Note Formatting
Jotaid's editor is source mode: what you see is the Markdown itself. The syntax markers stay visible and are highlighted live — the asterisks around **bold** remain, and the words between them are already bold. A WYSIWYG editor asks you to guess what it stored; source mode does not.
Press ⌃⇧P to preview at any time; ⌘E switches between the edit and preview tabs.
The Formatting Toolbar (macOS)
The formatting toolbar sits in the middle of the editor's top bar. It adapts to the width it is given and always keeps the most-used buttons first:
| Priority | Buttons |
|---|---|
| Always shown | Heading menu (H1–H6), paragraph, bold, italic, strikethrough, highlight |
| Appears when wider | Bullet list, numbered list, task list, link, image |
| Appears when widest | Superscript, subscript, footnote, quote, inline code, code block, clear formatting |
⇧⌘T collapses or restores the whole toolbar.
iOS has no such toolbar — there is no room for eighteen buttons, so you write the Markdown directly. Every piece of syntax below works on both platforms.
Headings
Start the line with #. The number of hashes is the level, up to six:
# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3The toolbar's heading menu maps to ⌘1 through ⌘6; the paragraph button (or deleting the hashes) turns it back into body text.
Emphasis
| Effect | Syntax | Shortcut |
|---|---|---|
| Bold | **text** or __text__ | ⌘B |
| Italic | *text* or _text_ | ⌘I |
| Bold italic | ***text*** | — |
~~text~~ | — | |
| Highlight | ==text== or <mark>text</mark> | ⌘⇧H |
| Underline | <u>text</u> | ⌘U |
Highlight renders as the same vivid yellow in all three themes, with the text colour following the theme — see Appearance & Themes.
Quotes
One > at the start of the line:
> A quoted paragraph.Shortcut: ⌘⇧.
Pasting
Text from a web page or another app usually arrives dressed in formatting. Jotaid tidies it before it lands.
Rich text becomes plain text (macOS): paste styled HTML and Jotaid extracts the words rather than dumping tags into your note; past a size limit it falls back to plain text outright. Images take the attachment path instead.
Auto-format on paste (Settings → Formatting / Import & Paste) is on by default, and its four rules can each be turned off:
| Rule | What it does |
|---|---|
| Normalize blank lines | Collapses runs of blank lines into one |
| Clean up spaces | Removes leading, trailing and excess spaces |
| Fix list formatting | Repairs the broken line breaks in lists copied from AI chat windows |
| Chinese–English spacing | Inserts a space between Chinese and Latin text |
"Fix list formatting" exists because of AI chat windows
Lists copied out of ChatGPT or Claude routinely arrive with broken line breaks that collapse into a blob in any editor. That rule is aimed squarely at them. To bring in a whole conversation, importing from the clipboard beats copy-and-paste.
Clear Formatting
Select a passage and click the last toolbar button to strip its Markdown markers, leaving plain text.
Smart Format is not clear formatting
⇧⌘F runs Smart Format, an AI re-format: it turns a wall of text into something with headings and lists rather than removing formatting. See Smart Format.
What Else You Can Insert
| What you write | |
|---|---|
| Links | [text](url), [[node]] |
| Images | Paste directly, or  |
| Lists | Bullet, numbered, task — nestable |
| Tables | | col | col | |
| Math | $inline$, $$display$$ |
| Code | `inline`, fenced blocks |
| Annotations | Super/subscript, footnotes, abbreviations, keys |
Next Steps
- Insert Links — Plain links and
[[backlinks]] - Quick Capture — Templates and every fast way in
- Shortcuts — Every shortcut in one table