Notes

A note is the block you will make most. Double-click the canvas background and you have one. Type into it directly, or press ⌘↵ — or double-click the note — to open the full editor.

Markdown works as you type it: ## becomes a heading, - a list, **bold** bold. The characters disappear as the formatting appears, so what you are looking at is the note rather than its source. What gets stored is still Markdown, which is why export, the AI bridge and sync all understand a note without anything having to translate it.

Notes that compute

Any line ending in = is a question, and the answer appears beside it — greyed out, and never written into your text:

wall = 3.2 * 2.4 =
waste = 1.1
needed = wall * waste =

Naming a value on the left binds it for every line below, so the third line knows what wall and waste are. Change the room size and everything downstream follows.

This is deliberately not a spreadsheet. It is for the arithmetic you would otherwise do in your head and get wrong — a quantity, a budget, a split — kept next to the sentence explaining why you were doing it. When you want a grid, use a sheet.

Formulas and equations

Press fx for an equation. Typing one that ends in = makes it live: it computes from the same values the note has already bound. One without the = is presentational and left alone, which is what keeps a formula you wrote to be read readable.

Hover any inserted block — an equation, a QR code — for the × that removes it. Backspace also works: the first press selects the block, the second deletes it.

Alignment

Markdown has no alignment syntax, so Umbra stores it as HTML inside the Markdown — <h1 align="center">. That is valid Markdown, renders centred on GitHub and in any browser, and means a centred heading survives being exported and opened somewhere else.

Two bodies

Every note also has a document body — the same block, a different surface. See Documents.