Importing

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

Files

• Drag and drop files onto a page, or use File ▸ Import… (multi-select works).
• 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.