A page can be a file on your disk, and stay one. Three things people do with this. A researcher keeps a folder of Markdown notes another tool writes, and wants them readable and linkable here without copying them. A writer keeps chapters as files so a different editor can open them. Somebody has a folder they have curated for years and wants MojoPad to follow it — new files becoming pages, edits arriving, without ever holding a second copy that drifts.
This is not importing. An imported file is copied in and the original stops mattering; a linked page and the file on disk are the same thing seen twice, and editing either changes both. If you want the copy instead, see Importing.
Sometimes a note shouldn't move in at all. Three cases where that's true:
For those, choose File ▸ New Page from a File… and pick the file. You get a normal MojoPad page — it links, it's found by search, it shows up in the graph, it takes backlinks — except its words live in that file. Type here and the file changes. Change the file in any other app and the page catches up, usually before you've looked back at it. Nothing is copied and nothing is converted.
The page carries a small ⇄ filename mark under its title, so you always know which pages reach outside the document. Click it to show the file in the Finder.
One file at a time is right for a handful of notes. When the thing you want to work with is a folder — an indexed folder, a vault, a repo's notes directory — choose File ▸ Link a Folder… instead. Every text file in it becomes a page, the folders inside it become folders in your sidebar, and files added to it later turn up as pages on their own, whether they were added while you were working or while MojoPad was closed.
That last part is what makes it feel like one library rather than two: clip something into the folder from another app, and a minute later it's a page here, searchable and ready to link.
Files MojoPad can't treat as notes — images, PDFs, anything that isn't text — are left alone rather than turned into pages, and hidden folders are skipped.
A folder is followed all the way down. Sub-folders, and sub-folders inside those, become folders in your sidebar in the same shape they have on disk — so a notes directory of a few thousand files across dozens of folders comes in whole, not just the files sitting at the top level. There is a ceiling, in the thousands, and if your folder is past it MojoPad tells you the real number it found, follows as many as it can, and leaves the rest alone. Two things to know if you meet it:
To see exactly where you stand, Help ▸ Save Diagnostic Report counts each followed folder the same way MojoPad itself does: how many files in it can be followed, and how many of them have pages. When those two numbers match, you have all of it.
File ▸ Files on This Mac ▸ Stop Following a Folder… ends the arrangement — as does Stop Following in the right-click menu of the folder itself, which is the same thing from wherever you happen to be looking. Files you add to that folder stop turning up here, and MojoPad asks what should happen to the pages that came from it:
The files on your Mac are left alone whichever you choose — stopping following never touches a file.
Follow the folder again later and the pages you removed come back — the same pages, with their links and their place in the tree — rather than arriving a second time alongside their own ghosts. And if the folder has simply gone missing from your sidebar, choosing Link a Folder… and picking it again puts it back where it was, with everything that came from it inside.
You keep a literature folder, and things in it move and go. You throw out a paper you have finished with, and a week later notice its page still sitting in your wiki — so now you delete it here too, and you are doing everything twice. That is the case this is for.
Right-click a followed folder in the sidebar and choose This Folder Leads…. It is off until you turn it on, and you turn it on one folder at a time — which side leads is a property of the arrangement rather than of the app, and a journal you only ever add to is nothing like a literature folder where things come and go.
With it on, the two match in both directions:
Nothing is destroyed in either direction. The Trash is the Trash until you empty it, and Recently Deleted holds a page for 30 days. A misdrag costs you a moment, not a note.
Being unable to see a folder is never the same as it being empty. This is the part worth trusting, because it is the part that would matter. A followed folder can live on an external disk, a network share, or a cloud folder halfway through syncing, and any of those can be unreachable for reasons that have nothing to do with anybody deleting anything. MojoPad will only take a page when the file's own folder is right there, readable, and simply without it. Unplug the disk and nothing happens. Lose the network and nothing happens. Leave a sync half-finished and nothing happens. It waits until it can actually see, and it checks each folder separately — one share going quiet doesn't stop it noticing a deletion in a folder on your desk.
Turning it on asks about what is already here. If you have followed a folder for a year, some of its files went long ago and their pages stayed. MojoPad counts those, tells you how many, and lets you either bring them into line now or leave them alone and have the new arrangement apply only from here on.
To turn it off again, right-click the folder and choose This Folder Leads a second time — the tick disappears and deleting on either side goes back to leaving the other alone. And if you ever wonder whether a folder is leading, Help ▸ Save Diagnostic Report says so for each one — except on a wiki with a password, where the report cannot read the list from disk and says that instead.
Say you keep your reading notes in ~/Notes, and another app already watches that
folder.
~/Notes.That round trip is the whole feature. Everything else is what happens when it gets complicated.
This is the arrangement most people are after: the document manager holds the documents, MojoPad holds the thinking, and one folder is common ground. Two things are worth knowing.
MojoPad writes into the file, it doesn't replace it. That matters more than it sounds. Apps that save by writing a new file and swapping it out break any link pointing at the old one — so if you keep item links to that document (DEVONthink's Make Custom URL Link, and the equivalent elsewhere), they'd stop working every time you edited. MojoPad edits the file in place, so the item stays the same item and your links keep resolving.
A file created after the folder was indexed needs one nudge. A document manager notices changes to files it already knows about within seconds — that's the direction that matters, and it just works. But a brand-new file appearing in the folder may not show up until it rescans. In DEVONthink: select the indexed group and choose File ▸ Update Indexed Items. This is the other app's behaviour, not MojoPad's, and it catches everyone once — including us, while building this.
The smooth path, then: make new pages from files the other app already knows about, and when you do add a file from outside, run its update once.
One file when a particular note needs to live somewhere specific — a README beside its code, a document someone else edits, a file you also open on a phone. A folder when you want two apps to share a working library, and you want new files to keep arriving without asking.
You can do both in one wiki, and a folder you follow can sit alongside hundreds of ordinary pages. Linked pages are ordinary pages in every other respect: they link, they take backlinks, they're found by search, they show up in the graph, and they can be tagged and given properties like anything else. Those extras live in the document, not in the file — so tagging a linked page doesn't scribble on someone else's file.
The other direction. A page that has been in your wiki for years can be given a home on disk: open it and choose File ▸ Files on This Mac ▸ Move This Page to a File…, then say where it should live. Its words go into that file, and from then on the page and the file are the same thing — edit either.
What moves is the writing. Its name, tags, properties, aliases and backlinks stay here, in the wiki, exactly as they were; the file gets the words alone. A rich-text page becomes Markdown on the way out, so anything Markdown can't express is simplified — MojoPad says so before it does anything, and you can stop there.
Some pages can't go: a storyboard would lose its shape as a flat file (use Send Storyboard To instead), an imported file or a canvas isn't writing, and a protected page won't be written out in the clear.
If you edit the page while another app edits the file, MojoPad stops rather than guess: a bar appears offering Use the file's or Keep mine. Neither version is thrown away before you choose — pick Keep mine and your text goes out to the file, pick Use the file's and the page takes what's on disk.
.md, .markdown), plain text (.txt), Org-mode
(.org), reStructuredText (.rst), AsciiDoc (.adoc), LaTeX
(.tex), TaskPaper and log files. A markdown file becomes a Markdown page; every other
kind becomes a plain text page, and that is the point — what MojoPad writes back is exactly
the characters that were there, so an Org file stays an Org file rather than being quietly
rewritten as something else.