Finding your way around

The app's window has three parts: the sidebar on the left with your documents, a bar along the top with a few buttons, and the page. This is a tour of the first two. Writing and editing covers the page.

The sidebar shows the name of your vault (the folder you opened) and the documents in it. Move the pointer over the name to see where the folder is on your computer. Folders come first, sorted by name, each with a count of the documents inside, then your documents sorted by title.

Click a document to read it. The folders around it open by themselves, and the app remembers which folders you left open.

A row shows a document's title. Each document is also a file in your vault's folder, and the file has a name of its own, the one you'd see in Finder or File Explorer. When the two differ, the file's name follows the title in small grey letters: a document titled "Budget plan" kept in a file called plan.md reads Budget plan plan.md (.md is the ending every document's file has). Capitals, hyphens and punctuation don't count as a difference, so budget-plan.md shows the title alone.

Folders are pages too

A folder is a page as well, the way a page with pages inside it is in Notion. Click a folder's name and its page opens on the right while the folder opens in the sidebar. Click the name again and the folder closes; the small arrow in front of the name does the same without changing the page.

A folder nobody has written a page for opens blank and says so. Click the page and start writing, and the page is kept from then on. Until you write something nothing is saved, so opening folders to look around changes nothing.

The vault is a folder like any other, so its name at the top of the sidebar is a page as well. Click the name and the vault's own page opens, blank until you write on it. Once there's something on it, it's the page you land on when you open the vault. It goes by the vault's name until you give it a heading of its own.

New, rename, duplicate and delete

Move the pointer over a folder or a document and a button with three dots shows at the end of its row. The vault's name has one too, which shows while the pointer is anywhere over the sidebar.

A folder's menu has New document and New folder, which make one inside it, Rename folder, Duplicate folder, Delete page (which removes the folder's own page and keeps the folder) and Delete folder.
A document's menu has Rename, Rename file, Duplicate and Delete. Duplicate makes a copy next to the document, with "(Copy)" added to its name and its title, and opens it.
The vault name's menu has New document and New folder for the top level, Delete page once the vault's own page has been written, and Vault settings (Settings).
All three have Show in Finder (Show in File Explorer on Windows), which opens your computer's file manager with the file or folder selected.

A new document or folder starts as a box in the sidebar to type its name into. Press Enter or click away to create it, or Esc to drop it. If a name can't be used, because it's taken for instance, the reason is written under the box. A new document opens straight away with its name as its heading.

Renaming uses the same box, in place of the row. Rename changes a document's title, the name in the sidebar and at the top of the page. A file that was named after the old title is renamed to match, so the document keeps one name, and a file called something else keeps its name. Rename file changes the file's name and nothing else; the .md ending shows greyed after what you type, because it isn't for changing. A document whose file is called something other than its title also has Name file after title, which offers a file name made from the title. Links to the document follow a renamed file the way they follow a moved one, as the next part says.

Deleting asks first. It names the document or folder and says how many documents go with it, then removes it from your computer for good. There's no bin, and in a shared folder the deletion reaches everyone else like any other change. If you delete the document you're reading, the vault's own page opens instead, or your first document when that page is still blank. Delete page on a folder, or on the vault's name, removes what was written there and leaves the folder, with a blank page again.

Moving, and what happens to links

Drag a document or a folder onto a folder to move it there, or onto the empty part of the sidebar to bring it to the top level. Links follow it. Every link to it from another document is rewritten to reach it in its new place, and when a folder moves that goes for every document inside it. Only where the link leads changes: its words stay as you wrote them. Links and pictures in the document that moved go on working too.

Giving a file a new name counts as a move, whether that's Rename file or a file following its document's new title. All of this happens when the move is made in Plicine. Move a file in Finder or File Explorer instead and the links to it stop working until they're changed.

Drag the sidebar's right-hand edge to make it wider or narrower. A double-click on the edge puts it back. The app remembers the width for each vault.

Finding words in the document you're reading

Cmd+F (Ctrl+F on Windows) opens a small bar over the top right of the page. Type into it and every match in the document is tinted, with the one you're on tinted harder. Enter moves to the next match and Shift+Enter to the one before, and the bar counts them for you ("3 of 12"). Esc closes it. If you had some text selected when you pressed the shortcut, the bar opens looking for that.

It searches the document as you see it, including what blocks draw, and it looks for the words in the order you typed them: "page break" finds that phrase, not the two words apart. Capitals don't matter.

When one document isn't enough, press Cmd+F again, or click All documents in the bar, and what you typed moves to the sidebar's search.

Searching every document

Above the list of documents is a search box. Shift+Cmd+F (Ctrl+Shift+F on Windows) puts the cursor in it from anywhere. Type two letters or more and the results replace the list; clear the box or press Esc and the list comes back.

Search covers everything in a document: its title, its headings, its text, the blocks in it and what's written inside them. Every word you type has to appear somewhere in the document. Capitals don't matter and parts of words count, so "rate" finds "rates". Each result shows the document's title, a line of the text around the match and where in the document it was found. Documents whose title or headings match come first.

Click a result, or use the arrow keys and Enter, and the document opens at the match, which is tinted for a moment so your eye lands on it.

Search keeps up by itself as documents change, including changes that arrive from someone else through a shared folder.

Linked from

At the foot of a document is Linked from: every other document that links to the one you're reading. Click one to open it at the line the link is on. A document nothing links to shows no list at all.

The list belongs to the app, not to the document, so it never appears in a PDF.

The bar along the top

Document and Source switch between the page as you read it and the text file behind it. You never need Source; it's there for people who like to see the text. Editing the source covers it.
Infinite and Paginated switch between one continuous page and the document laid out in pages, exactly as its PDF will be. Both are the same document and you can write in either. Plicine remembers the choice for that document, for everyone who shares the folder.
The theme list lets you try the document in another look. It's only a preview: nothing is saved, and the document goes back to its own theme when you reopen it. A vault's usual theme is set in Settings.
Export PDF saves the document as a PDF in your Downloads folder and opens it. Exporting PDFs has the rest.

When Plicine has something to warn you about, a block it can't find for example, a small strip above the page shows a count. Click it to read the warnings.

Narrow windows

In a narrow window the sidebar folds away to give the page its room. The button at the left of the top bar brings it back over the page, and opening a document or pressing Esc closes it again. When the top bar runs out of room, the theme list and Export PDF move into a menu behind a three-dots button at its right-hand end.

For technical readers: Documents says where a document's title is written in its file and how a file's name follows a new title, and, under Links between documents, which links a move rewrites and what it leaves exactly as written.