Put something in the sack

Before you start

• A signed-in account. Everything below is on the board itself — nothing to set up.

Steps

1. Click the prompt at the top of the board

   It reads *throw something in the sack…* and expands where it stands, with the cursor already in the title box. Nothing opens over the board and nothing is hidden behind a panel.

   If you would rather it started open every time, there is a setting for it — see Change how the board looks.

2. Type it

   The title is optional and the body is optional — you need one or the other, not both. Naming a list you have not filled in yet is a real way to start one.

   The title is its own box rather than the first line of the body, so nothing is parsed out from under you.

3. Let it guess the kind, or pick one

   Start a line with - and it switches itself to a Checklist. That is the only guess it makes, and it follows what you type until you overrule it.

   Clicking a kind in the picker pins it, so it stops moving mid-sentence. Encrypted has to be picked — nothing you can type means "encrypt this". Files cannot be built here at all: picking it hands you to the full editor, which has the file picker.

4. Add tags if you want them

   Type a name into the tag box and press space. Names that do not exist yet are created on save — see Organize with tags.

5. Save

   Ctrl+Enter saves without reaching for the mouse (⌘+Enter on a Mac), and Esc closes and discards. Both are printed along the bottom of the composer.

What happens next

• The card appears on the board immediately, newest first unless you have changed the sort.
• Composing inside a tag view pre-tags what you write with that tag; composing inside a kind view starts on that kind.
• Editing an item later opens in the same slot the composer uses, so reworking something happens where you wrote it.

If something goes wrong

Each row is what you see on screen. Symptoms are worded the way the app words them, so the sentence in front of you should be findable on this page.

Save is greyed out

Both boxes are empty. A title alone or a body alone is enough; nothing at all is not.

It keeps turning into a checklist

A line starting with - is the checklist signal. Click Note in the picker to pin it back — a kind chosen by hand stops the guessing for good.

You picked Files and ended up somewhere else

That is the handoff to the full editor, which is the only place with a file picker. Picking any other kind there sends you back to the composer.

You opened an item to edit and lost what you were typing

The editor and the composer share one slot, so opening an item drops an unsaved draft. Save first, then edit.

You cannot change an item’s kind after saving

Correct — a kind is fixed once an item exists. Make a new one of the right kind and delete the old.

Next

• Make a checklist — Start one from the composer with a dash, build it row by row, and tick items straight off the card.
• Attach files to an item — Up to ten files on a card, ten megabytes each. Uploads happen on save, and editing replaces the whole set.
• Encrypted notes — For the handful of notes that are a door code or a recovery key. The body is stored encrypted and shown one at a time.
• Empty your head with Dump mode — One big box. A blank line between each thought, and each one lands as its own note.
• Organize with tags — Tags are typed, never picked from a list. How to make one, rename it, recolour it, and why empty ones vanish.

Still stuck? Email [email protected] and tell us what the screen said. All the help articles are at Help.