#getting-started #guide
Welcome! This guide helps you get started with SilverBullet assuming you have it successfully Install|installed as a server or desktop app.
Once you launch SilverBullet on a fresh Space, you will be greeted by its automatically generated Index Page that contains a few sections:
Likely you’ll discover workflows that will work for you over time, but to not have you start with a (scary) blank page, these four sections should give you a starting point with some “best practices.”
The idea of the quick note is to serve as a modern replacement for the old-fashioned “I just need to jot something down, gimme a piece of paper, quick!”
When such an occasion arrises, you have a few options:
1. On your index page click the “Create quick note” button
2. Hit the Ctrl-q shortcut followed by another q (or Ctrl-q), so Ctrl-q Ctrl-q — quick, quick!
Either of these will navigate to a new page with the Inbox/ prefix followed by the current date and time.
Start typing your Markdown and be confident your quick thoughts are safely persisted to your space. There’s no save button to push. Every second or two your changes are persisted safely.
This workflow helps you getting quick notes down, so none of your brilliance (or anybody’s phone number) gets lost. However, it’s not a great strategy for finding this information again later. Yet, the first priority was to jot it down. That now happened. Relax.
The next step is to either rename the note by clicking on the page title at the top, changing it to something more descriptive, and hitting Enter. This will rename the page. Or to simply cut and paste the content elsewhere and then clean it up with the Page: Delete command. Commands can be invoked by name by clicking the little “command prompt” button at the top right, or hitting Cmd-/ on Mac or Ctrl-/ anywhere else.
Now, when you move back to your index page by clicking the “home” button, you will notice (unless you immediately renamed your quick note) that your note now appears in a list in the “Recent quick notes.” section. How did that happen? This is where the SilverBullet magic starts. This is Space Lua/Integrated Query at work, but there’s no need to go there yet, just enjoy this functionality as it is for now (or peek a bit under the hood by Alt-clicking on this widget to see what’s the code underlying it).
A common workflow is to keep making quick notes as you need. Then, whenever you have time, go through the list and rename them, move the content or delete them so that your quick note list is empty again.
But at the end of the day, this is your space, so you can use (or not use) them however you like.
Dear diary,
A Journal entry is in effect not that much different than a quick note, except that its page names are prefixed with Journal/ and only contain the date, but not time. And that every time you click the “Today’s entry” button (or run the Journal: Today command, or hit Ctrl-q j) you end up on the page for that day and are greeted with an ever expecting (silver) bullet:
*
A common workflow is keep this page open throughout the day and use it as your journal Outlines|Outline. You can use it to create tasks for yourself (see #Tasks later), write quick notes to yourself (if you don’t use quick notes), and make notes about meetings you’re in.
Here is (one) of SilverBullet’s killer features: if you start to link to topic pages in your journal, you are now are starting to build your knowledge graph.
What does that mean? Let’s make this more concrete, let’s add an item to our journal:
* Met with [Allan](Allan) today to talk about [Project Phoenix](Project Phoenix):
* Both happy with project progress
* [ ] Agreed I shall come up with a better project name
* [ ] Agreed [Allan](Allan) will approve final project name
The [page](page) syntax is Link syntax. It allows you to create a web of links across your space, like a personal wiki. However — and here’s the kicker — these links are bi-directional. This means that on the page you link to you can see what pages point to it.
This means that if I now click on the Allan link, I navigate to this page (or create it, if it didn’t exist yet) and there in a Linked Mention section I will see that on this and that journal page, I mentioned Alan + all the sub-items mentioned in the journal. Cool right? And because also created a task mentioning Allan, and that task is not yet complete, it will also appear at the top of the page as under Linked Tasks.
This way, as you chronicle your journey day by day, mentioning people, projects and other topics, you implicitly contribute content to these pages. On the topic pages themselves you will see where they are mentioned and the context, and you can add additional information as you see fit in the page itself.
On your index page you will see a list of all the days you’ve created a journal page for which is useful for navigation. If you’re on a journal page you can also use the Journal: Previous Day and Journal: Next Day command (these have keyboard shortcuts too) to walk through the various entries, or use Journal: Picker to get a list of all of them.
As you journal or create quick notes or topic pages, you may want to make note of things to do. For this, markdown offers Task syntax:
* [ ] My task
It’s a tad ugly and annoying to type, but this is where another convenient SilverBullet feature will jump to the rescue: slash commands. Type “My task”, then a space, then /task and hit enter, it will now turn your current line (or bulleted list item) into a task:
You will notice that visually it will turn [ ] into a checkbox. You can go ahead and click it, it does what you expect:
As you collect incomplete tasks across your space, the “Recent incomplete tasks” will collect them all in one place until they’re done.
Reality check: it’s likely you will collect a lot of tasks and this list will become unwieldly so likely you’ll want to replace this list with something more specific later. For this see the Guide/Task Management guide.
This section does what it says on the tin: it shows you the last 10 modified pages in your space. Useful to get back to where you were last making changes. That’s all there’s to it, really.
Now that you know the basics, explore these guides for real-world workflows: