod+Alt+B — the left and right sidebars
• Mod+G — the graph
• Mod+1, Mod+2 — heading 1, heading 2
• In the editor: Mod+B, Mod+I, Mod+E — bold, italic, code
• Mod+K in the editor — write a link
• Mod+Shift+V — paste the other way round
• [[, #, / — complete a link, a tag, a command
• @, !, % on a task line — due date, priority, status
• Esc — close whatever is open over the note

Limits worth knowing

• Early access is invite only, and Google's consent screen is in testing while the app asks for the full Drive scope. That means everyone re-approves roughly once a week, in one tap, and that every user has to be added by hand.
• Google files are Google's. A Doc or a Sheet is framed from Drive and edited there; nothing is converted. The desktop app is the exception, where the frame is editable in place.
• The desktop apps are macOS on Apple Silicon and 64-bit Windows. No Intel Mac build, no Linux build, and an iPad reports itself as a Mac and can run none of it — there, add the site to the home screen.
• A vault is read once before search is complete. On a few thousand notes that takes a while on a first run; the app says how far it has got, and search says so too rather than claiming there is nothing to find.
• The Gmail sync runs while the app is open. There is no server reading your mail in the background, so a label set while every device is closed is picked up the next time one of them opens Pergalino.

If something here does not match what you see, the app is right and this page is behind: say so and it gets fixed.