Small things that make Kinjot faster.

Keyboard first

Single keys do the common things whenever you are not typing in a note. They are all rebindable in Settings → Notes, and several of them are also commands you can find by name in search if you’d rather type a word than remember a key.

• n — new note
• v — paste the clipboard as a new note
• c — copy the note
• t — add a tag
• Delete (Backspace on a Mac) — trash the note
• r — open Recall
• m — minimise Recall
• Ctrl (tap) — multi-select
• [ — cycle the folder pane
• ] — cycle the note list
• a — reading preferences
• f — focus mode
• d — back to the default layout
• arrow keys — move between panes and rows

Two keys work while you are typing in a note, for checklists: Ctrl+Enter (⌘↩ on a Mac) ticks or unticks the tasks on the selected lines, and Ctrl+Shift+L (⌘⇧L on a Mac) turns lines into a checklist and back. They belong to the editor, so Settings does not rebind them; Checklists below has the rest.

Ctrl-K (⌘K on a Mac) is the one to learn first. It searches the full text of every note, plus folder and tag names, and shows the note beside the results; the same box runs the commands by name — so it is both “find that thing” and “what can this app do”. It searches the folder you are in until you press Tab for everywhere, and remembers that choice.

It finds settings too. Start with settings to search only Settings, or help for settings and the matching sections of these guides; choosing a setting opens Settings at its row and changes nothing. Every setting also has its own link, such as /app?settings=reading&setting=reading.theme, which works on a phone too.

Getting things in

The fastest capture is v. Copy an error, a diff, a chunk of terminal output, press v, and it is a note. Pasted code is fenced automatically with the language detected, and Kinjot will suggest a title from the first line — accept it with Tab or type your own.

Notes are Markdown. Fenced code blocks get syntax highlighting, links work, and everything survives export unchanged, because export is just the file.

Open the importer from Settings → Import & export → Import notes…, then drop a folder of .md files in. Re-importing a file you have not changed will not duplicate it; an edited file arrives as a new note, because a plain Markdown file carries nothing that says which note it used to be. A Kinjot export round-trips exactly — real created dates, folders and tags intact.

Folders, tags and pins

A note lives in exactly one folder and can carry any number of tags. Use folders for where something belongs and tags for what it is about — ‘clients/acme’ is a folder, ‘#postgres’ is a tag. Click a tag in the Tags strip above the note list to filter to it.

Pin the three or four notes you keep coming back to; they stay at the top of every list. Ctrl-click to pick out several notes, or tap Ctrl to enter multi-select — then tag, move or trash them in one go.

Nothing is destroyed until you empty the Trash, and a trashed note stays out of search until then.

Checklists

A Markdown task is a list line with a box: - [ ] to do, - [x] done. Numbered tasks (1. [ ]) work too. Checklists, in the sidebar (the menu on a phone), gathers every unchecked task in your notes into one list, grouped by note, the most recently updated note first. Each task keeps its nesting and the heading it sits under. Choose a task to open its note with the cursor at the end of its line, or a note’s row to open the note. Search finds the view by name, or as Tasks, To-do or Unchecked.

You can work the list without opening a note. Click a task’s box to tick it, or untick it, in its note. Add item under each note adds a task after the note’s last one; paste a list there to add every line at once.

Add a task… at the top of Checklists adds to one note you pick. The first time, it asks which: a note called Tasks, a new note Tasks in All notes, or any other note you find by title. Later adds go straight to that note, which each device remembers. A note without a checklist gets one at its end. If the note goes to the Trash, the next add asks again.

A task can have a due date: write it on the task’s line, as in - [ ] Pay rent @2026-10-30. Kinjot also reads 📅 2026-10-30, due:2026-10-30, and a day and month such as @30 oct (the nearest 30 October). In the list the task reads “Pay rent” with a small date beside it, red once it is overdue. Above the notes, Due repeats the tasks that are overdue, due today, or due in the next seven days, each with its note’s title. In Add item and Add a task… you can type a shortcut instead of a date: @today, @tomorrow, a weekday such as @fri, or @30 oct, and it is written as the date. In the note, the editor shows the date as the same small chip, and the written date comes back when the cursor reaches it; the reading view shows the chip too. Typing @ on a task’s line in the editor offers dates to pick from, and the one you pick is written in full. Settings → Notes → Due date format picks which of the three forms the add fields and the @ suggestion write, on each device.

Some tasks stay out of the list: notes in the Trash, notes tagged autosave, tasks quoted in a blockquote (> - [ ]), tasks in a note’s YAML front matter, and anything inside code, a table or HTML. A note whose tasks are all checked leaves the list too.

On the desktop, the toolbar above the list narrows it. Filter tasks matches words in a task, its heading and its note’s title. The sort puts the most recently updated notes first (the default), the oldest or the newest. Filters picks a folder, any number of tags (a note must carry them all), and Show checked items, which brings checked tasks back, struck through, and the notes that are all done. Each folder or tag you pick shows as a chip you can remove, and Collapse all folds every note to its row. On a phone the filter field sits at the top, and the sort and the rest are in the Filters sheet. The sort and Show checked items are remembered on each device.

In the note itself, click a box to tick its task, in the editor or while reading the note. On a phone, a tap on a box in the note you are reading ticks it without opening the keyboard, and the undo arrow at the top takes it back. A task quoted in a blockquote ticks only in the editor. Press Ctrl+Enter (⌘↩ on a Mac) to tick the tasks on the selected lines; when they are all ticked already, it unticks them. Ctrl+Shift+L (⌘⇧L), or Checklist in the bar over selected text, turns lines into tasks and back. Right-click a task for Check all in this list, Uncheck all in this list and Move checked to the bottom, where they apply. Enter after a task starts the next one with a box, numbered tasks included. Checked tasks read muted and struck through, in the editor and when reading.

Reading and writing modes

Markdown markers hide themselves until your cursor reaches the construct, so a note reads like a document while you edit it. If you’d rather see the raw characters, turn off live preview in the reading panel (a) or in Settings → Notes.

f is focus mode — both side panes shrink to narrow rails, leaving the note the width. [ and ] step the panes through full, narrow and hidden independently, and d puts everything back. Drag the divider between two panes to set the widths you want; they are remembered.

The reading panel also carries measure, text size, line height and typeface, and the light/dark/paper themes. These are reading settings, not document settings — they never touch the file.

On Pro, the note you are reading can show related · N in its action row: up to three of your notes closest in meaning, each with a one-line summary. Open puts one beside your note. On a phone, the note’s ••• menu has Related jots: tap one to read it without leaving your note, then Open note to go to it. Not relevant here and Don’t suggest again hide a suggestion in this browser. Turn it off with Settings → AI provider → Suggest related jots.

The small drawings of Kin are decorative; turn them off in the app with Settings → Reading → Show Kin illustrations.

On kinjot.com, Settings → Reading → Show Kin shows or hides Kin in this browser. Kin is a row in the desktop sidebar: Ask, Organize and Help in one column beside your note, for Recall questions, Tidy instructions and a search across Settings and these guides. With Kin shown or hidden, the Recall and Tidy up rows and r work as before. On a phone the Kin row is in the menu, after Recall: Ask and Help work as on the desktop, and Organize shows Tidy’s log, since Tidy runs from the desktop.

Asking better questions

Recall is a question box, not a search box. ‘What did I decide about auth?’ works better than ‘auth’. It reads across your notes and answers in a sentence or two, with the notes it used listed underneath so you can check it.

Ask about decisions, reasons and trade-offs — the things you wrote down precisely because you would not remember them. Keyword search is still better for exact strings like an error code or a function name; that is what Ctrl-K is for.

Answers are saved. The Recall row in the sidebar has them, so a question you asked last month is free to read again.

Stop ends a question Recall is still searching or answering, and keeps whatever has arrived. Stopping keeps the credits already used; a question the AI provider never received costs nothing. Only a finished answer is saved.

Without Pro, Recall in the browser’s local mode finds and ranks the relevant notes but does not write an answer. You can also bring your own OpenAI or Anthropic key on any plan — it is used only for Recall, only for the session you paste it in, and it is never stored. While you are signed in, answers written with your own key are not saved.

Letting Tidy do the filing

Tidy proposes organisation. It can create a folder, create a tag, move a note, change a note’s tags and merge two tags. It cannot edit what a note says, delete a note, or delete a folder, in any mode.

Run it with an instruction if you have one in mind — ‘put everything about deploys together’, ‘merge the tags that mean the same thing’. Anything that changes your taxonomy — a new folder, a new tag, a merge — pauses and shows you the proposal before it happens. Pure filing into folders and tags you already have applies straight away. Either way the run lands in the change log, and every run can be undone.

An instructed run can also rename — ‘give my untitled notes real names’, ‘clean up the titles in Infra’. Titles only: the body of a note is never touched, and a run you did not ask to rename never will. Every proposal is shown as the old title beside the new one, you can edit any of them or untick the ones you don’t want, and the whole thing undoes from the change log like anything else.

If an instruction is genuinely ambiguous — a word that names both a folder and a tag, say — Tidy asks one short multiple-choice question before it plans, and asks only once. It reads up to 400 notes in a run; when more than that match, it tells you how many it found.

When the AI declines

Recall answers, Tidy plans, Kin chat replies and the short summaries (gists) Kinjot writes of your notes come from an AI provider, Anthropic or OpenAI, and the provider runs safety filters on everything it is sent. Now and then a filter declines a request. Kinjot then says so: nothing is written or changed, and a declined Recall or Tidy run, or Kin chat message, is not charged.

The filters look for help with malware and exploits, dangerous biology, building competing AI models, attempts to read the model’s hidden reasoning, and other areas the providers’ usage policies cover. Ordinary security and machine-learning notes can trip them by mistake, and in Recall it can be a note your question matched rather than the question itself.

If some notes keep tripping them, move those notes into a No AI folder: open the folder’s menu and choose Keep AI out…. Kinjot never sends the notes in a No AI folder, or in its subfolders, to any AI provider, and your agents cannot read them through Kinjot; Ctrl-K search still finds them. When a question was caught by mistake, rephrasing it usually helps.

Repeated declines pause hosted AI for your account: five in a day pause it for up to a day, and fifteen in thirty days for up to thirty days. Kinjot tells you when it resumes. Your notes, search, dictation and Recall with your own AI key keep working meanwhile. If you think a pause is a mistake, email [email protected].

Working with Claude Code and Codex

Kinjot is an explicit notebook. Your agent saves what you ask it to save and nothing else, so say what you want kept: ‘Jot that down in Kinjot as “Worker env fix”, with the explanation and the commands.’

Ask for the full answer if that is what you want — an agent left to summarise will summarise, and the detail you wanted is usually the detail it drops.

Later sessions can find it: ‘Find my Kinjot notes about worker environment’, then ‘read the Worker env fix jot in full’. On Pro your agent can also search by meaning, which is what you want when you cannot remember the title.

Setup is one command and one key — see the Claude Code or Codex guide, and the MCP tool reference for exactly what each tool does.

Backups, history and where your notes live

Local mode keeps your notes in that one browser. Clearing site data deletes them, so export a backup from the LOCAL badge if you are keeping anything you’d miss. Signing in is the other answer: the same notebook, synced, and your local notes come with you.

Signed in, writes are local-first. You can keep typing offline and the queue drains when you reconnect; the dot on a note tells you which state it is in.

Version history is on for new accounts; turn it off or on in Settings → Notes. While it is on, every edit is kept and you can read or restore an older draft.

Export gives you a folder of Markdown files — no lock-in, no proprietary format. Do it whenever you like; it is the same content the app reads. Note reminders are account data stored with your account, so they are not included in exports; checklist text is.

Still stuck? The FAQ answers the awkward questions, and the docs cover setup end to end.