- Published on
How to hide notes for extra privacy and organisation
Privacy is a fundamental part of the StarJot philosophy. Because your data lives locally on your device, it is already secure from prying eyes. However, sometimes you want a bit more privacy even within your own workspace, or perhaps you just want to declutter your screen.
StarJot provides two different ways to hide notes, depending on exactly how invisible you want them to be.
Here is a breakdown of Deep-hidden notes and Sidebar-hidden notes, and when to use them.
Deep-hidden notes
If you have a note that requires absolute privacy, you can turn it into a deep-hidden note. This removes it entirely from the main interface. It will not appear in your sidebar, it will not appear in your search results, and if you add tags to it, those tags will not show up when you are filtering.
The only way to access a deep-hidden note is by directly clicking a backlink to it from another note.
This is perfect for notes you really want kept out of sight. Think of it as a quiet space for personal journaling, incubating early, half-formed ideas that you aren't quite ready to look at every day, or drafting sensitive project outlines.
How to use it: Simply start your note's title with a full stop (a dot). For example: .My private note.
As soon as you remove the dot from the title, the note will become un-hidden and behave normally again.
NOTE
Tags in titles: If you start your note's title with a tag (for example, #draft), you must place the dot after the tag, right before the actual title text. For example: #draft .My private note.
Sidebar-hidden notes
Sometimes you don't need a note to be completely invisible; you just want it out of the way so you can focus. Sidebar-hidden notes are removed from your main navigation sidebar to keep things tidy, but they will still show up when you use the search function.
This feature is brilliant for structural notes, archives, or reference documents that you simply don't want cluttering up your daily workspace.
For a real-world example: this very article was drafted in StarJot. I didn't want the draft cluttering up my sidebar, so I hid it. Instead, I created a main 'Docs' note and linked to this draft from there, allowing me to access it easily without it taking up space on my screen.
How to use it: To hide a note from the sidebar, simply add one of the following tags anywhere inside the note:
#hidden#archive#private#trash
As long as one of those tags is present, StarJot will neatly sweep the note out of your sidebar, leaving you with a perfectly clean environment to think clearly.