Ideas, search and clusters

Ideas is a stream for quick thoughts you have not yet arranged on the canvas. A captured item is called a snippet. It can hold a title, body, tags and saved lookups, and can later become material in a project.

Use it for a sentence such as “Try warmer lighting above the desk” while leaving its eventual place in your project undecided.

Capture a thought#

Select the lightbulb Ideas tab in the list panel. Enter your thought in the capture field and submit it with Return. Empty or whitespace-only captures are ignored. New ideas appear in the dated stream.

Check the capture destination before submitting. Right-click the Ideas icon to choose .snippet or an active DataJar. The choice is remembered. A leading dot command can also choose a destination for one capture: .snippet Try warmer lighting sends that text to ordinary snippets. A DataJar address such as .reading A useful passage sends the following text to that jar when it exists.

A dot address needs content after it. An unknown jar address opens a separate resolution flow rather than silently creating an ordinary snippet. DataJars explains those choices and the distinction between capture and jar search.

When Tasks is the selected tab, capture creates a task in the task collection. It does not send the task into your selected DataJar.

Edit and organise snippets#

Right-click a snippet and choose Edit to change its title, timestamped body and tags. Closing the snippet editor commits its edits; it also saves and closes after a minute without edits. Finish by closing normally when you want to make sure the editing session has ended.

The right-click menu also offers:

Send to Glob Project is available when the panel supplies that destination action. It opens the project-transfer workflow. Check its chosen project before confirming. Sending text to another collection is different from editing the original snippet.

Converting an idea into a task can make it disappear from Ideas because tasks have their own tab. Likewise, an archived item no longer belongs in the active stream. Check those states before assuming a search failure lost your text.

Search the collection you are viewing#

The Mac note list offers Search notes through its magnifying-glass control. Enter part of the title or content you remember. Clear the field with its clear button when finished; an old query can hide items that are still present.

The panel also has tab-aware search fields, with prompts such as find a thought, find a task and search clusters. Search filters the current surface. It is not a single result list combining every journal entry, imported document, canvas note and knowledge record.

Use the appropriate search for the material:

• Canvas notes: the note-list search in the current project.
• Ideas or tasks: that tab's search.
• Imported document text: Import Studio.
• Saved knowledge records: Knowledge Browser, where Return submits the search.
• Questions requiring an AI response: Ask Glob, which is different from a text filter.

Find groups of related ideas#

Open Clusters to review related snippets. Analyse requests grouping; Re-analyse requests another analysis. The panel can also start an initial analysis when eligible material and a provider are available. Capturing a thought is therefore distinct from manually confirming a particular grouping.

The empty state explains whether there are too few eligible notes, no strong patterns, or no available provider. Sign in to Glob to enable clustering points to the hosted-account requirement when an on-device route is not available. No clusters detected yet is not evidence that your snippets have disappeared.

Do not expect every idea to receive a cluster. A group is a suggested organisation of related material, rather than a compulsory folder for each snippet.

Refine a cluster#

Double-click its heading or right-click and choose Rename to change the label. Color offers a palette and Automatic. Drag a snippet onto another cluster header to move its membership. Remove from Cluster removes that membership rather than deleting the snippet itself.

Open in Glob brings the group into the canvas workflow. Create Project from Cluster starts a project from that group. These actions differ from simply expanding a cluster to read its snippets.

Review the destination and the resulting canvas notes before repeating a creation action. Cluster analysis, canvas placement and the source idea stream are related workflows, but they are not interchangeable views of a single folder.