Getting Started

Last updated: 2026-08-15

This page takes you from installation to your first real work: opening or creating a vault, learning the interface, and understanding the three editor modes.

System requirements

Plainva draws its window with the system’s web engine, so the engine — not the processor — sets the floor:

Windows 10 or newer with the WebView2 runtime (Windows 11 ships it; on 10 the installer adds it)
macOS 13.3 (Ventura) or newer, Apple Silicon or Intel
Linux with WebKitGTK 2.40 or newer (check with pkg-config --modversion webkit2gtk-4.1)

The engine bar is Safari 16.4, and on macOS the system version decides it: an app draws its window with the system WebView, which arrives with macOS updates rather than with Safari. On a Mac that Apple no longer updates, Safari can therefore be far newer than the engine every other app gets — Monterey stops at Safari 15.6.1 however current its Safari is. Ventura reached 16.4 at 13.3, which is where the floor sits; installing a newer Safari does not move it.

On a system below that line Plainva says so at startup instead of opening a blank window.

What is a vault?

A vault is an ordinary folder on your computer that holds your Markdown notes. Plainva adds a hidden .plainva/ subfolder for the search index and settings — your notes themselves remain untouched .md files. You can have several vaults (e.g. “Personal” and “Work”) and switch between them.

Opening or creating a vault

On the very first launch — before you have ever opened a vault — Plainva shows a short welcome, once. It says in three lines what Plainva is built on, shows a small preview of the interface next to it, and offers the three ways in right away: Open Vault, New Vault and Import from another app. Later skips it and leaves you on the ordinary welcome screen; it does not come back — unless you ask for it again under Settings → Startup & behavior → Welcome screen.

After an update the same spot shows what changed: the biggest change of that release with a headline of its own, the rest as one line each. It appears once per version — you can call it up again anytime under Settings → Startup & behavior → Show release highlights again.

On launch, the welcome screen greets you:

Open Vault — Plainva first asks “Where is your vault?”: Local folder opens an existing folder of Markdown files on this computer (Obsidian vaults work out of the box); Online vault syncs an existing vault from the cloud into a local folder — the same three steps for every provider (Connect, choose the folder in the cloud, choose the local folder; see Sync Setup).
New Vault — the first question is “Where should your vault live?” (On this computer or With an online service), then you pick the starter structure: empty or from a prepared folder structure; both are adjustable anytime. The Empty vault contains just an index.md overview. Available templates: the Plainva Tour, PARA, Zettelkasten, ACE (Linking Your Thinking), Johnny.Decimal, GTD, Journal and Project — each creates folders, a welcome note with a quick guide and automatically maintained index.md overviews in the OKF format (folder and file names follow the app language). The Plainva Tour is the recommended place to start: it fills nine folders and seven databases with examples, so you see every view in action once — pinboard, calendar, gallery, board, timeline, table and the tree view with sub-items — plus note templates, folder rules and a Markdown cheat sheet. Nothing in it is precious: delete what you do not need and rename the rest. The Journal template additionally wires up the vault’s daily-notes settings. The Plainva Tour, PARA, GTD, Zettelkasten, Journal and Project templates also ship ready-linked databases with matching note templates — for example projects with a status board and an area link, or tasks that point to their project. The Project template shows the project tooling in action: four connected databases, a column that counts a project’s open tasks, a footer that sums the planned effort, dependencies between tasks, and milestones that appear as a diamond on the timeline. On the online path the connection follows the template: pick the provider, connect, choose the folder in the cloud or create a fresh one via New folder, pick the local folder — the chosen structure is created in the local folder and uploaded to the cloud by the first sync.

Recent Vaults lists everything you have opened before. Remove from list removes an entry from Plainva only — the files stay on disk. Enable Automatically open the last vault on start to skip the welcome screen in the future. When removing, Plainva asks whether to additionally forget all of the vault’s app data (search index, settings, window layout, credentials for sync, calendar and mailboxes; automatic ZIP backups only via the extra checkbox) — your vault folder always stays untouched.

The interface

Left sidebar — three views: Files (the file tree), Tags (all #tags in the vault) and Databases (every .base in the vault, grouped by folder — click one to open it); Recently opened and Bookmarks are sections above the view switch, so they stay visible in all three views. At the very top sits the search field with a + beside it for New Note, New Folder, New Base and Daily Note. The search placeholder says what is being searched, and the tabs carry their names as long as the panel is wide enough — as it narrows, first only the active tab keeps its name, then the icons speak alone. At the bottom: the vault switcher, Open Daily Note and Settings. The double-chevron button next to the three views collapses or expands all folders at once, and Reveal in file tree in the editor’s ⋮ menu jumps straight to the open note in the tree. In the Files view, a header shows the current vault’s name and icon.
Title bar — your open tabs. Tabs can be reordered by dragging and moved between editor panes.
Editor area — where you read and write. Via the tab menu (Split right / Split down) or the shortcuts Ctrl+Alt+V / Ctrl+Alt+S you split the editor into two panes, e.g. a note next to a database.
Right sidebar — four sections, reorderable by drag: Calendar (daily notes), Outline (headings of the active note), Backlinks (who links here) and Properties (the note’s frontmatter).
Status bar — word/character count, sync status (Local/Online/Offline) and save status (Saving… / Saved).

The three editor modes

Switch modes at the top right of the editor:

Mode	What for
Read Mode	Fully rendered view for reading and navigating. Links open right inside Plainva.
Live Preview	The default for writing: Markdown renders as you type; formatting characters only appear where you are working.
Markdown Source	The raw text without rendering — for full control.

Which mode notes open in is up to you: pick the Default view under Settings → App → Editor & notes (read, live or source). Switching the mode in the editor applies to that file for the current session.

You can also toggle between Readable width and Full width.

File tree basics

Creating: right-click a folder → New Note Here, New folder or New database (.base). The big New button creates inside the currently selected folder (or the parent folder of a selected file).
Selecting: click selects, Ctrl+click adds/removes individually, Shift+click selects a range, middle-click opens in a new tab.
Context menu: includes Rename (updates links vault-wide), Duplicate, Open in split (right) / Open in split (bottom), Add bookmark, Copy Path, Show in File Manager, Delete.
The same actions in the sections above the tree: right-clicking an entry in Recently opened or Bookmarks opens the same menu — without the folder entries, and with Remove from list added (that drops the entry from the list, never the file). Renaming there runs through a prompt instead of an input field in the row. The calendar and task views can sit in Recently opened too; they can be opened and removed from the list, but not renamed or deleted — they are views, not files.
Multi-selection: deleting asks once for all items, duplicating and moving by drag work on the whole selection. Deleted items go to the operating system’s trash.
New notes automatically start with a # Heading derived from the file name.
A folder’s own index.md (its overview) sorts to the top of that folder in the tree, above its subfolders and files — not alphabetically among the other notes.
Read again: the circular arrow in the tree’s heading (or F5) reads the vault again — Plainva reconciles the index with the folder and, on online vaults, also fetches the cloud files. A short report then states what was new, changed, removed or skipped. For a single folder there is Read this folder again in the right-click menu.

Daily notes

The Daily Note button in the left action rail opens or creates today’s note. Configure the base folder, date format and an optional template under Settings → Vault → Content & structure (Choose folder… next to the field lets you pick the folder right inside the vault).

The date format uses the same tokens as Obsidian: YYYY year, MM month, DD day, dddd weekday name — YYYY-MM-DD dddd gives 2026-07-29 Wednesday. Text that should stay as it is belongs in square brackets: [Journal] YYYY-MM-DD. Month and weekday names are always English, so switching the app language never makes your existing daily notes unfindable.

The Calendar on the right is a day overview: clicking a date opens the calendar tab at that day; a right-click opens a menu that names the day at the top and offers Open calendar, Daily Note and that day’s events and due tasks. Days with a daily note carry a tiny sun glyph, days with events colored dots per calendar. The Today button returns to the current month; clicking the month label opens a quick month/year picker. There you can also enable Show week numbers to add an ISO week column — the setting is remembered.

Settings

Settings (gear icon at the bottom of the leftmost action rail, or Ctrl+,) close via the X in the top right, Esc or a click outside the window. Changes are saved immediately and automatically — only cloud credentials are applied deliberately via Sign in in the Cloud accounts area (see Sync Setup). Settings come in two parts; every area in the left rail opens its own page, where the settings sit in named group cards:

App — everything that applies app-wide, in five areas. Appearance: the Theme picker as preview cards — besides Petrol (the default) you get Nord, Solarized, Gruvbox, Catppuccin, Paper (E-Ink-like, maximally calm), Sepia (warm paper), Forest, Midnight (OLED black), High Contrast and Phosphor Green/Phosphor Amber (retro terminal with subtle scanlines); plus the Mode (Light/Dark/System Default; single-mode themes such as Midnight pin the mode, and the light/dark switch in the title bar pauses while they are active), Language, Week starts on, Density and Interface zoom. Editor & notes: Default view, Content font size and Content font. Startup & behavior: open the last vault automatically, compatibility warnings. Updates: Plainva quietly checks for new versions on startup and shows a notice when one is found — click it to download and install the update straight away (it stays up until Plainva restarts). Opt out via Check for updates on startup. About & diagnostics: version details, the OS keychain status, Performance metrics, Export diagnostics… (no note content) and Report a problem. Keyboard shortcuts stay reachable any time via F1 or Show keyboard shortcuts in the bottom left.
Vault — the selected vault sits as a small card in the rail (the active vault carries a dot); with several vaults, Switch below it opens a picker list. Below that, the per-vault areas: Cloud accounts is the one place for every cloud sign-in — Connect account… picks the provider (Microsoft, Google, Nextcloud, Dropbox, S3, WebDAV or an email mailbox) and the services (Files, Calendar & tasks, Email) that account should carry. The service areas Sync (see Sync Setup), Calendar (see Calendar & Tasks) and Email (see Email capture) only appear once a connected account carries that service. Always present: Content & structure (Daily notes, Templates (the Template Folder plus the folder → template and note type → template rules, which apply on the phone too), Daily notes (including their Template), the Inbox folder, the Attachments folder, Tasks, OKF (Open Knowledge Format) — see OKF — and Extended databases), Backup & version history and Maintenance (Rebuild index, restore deleted files, vault statistics).

Tabs

Right-click a tab for its menu: Pin, Reload, Open in split (right), Copy path, Show in file manager, and the closing group.
Pin holds a tab in place: it moves to the front of the strip, shows a pin instead of the close cross, and survives every Close others / Close to the left / Close to the right / Close all. To close it, Unpin first.
Reload discards the view and reads the file from disk again — handy when another program changed it. If the tab has unsaved edits, Plainva refuses to reload rather than overwrite your work.

Arranging bars & areas

The action rail on the far left, the tabs of the left sidebar, the sections above the file tree and the sections of the right sidebar all work the same way.

The action rail offers New Note, New Folder and New Base. All three create inside the selected folder in the file tree; with a file selected, in that file’s folder; with nothing selected, at the top level. The Daily Note does not follow that — it always belongs in the folder you named for it in the settings. If you do not need one of the three, hide it.

Right where they are: press and hold a button or a section heading and drag it to its new place — a plain click still just triggers it, and if you scroll while holding, you scroll (the drag is cancelled). Esc cancels a drag in progress. A right-click offers the same actions without holding: Move up, Hide and Customize bars….

In one place: under Settings → Vault → Bars & areas all five bars sit below each other — including the phone’s navigation bar, which you can therefore arrange on the big screen. Each is one list with a dividing line: everything above it is visible, everything below is hidden. Here you move entries with the drag handle — on this page a list is being arranged, which is exactly what a handle is for. Dragging to the top or bottom edge scrolls the page along, so an entry travels from the very bottom to the very top in one movement.

Two things deliberately cannot be hidden: Help and Settings at the bottom of the action rail, and the Files tab of the left sidebar. Everything else is yours to hide; hidden rail actions stay reachable from the command palette (Ctrl+P). Right-sidebar sections with nothing to show for the open note never appear in the first place.

The arrangement belongs to the vault and travels to your other devices through settings sync. A vault you have not adapted follows your default — set it with Save as default, and Reset to default returns an adapted vault to it.

Customizing the interface

Toggle the sidebars via the two title-bar buttons or Ctrl+Alt+B (left) / Ctrl+Alt+R (right) — great for focused writing. Plainva remembers the state.
Command palette: Ctrl+P opens Commands — type and hit Enter to run (new note, daily note, split, sidebars, Back up now, and more).
Density: under Settings → App → Appearance, choose between Comfortable and Compact — compact tightens lists, menus and table rows; note content is unaffected.
Content font: under Settings → App → Editor & notes, set the Content font size (12–24 px) and the Content font (theme default, serif, sans-serif, monospace or the name of any installed font) — this scales the editor and reading view only; the interface stays as it is.
Interface zoom: scales the WHOLE interface between 80 % and 150 % — under Settings → App → Appearance or via Ctrl+Plus/Ctrl+Minus (Ctrl+0 resets).
Native-free dialogs: confirmations appear as Plainva dialogs styled by your theme (destructive actions get a red button), short notices as subtle toasts in the bottom right — no more system popups.

The graph

Via Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+G (or the Graph section in the right sidebar) you see your vault as a map: folders as bubbles, notes as nodes, relations as labeled edges — including a cleanup mode and time travel. Details: Graph.

Sections with nothing to show for the open note — Outline, Backlinks, Properties, Databases — do not appear at all, rather than sitting there greyed out. The whole right sidebar remembers one global preference for notes; full-surface views without note context close it only temporarily.

When you drag the panel narrow it changes in three steps, so nothing breaks:

280 px and up — as usual.
232–280 px — properties put the name above the value instead of beside it, long values wrap, the sections tighten up.
below 232 px — the calendar shows one week instead of the month (seven days, week number below right); a month grid would have 14-pixel cells here and stop being a calendar. The graph gets shorter, and backlinks show the file name without the path line.

The right panel cannot go below 200 px — no section is usable under that. The left one still goes down to 150 px, because file names simply truncate.