The outliner

Every page in Subspace, notes, agent definitions, meeting minutes, CRM records, is an outline: a tree of nodes (bullets), each with text as its source of truth and optionally an element (a table, code cell, terminal, custom function, or file) rendered in a node frame. The outliner is the surface you spend the most time in, and almost every other feature, links and embeds, page metadata, tables and formulas, agent runs, renders as bullets inside it.

Every line is a bullet; a bullet can carry a table, a code cell, or a file.

An empty page shows “Click to start writing…”. Click any bullet’s text to start editing it in place.

Editing

Key	Effect
Enter	New sibling below the current node, or the node’s first child if the cursor is on a parent
Tab	Indent: make the node a child of its previous sibling
Shift+Tab	Outdent: promote the node to be a sibling of its parent
Backspace on an empty node	Delete the node and move focus up
↑ / ↓	Move focus to the previous / next visible row
Escape	Commit the edit and blur
⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z	Undo / redo your own edits

Pressing Enter on a folded parent unfolds it in that window only, since folds are per-window view state (see Folds below).

Drag a bullet by its dot to reorder it among siblings or reparent it under a new parent; drop position (above, below, or onto another bullet) determines whether it becomes a sibling or a child. Node order is stored as a fractional rank key per node, so reordering one bullet never touches its siblings’ rows.

Slash commands

Type / at the start of a bullet to open a popover of registered commands (custom functions today; agents join the same menu), each with a description and a type badge. Filter by typing, then press Enter or click to insert name( and hand off to the argument UI. See Custom functions and Agents overview.

Checkboxes and todos

Start a bullet with [ ] and it renders as a checkbox with the rest of the line as its label. Click the box to tick it, which rewrites the text to [x] . A checkbox is not a special node type: it is a convention in the bullet’s own text, so ticking one is an ordinary edit that undoes, syncs, versions, and exports like any other.

The prefix has to be exact: an opening bracket, a single space or lowercase x, a closing bracket, then one space, at the very start of the bullet. These common near misses are plain text, not checkboxes:

Written	Result
[ ] Ship the release	A checkbox
[x] Ship the release	A ticked checkbox
- [ ] Ship the release	Plain text (Markdown list style is not stripped)
[X] Ship the release	Plain text (the x must be lowercase)
[ ]Ship the release	Plain text (a space after ] is required)

While you are editing a bullet you see its raw text, including the prefix; the checkbox reappears when you click away.

The Todos page

todos in the sidebar (/p/todos) collects every unticked checkbox in everything you can read. It is an ordinary page holding a saved query over the checkbox source, so you can open it, edit it, narrow it to one directory, or replace it entirely. Your version is kept across restarts.

Tick items on their own page

Rows on the Todos page are links, not checkboxes: click through to the source bullet to tick it. There is also no slash command or shortcut for inserting a checkbox, and no query builder for making your own checkbox list, so a new one means writing the query block by hand or asking an agent to write it.

Checkboxes are deliberately separate from the task queue. The queue holds work the system generated and needs a decision on; checkboxes are your own text.

Folds

Hover any row and click the chevron that appears in the left gutter (▾ expanded, ▸ collapsed) to fold or unfold its children. A collapsed parent shows a halo around its bullet so you can tell it is hiding content.

Note

Folds are per-(device, window) view state: they live in kb.view_state, keyed by (device_id, window_id, page_id), not in the document. They are never broadcast to other windows or devices and never appear in the command log, so two people (or two windows) can have completely different fold states on the same page at the same time.

Folding a bullet only hides its subtree in that view; it has no effect on search, backlinks, or what an agent’s kb.read tool sees.

Zoom and hoist

Click a bullet’s dot to zoom into it: that node becomes the view’s root, and only its subtree renders, as if it were its own page. A breadcrumb across the top (page › ancestors › node) shows your position and lets you zoom back out one level at a time.

Zoom state is URL-addressable: /p/<slug>?zoom=<nodeId>. That means a zoomed view is a shareable link and survives a reload, a refresh, or opening the same URL on another device. Zooming ignores the root node’s own fold (you always see its direct children even if it was collapsed in the outer view); descendants below the root still fold normally.

Open a bullet as a pane or tab

In the desktop app, you can work on two parts of a page (or two different pages) side by side without leaving the outliner:

• ⌥↵ (Option/Alt+Enter) with your cursor on a line opens that bullet, zoomed, in a side-by-side shell pane. ⇧-clicking the bullet dot does the same thing.
• ⌥⇧↵ promotes the bullet to a full new tab instead, the same way the terminal’s ⇱ button promotes a pane to a tab.

Both the origin outline and the new pane or tab are live, independent, routed views of the same underlying page: edits in either one sync through the shared reducer, so typing in the pane updates the bullet in the original outline immediately. The pane/tab layout persists per window in kb.view_state, so it survives a reload. Click the × on a pane to fold it back to a single view.

Without the desktop shell (on web or mobile), both shortcuts fall back to in-place zoom navigation instead of opening a second view.

Convergence and undo

Edits apply optimistically: the client runs your command through the same pure reducer the server uses, updates the screen instantly, and holds the command in a pending list until the server echoes it back over /ws. Multiple windows and multiple users converge to the same document, last-write-wins in server commit order. The header’s save indicator (data-dirty) shows whether you have un-acknowledged commands in flight.

⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z undo and redo your own commands by issuing their reducer-emitted inverses as ordinary new commands, so undo is itself just another convergent edit. See the command model for how the reducer, optimistic apply, and rebase fit together.

Design tokens

The outliner’s visual language is a small, fixed token set (from the design system’s Foundations sheet), exposed as CSS custom properties:

Token	Value	Used for
--canvas	#fafaf8	Page background
--surface	#ffffff	Cards, popovers, node frames
--hover-wash	#f4f3f0	Row hover background
--hairline	#e9e7e2	Default dividers
--chrome-hairline	#f0eee9	Chrome/toolbar dividers
--guide	#eceae5	Indent guides
--faint-ink	#9e9c94	Placeholder / de-emphasized text
--secondary-ink	#6e6c66	Secondary text
--ink	#1c1b1a	Primary text
--accent-link	#3e63c4	[[links]], the brand blue
--accent-agent	#7b5bc4	Agent affordances, the brand purple
--accent-ok	#4c8a62	Success / normal-severity states
--accent-attention	#b07c22	Important-severity states
--accent-urgent	#b4453c	Ultra-severity states
--bracket	#b9c4e0	[[ ]] bracket glyphs
--tag-ink / --tag-bg	#6b7ca8 / #eef0f6	#tag chips
--embed-rule / --embed-bg / --embed-head	#d8deef / #fafbfd / #8a94ae	((embed)) blocks
--font-ui	'Source Sans 3', -apple-system, 'Segoe UI', sans-serif	UI and node text
--font-mono	'JetBrains Mono', ui-monospace, SFMono-Regular, monospace	Code cells, terminals
--indent-step	22px	Horizontal offset per nesting level
--shadow	0 1px 3px rgba(28, 27, 26, 0.05)	Elevated surfaces

Pages & directoriesHow pages, directories, slugs, and the sidebar tree organize outlines.

Links, tags & embeds[[links]], #tags, ((embeds)), labels, and backlinks inside node text.

Page metadataThe hidden JSON panel (⌘⇧M) behind every page.

Search⌘K hybrid search over pages, nodes, files, and mail.