Importing

MojoPad eats almost anything. Every import becomes a page, named after the file, ready to link.

Bringing your notes over from another app

Notes scattered across two or three apps, and you want them together? Nearly every notes app can export what you've written as a folder — the notes in one place, the pictures they use beside them. Choose that folder with File ▸ Import…, or drop it onto a page, and the whole thing comes in.

• Pictures come with the notes. This is the part that usually goes missing. A note points at its pictures by a path that only means something in the folder it came from, so MojoPad reads them while that folder is still in front of it and puts them in the page. It handles the three ways apps write those links — a plain path, a path with its spaces escaped, and the bare-filename style where the picture could be anywhere in the export.
• The folders you had are the folders you get. Notes arranged in folders arrive arranged the same way, however deep. Choose Unfiled instead if you'd rather sort them out yourself.
• Links between notes keep working. A link written [[Like this]] becomes a real link to that page — MojoPad links by name, so once both notes are in, they find each other.
• Tags become tags. A #tag written in a note is added to the page's own tags, and stays in the text where you wrote it.
• Settings folders are left alone, so you get your notes and not an app's configuration.

You choose what comes in, and where each part of it goes. Most people's notes aren't one kind of writing — a journalling app often holds a diary in one journal, a notebook in another and a pile of half-thoughts in a third, and a folder of notes usually has folders inside it. So choosing an export doesn't import it: MojoPad opens on what it found, a line for each part with its own count, and you say where each one lands, rename it, or leave it behind entirely.

• Each part goes where you send it — into a folder you already keep, chosen from a list of everything in your wiki, or into a new one you name on the spot. If you've been keeping notes here for a while, the folder you have in mind is already on that list.
• Writing that carries dates can go to the Journal, as the days it belongs to — entries from the same day are put together on that day, in the order they were written, the way a diary has always worked. Anything else goes to a folder of its own, named after where it came from.
• Two things arrive switched off unless you ask for them. Some apps record where you were for every single note — a quick-capture app keeps the map coordinates of everywhere you've ever typed, and a journal keeps the place and the weather. That's not usually what someone means by "import my notes", so it's yours to turn on rather than yours to discover later.

If your app offers a choice of export format, take the one that keeps attachments — some offer to put the pictures inside the notes themselves, which works here too. Export a handful of notes first and import those before committing to the lot; it takes a minute and tells you what you're getting.

What it won't do — worth knowing before you start

Better said plainly here than discovered halfway through a library.

• Pictures live inside the pages that use them, which is how every picture in MojoPad works. That makes a page self-contained and portable, and it means a wiki holds its pictures in memory while it's open. Bringing over a few hundred photos is comfortable; bringing over thousands is not, and there's no warning when you cross the line — it simply gets heavy. If you're moving a photo-heavy journal of years, bring it over in parts rather than in one go. A single picture larger than about eight megabytes is skipped rather than embedded.
• Video and sound aren't brought across. A journal export can contain both, and MojoPad can't play either yet — so an entry arrives with its words and its pictures, and its recordings stay in the export folder where you can still get at them. Better that than a page pretending to hold something it can't play.
• A title written into the note appears twice. Some apps put the note's name at the top of the note as well as in the filename, so you'll see it as the page's name and again as its first heading. MojoPad leaves it: the only way to remove it automatically would be to delete any heading matching the page name, which would quietly eat headings people meant to keep. One keystroke removes it; nothing brings back a heading deleted without asking.
• Pictures your notes point at but that aren't in the folder are left out. If an export references something outside the folder you chose, MojoPad won't reach outside for it — a note is a file anyone can write, and a link in one is a request, not permission. Help ▸ Save Diagnostic Report counts anything skipped this way, so you can tell "nothing was there" from "something went wrong".

Files

• Drag and drop files or a whole folder — onto a page to bring them in there, or onto the pages column on the left, which is usually where you mean. Drop straight onto a folder in that column and they're filed into it. Or use File ▸ Import… (multi-select works, and folders can be chosen too).
• Pick where they land. After you choose files with File ▸ Import…, MojoPad asks which folder the new pages should go into. Pick a folder, choose Unfiled to sort them out later, or type a name that doesn't exist yet and MojoPad offers to create the folder on the spot — a thousand files can arrive already filed, no moving them one at a time afterwards. (The list filters as you type, so a deep tree is two keystrokes away.)
• Drag files onto a folder. In the sidebar's Folders view, drop files from Finder straight onto a folder row — they import and file into that folder in one motion. Right-clicking a folder offers the same thing as Import Files Here….
• Images land inline, ready to resize and annotate.
• PDFs become readable pages, shown in MojoPad's own reader — clean pages on the page background, no plugin chrome, with real selectable text (select, copy, drag excerpts to a canvas or — from the split pane — straight into your notes; see Transclusion and Split View). Their text is searchable, so a word inside the PDF turns up in search and ⌘F finds it in the reader (see Searching). Long documents open instantly: pages draw as you reach them. You can mark passages as you read — see Reading with a pen in your hand below. For ink-level markup, click Open in PDF editor… above the page: it opens in your default PDF app (Preview, Acrobat, …), and because the file lives inside your document, your edits save straight back into it — press Reload to see them.
• Text files become editable pages — plain text, Markdown, and other text formats like Org-mode (.org), reStructuredText (.rst), AsciiDoc (.adoc), LaTeX (.tex), and log files. If it's really text, it opens as text.
• Anything else is stored in the document and linked.

Reading with a pen in your hand

Three kinds of reading, and MojoPad now handles all three without making you stop and take notes:

• The paper you're reviewing for a colleague. Mark the three passages you want to raise, in three different colours — one for methods, one for claims you doubt, one for the sentences you'll quote back.
• The chapter you're studying. Mark as you go, keep reading, and let the marks be the map you come back to. Nothing leaves the page and nothing interrupts the reading.
• The contract, the manual, the long report. Mark the clause you'll need to find again in six weeks, when you will not remember which page it was on.

How. Open the PDF and select the words you want to mark. A small bar of colours floats just above the selection — amber, yellow, green, pink or blue, the same five the editor's text highlighter uses. Click one and the passage is marked; the colour you chose is the one offered first next time, so marking a whole chapter in one colour is one click per passage.

Changing your mind. Right-click a mark for its own menu: pick another colour, or remove it. To clear every mark in the document at once, use the reader's toolbar. Marks live in the document, so they are there on every view of that PDF, they survive quitting, and they travel with the document if you move it.

Everything else the right-click menu did, it still does. Away from a mark you get the usual macOS menu — Copy, Look Up, Read Aloud — and it now works on whatever word is under the pointer, so you can look a word up without selecting it first.

Marking versus quoting. Dragging an excerpt into a note also leaves a permanent mark on the PDF, and that's the move when you want the words in your writing. Use a highlight when you want the passage to stay where it is and simply be findable — the point of the pen, rather than the scissors.

Web pages

• File ▸ Import URL… (or paste a link onto a canvas ▸ Add web page here…) renders the page first — so JavaScript-built articles arrive as real content, not an empty shell — then extracts a clean, editable page. It keeps what matters: the article's structure — real tables, blockquotes, figures and captions, nested lists; the sharpest images (the full-resolution originals, not thumbnails or lazy-load placeholders); a quiet byline line (author · date · site, read from the page's own metadata); and any embedded videos, which arrive as players you can actually play. Ads, share bars, cookie banners, newsletter sign-ups, and "related articles" rails are left behind. On-device AI then trims to just the article. (For pages behind a login, use the Clip to MojoPad extension below, which captures from your own browser session.)
• Safari web archives (drag a .webarchive in) offer a choice: Clean & editable (the article, extracted) or Original snapshot (the page exactly as saved, pixel for pixel — like VoodooPad kept them).
• Local HTML files (.html) import the same way — the same Clean & editable / Original snapshot choice, with images and stylesheets from the file's own folder pulled in so the snapshot still looks right. (Page scripts don't run — snapshot freezes the static page, clean keeps the article.)
• ePub books offer a choice too: As wiki pages turns the book into a page per chapter with a linked contents page — readable in your theme, editable, in the graph — or As an attachment keeps it as one file page that reads like a book: one warm serif column with chapter dividers, in MojoPad's own reader — and the book's own images and diagrams appear in place, sized to the column. (Only images carried inside the book itself are shown; anything a page tries to fetch from the web is quietly left out, so reading never phones anywhere.) Select and copy from it, drag passages to a canvas, and excerpts leave permanent highlights that thread back from your notes — the same loop PDFs have. It's searchable and askable too, whole-book AI included. (DRM-protected books can't be opened — true everywhere.)
• The Web Clipper clips from your browser with one click — via the Clip to MojoPad Chrome extension (it captures the fully-rendered page, even behind a login) or the bookmarklet (Safari too). The selection if you've made one, the whole article if not. See Page Links Everywhere.

Clipped articles arrive as ordinary rich-text pages: headings, images, and links intact, and any code or preformatted blocks render in tinted boxes that wrap long lines instead of running off the page.

Talk to your videos — transcripts

Under any YouTube, Vimeo or TED video sits a small 📄 Transcript button — always there, no hunting for it. Click it. MojoPad fetches the video's captions and lays them out beneath the player as timestamped paragraphs — real, searchable text that becomes part of the page. Search finds talks by what was said in them; the transcript travels into your exports; and it renders wherever the video does, including on a canvas card.

The button does its work once and then goes away: a video that already has its transcript doesn't need it again.

Every timestamp is a link. Click one and the player jumps to that moment — no scrubbing. It's the fastest way to re-find the ten seconds you actually wanted.

Pull a quote onto a board — and jump back to hear it. Open the talk beside a canvas (⌥-click it, or right-click its card ▸ Open beside the board), then drag a transcript line onto the canvas. It lands as a sticky stamped from 🎬 the talk · 12:34. Click that stamp later and the talk opens beside the board, the video seeks to the exact moment those words were spoken, and a thread draws itself from your note to the video. Your notes remember not just where an idea came from, but when.

Transcripts are best-effort: a video with no captions, or a platform that changes its internals, may come back empty — an occasional maintenance patch keeps them flowing. Auto-generated (machine) captions are labelled as such.

From anywhere on your Mac

• The Bucket — press ⇧⌘7 in any application and a small capture window appears; type a thought and it's appended to your Bucket page, timestamped. When you capture from another app, MojoPad stays out of your way: the moment the panel closes it hands focus straight back to wherever you were — your browser, your editor, the call — so the capture never yanks you into MojoPad. Inside MojoPad you can also open it from the 🪣 Bucket button in the toolbar or File ▸ Quick Capture (Bucket). Click the 📌 pin in its title bar and the panel floats over everything for drip-capture: each ↩ saves the thought and clears the box for the next one, clicking elsewhere no longer dismisses it, and esc closes it when you're done — perfect alongside a call or a video.
• Triage the Bucket into real pages. When the capture page fills up, run Explode Page… from the command palette: every block gets a checkbox and a page-name field — tick the pieces that should become pages (give two pieces the same name and they join the same page), and a → link stays behind for each so the trail survives. ✦ Group with AI asks your local model to propose the grouping — related captures ticked and named in one pass, yours to adjust before anything moves.
• Create Page from Selection (command palette) works anywhere, not just the Bucket: select any passage and it moves to a new page — named from the words, adjustable before it lands — leaving a link where the text used to be.
• Save PDF to MojoPad — in any app's print dialog, open the PDF menu and choose Save PDF to MojoPad. The PDF lands in your frontmost document.
• New Page from Clipboard (⌥⌘V) — also on the page list's right-click menu.

Combining documents

File ▸ Merge Document… imports every page of another MojoPad document into this one — names are de-duplicated, links are rewired. File ▸ Split Document… goes the other way: pick pages, save them as a new document, optionally remove them from this one.