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ManualGetting started01

Opening it for the first time

From installing it to writing your first paragraph is three things. This page breaks each one into steps, with nothing skipped in between.

Install it

Folding Mirror is a macOS app that lives on your own machine, and it needs macOS 12 or later. There are separate builds for Apple silicon and Intel — if you aren't sure which you have, click the Apple menu → About This Mac and read the “Chip” line.

The installer isn't out yet

The macOS build is in its last round of checks before release. Until it goes up, you can write a couple of lines on the sheet on the front page — that is the app's own editor moved onto a web page, and it feels the same. The rest of the manual is about the installed app; it reads fine in advance.

There is no sign-up step

Folding Mirror has no account system: install it and write. No registration, no login, no online check. Which also means there is no “sync after signing in” — your documents stay on your own disk from beginning to end.

Point it at a folder

A library in Folding Mirror is, plainly, an ordinary folder on your disk. Nothing is imported, moved or indexed into a database: whichever folder you point it at is the folder whose .md files it shows. Rename, move or delete something in Finder and Folding Mirror follows. The reverse holds too — the day you stop using it, every file is still there, and there is no “export” step.

On first launch it opens a default library of its own with two or three sample documents, so there is something to click. Switch it to your own folder right away — Documents/Notes, say, or whatever notes directory you already keep.

  1. Look at the bottom row of the sidebar

    There is a folder icon, the name of the current library, and a pair of arrows on the right. It tells you which library you are in, and it is the way to switch.

  2. Click it and choose “Open Other Library…”

    The system folder picker opens.

  3. Select the folder you want and confirm

    The sidebar becomes that folder's contents at once. Folding Mirror puts nothing inside it — it simply starts showing the .md files already there.

Libraries you've used are remembered: the recent ones are listed in that same menu, one click away. One library for work and another for writing is a comfortable way to work — switching clears the open tabs, and Folding Mirror opens a document for you in the new library.

Four areas of the window

The window has only four areas. Learn them and the rest of this manual gets much easier.

① Left: the sidebar

Search at the top, the document tree in the middle, and at the bottom the library switcher and the settings button (the gear). In the tree, right-click is the thing to know: right-click empty space to create a note, folder, drawing or diagram; right-click a file to rename it, duplicate it, copy its path, reveal it in Finder or delete it. If it's in your way, collapse it with ⇧⌘L.

② Top: the toolbar

The left half holds the tabs and the breadcrumb (which document you're in); the right half is four groups, left to right:

  • Live / split: a sliding switch between “just the page” and “source left, page right”.
  • Insert drawing / insert diagram: put a sketch canvas or a Mermaid diagram in the current document.
  • Outline / mentions: the side panel next to the editor; the two share one place.
  • ⋯ options and the quill: the first holds version history and the export commands, the second is the AI assistant (⇧⌘A).

③ Middle: the paper

This is where you write. It is already the finished look — there is no second preview window to open.

④ Bottom: the status bar

On the left is the save state (saved / unsaved / saving); on the right are words, characters and roughly how many minutes it reads. Select a passage and it counts only that passage. The button at the far left is writing modes: focus mode (F8) dims everything but the current paragraph, and typewriter mode (F9) keeps the line you are writing in the middle of the screen.

Write your first document

  1. Press ⌘N for a new one

    Or right-click in the sidebar → “New Note”. It lands in whichever folder is selected.

  2. Put a title on the first line

    Just type. To make it a big heading press ⌘1 — the line grows at once and a faint # appears in front of it. That is what Folding Mirror looks like: the marks are always in the file, they just don't interrupt you.

  3. New line, keep writing

    Bold is ⌘B, a list is ⌥⌘U. If you'd rather remember nothing, type “/” on an empty line and the menu lists what you can insert; or select some text and right-click, where the menu has “Turn into” and “Insert”.

  4. Give it a name

    Right-click the file in the sidebar → “Rename”. The file name is the document name — there is no separate “document title” living apart from it.

You don't have to learn Markdown first

What Folding Mirror writes really is a Markdown file, but you can go on not knowing that. Every format has three routes — a shortcut, the “/” menu, and the right-click menu — and any of them will do. The writing page covers all three.

Saving takes care of itself

Pause for half a second and it has already written to disk. The mark on the left of the status bar goes from “unsaved” back to “saved”. It also flushes whatever is pending before you switch tabs, close the window or quit.

⌘S still works, of course, and saves immediately — press it out of habit if you like, it does nothing extra. When you actually need “the version from a few hours ago”, see version history: checkpoints have been recorded in the background all along.

Where to go next