The window#

Scoria opens one window on one vault, in a three-part shell: a dock on the left, the open note in the middle, a dock on the right. Both docks can be hidden, which leaves the note alone on screen.

┌─────────────┬────────────────────────────────┬──────────────┐
│ Files       │                                │ Backlinks    │
│ Search      │          the open note         │ Outgoing     │
│             │   (reading, Live Preview or    │ Outline      │
│  ← left     │          Source mode)          │ Tags         │
│    dock     │                                │  right dock →│
├─────────────┴────────────────────────────────┴──────────────┤
│ vault                              412 words, 2310 characters│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The left dock#

Two tabs:

• Files — the folder tree of the vault. The tab Scoria opens on.
• Search — vault-wide search with the full query grammar.

Ctrl + Shift + F opens Search; file-explorer:open returns to Files. Ctrl + E is not involved — toggling the dock itself is app:toggle-left-sidebar.

The note#

The middle is one note, in one of three modes:

Which one a note opens in follows your vault's settings: defaultViewMode decides reading view or editing, and livePreview decides which of the two editing modes. See editing a note.

The right dock#

Four tabs, all about the open note except Tags, which is about the whole vault:

• Backlinks — notes that link here, and unlinked mentions of this note's name or aliases.
• Outgoing links — where this note points, resolved and unresolved.
• Outline — this note's headings; click one to scroll to it.
• Tags — every tag in the vault with its count.

app:toggle-right-sidebar hides and shows the dock. Each tab also has a command of its own (backlink:open, outgoing-links:open, outline:open, tag-pane:open), so you can bind a key straight to the pane you want.

The status bar#

Along the bottom: the vault's status on the left, and the open note's word and character count on the right. While you are editing, the right-hand side also carries the cursor's line and column, the number of cursors when there is more than one, and the parser and shaping timings for the note you are in:

Ln 212, Col 7  ·  parse 18.4 ms, 9120 spans  ·  shape 0.21 ms  ·  412 words, 2310 characters

Those timings are there on purpose rather than left in a debug build: the editor reparses the note in the background after each edit, and this is where you can see that it is keeping up. See performance.

Navigating#

Clicking a link to a note that does not exist creates it — the same as Obsidian, and the same as pressing Enter in the quick switcher on a name nothing matches. See managing notes.

History is per window and linear: opening a note from the graph, from a link, from Files or from the switcher all push onto the same back stack.

Keys#

Every shortcut in Scoria is an Obsidian command bound from its default hotkey, so your vault's hotkeys.json rebinds or unbinds all of them. The one exception is Ctrl + Q, which quits.

The 34 commands Scoria can actually run are the ones the command palette offers; the rest are still listed in Settings' Hotkeys tab, so you can see your bindings for commands that do not do anything yet. The full list is in commands and hotkeys.

The theme#

Colors come from your vault's appearance.json — the base theme (dark or light) and the accent color — and are read before the window opens, so the first frame is already right. A CSS theme (cssTheme) is not applied; that is a later phase.

Fonts come from appearance.json too: the interface font, the text font and the monospace font, with the font size.

Next#

• The Files view
• Reading view