The Binder

The left-hand panel is the binder — a tree view of your project folder, one of the dockable tool windows described above. It’s .gitignore-aware, and documents are shown without their .md extension.

• Navigate by keyboard: click a row (or Tab to it) to give it focus, then:
  • Up/Down moves between rows
  • Left/Right collapses/expands a focused folder
  • Enter opens the focused document
• Drag and drop a file or folder onto another folder to move it there. Drag it onto another document instead to reorder — dropping it just before that document, within the same folder — without changing which folder it’s in.
• F6 (the remappable “Toggle Binder/Editor Focus” shortcut) jumps keyboard focus back and forth between the binder and the editor/preview, without touching the mouse.
• Right-click a row for a context menu:
  • New File / New Folder / New From Template (folders only — see Templates) — each prompts for a name (Enter to confirm)
  • Rename — also prompts for a name, and updates any [[wikilinks]] elsewhere in the project that pointed at the old name
  • Delete — shows a native confirmation dialog; if a Trash folder is configured, it’s worded as a move to Trash rather than a permanent delete
  • Restore (on a trashed item) — moves it back to its original folder, offering to recreate that folder if it’s gone since
  • Folder Role / Dropdown Source / Empty Trash (folders only) — see Folder Roles and Dropdown Source Folders
• A folder with a role assigned shows a leading icon instead of a text label: 🔍 Research, 🗑 Trash, 📋 Templates, 📖 Manuscript, 🌐 World
• Click the root row (the project itself, at the very top of the tree) to switch the Metadata dock over to project-wide fields — see Project Metadata. The row gets the same persistent highlight a selected document gets, and clicking it also toggles the whole tree open/closed, the same as clicking any other folder row does
• Click any other folder row to switch the Metadata dock to that folder’s own metadata instead — see Folder Metadata. The form’s heading reads “Folder Metadata” instead of the document’s title, so it’s always clear which kind of row you’re editing

Binder Background Coloring

Binder rows — documents and folders alike — can be background-colored to make status, POV, or progress toward a word count target visible at a glance without opening the Metadata dock for each one. Four modes are available, switchable via View > Color Binder By, File > Project Settings > Binder (see Project Settings), the remappable “Cycle Binder Color Mode” shortcut (default Ctrl+Shift+C, cycling through the modes below in order), or by clicking the mode indicator that appears in the status bar once a mode other than Off is active (clicking it cycles too):

• Off — no background coloring at all. The default, so a new project’s binder starts uncolored until you opt in.
• Status — colors each row by its own status value, using whatever color you’ve assigned that status (see below).
• POV — colors each row by its own pov value the same way.
• Word Count Progress — a red→yellow→green gradient toward word_count_target: a document uses its own word count against its own target; a folder uses the combined word count of every document nested inside it (computed on a background thread alongside the Word Count panel’s own total, so it never blocks the UI) against the folder’s own target.

A row with nothing relevant to the active mode — no status/POV assigned, or no target set — simply shows no color; there’s no fallback to a different mode.

Status and POV colors themselves are assigned from the Metadata dock: next to the Status:/POV: row (on both the document and folder forms), a color swatch button appears as soon as that field isn’t blank — click it to open a color picker. Each status/POV value’s color is shared project-wide, so coloring “draft” or “Alice” once colors every row carrying that value, document or folder alike.

A file with uncommitted git changes (when git integration is on, both app-wide and for the project) also gets a trailing “•” marker after its name — a folder shows the same marker if anything nested inside it is dirty. This is independent of the coloring modes above: it’s a plain text suffix, not a color, so it shows alongside whichever Color Binder By mode is active rather than competing with it.

Document Stats

Settings > Appearance > Show document stats in binder (off by default) adds a right-aligned lines/words/chars readout to every document row — e.g. 53/418/2345 for a 53-line, 418-word, 2,345-character document. The open document’s numbers update live as you type; every other document’s come from its file on disk, re-read only when it actually changes. Toggle it without opening Settings via the remappable “Toggle Document Stats in Binder” shortcut (default Ctrl+Alt+D).