Clew Clew 0.9.0
The Clew Manual
Everything Clew does, explained properly: what to type, what happens, why it works that way, and where the sharp edges are. If you are new, start with the Introduction and read forward; if you came here for one feature, every chapter stands alone.
demo-vault/ is this manual's live twin —
documentation written in Clew, where every guide note exercises
the feature it documents. This manual goes deeper and works in any
browser; the demo vault lets you poke the features as you read about
them. They are best side by side.
Getting started
Introduction
What Clew is, the five design commitments behind it, and how it relates to Obsidian.
Getting started
Installing on macOS, Windows, and Linux; building from source; opening your first vault; a guided tour.
The vault
Vaults and files
What a vault is on disk, the file explorer, renames that rewrite links, symlinks, multiple windows, and Obsidian coexistence.
Attachments and files
Pasting and dragging images, the attachment folder, and the built-in viewers for images, PDFs, audio, and video.
Office documents
Word, Excel and PowerPoint files editing in tabs — the built-in LibreOffice engine, explicit saves, and the fallbacks.
Writing
The editor
CodeMirror 6, dialect highlighting, completions for links, tags, and citations, auto-save, undo, and conflict handling.
Live edit and the toolbar
The markup put away until the cursor needs it — maths, tables and diagrams drawn in place — and the formatting toolbar.
The jmarkdown dialect
The academic inline syntax — and the per-vault switch back to standard Markdown.
Links and embeds
Wikilinks, headings and display text, transclusion, media embeds with sizes, and what happens when files move.
Properties and metadata
Frontmatter as typed, editable rows; why Key:: value
is a description list here, not a field; how properties feed queries.
Daily notes and the diary
The calendar panel, per-day files or a single log, composed interval views, and templates.
Reading mode
How rendering works
The jmarkdown engine, live preview, scroll sync, inverse search, and checkboxes that write back.
Math and theorems
LaTeX mathematics with AMS numbering, theorem environments, and cross-references.
Citations and bibliographies
BibTeX files, \cite commands, bibliography styles, and
cite-key completion.
Diagrams
Mermaid fences built in; TikZ, MetaPost, LaTeX snippets and plain TeX typeset in the page by a bundled wasm LaTeX, with no TeX installation.
Interactive maps
Leaflet fences: markers, tracks, regions, custom tiles, and photo maps from geotagged photos.
The vault as a database
Queries
Filter notes by folder, tag, and properties; date arithmetic; grouping and sorting — and table cells you can type into.
Tasks and kanban
Every checkbox in the vault in one list; boards whose columns are a frontmatter field, where dragging a card rewrites the note.
Canvas
Workspace
Navigation, tabs and splits
The quick switcher, the command palette, tab history, pinned tabs, and split panes.
Panels
The explorer, backlinks, outgoing links, unlinked mentions, tags, outline, bookmarks, and the status bar.
Search
Full-text search across the vault and its operators.
Graph view
The whole vault — or the current note's neighbourhood — as a force-directed graph.
Sharing your work
Exporting notes
HTML, LaTeX, and PDF from the same source, through the real engine.
Publishing as a website
Compile the whole vault to a static site any web host can serve.
Extending Clew
The Note API
Notes as programs: a scripting API inside rendered notes, with shared state that travels with the vault.
Vault plugins
Extend the engine, the preview, and the app from a folder inside the vault.
Theming and CSS snippets
Dark and light themes, and restyling both the app and reading mode.