Files and Folders

Typora edits plain Markdown files on disk. There is no database or import step: open a file, or open a folder and work with everything in it.

Opening files

• File ▸ Open…, Open Recent, and Reopen Closed File.
• Open Quickly (⌘ShiftO on macOS, Ctrl+P elsewhere) — find a file by name.
• Drag a file onto the titlebar to open it in a new tab — see Dragging files.
• From a terminal: typora notes.md — see Command Line.
• File ▸ Reopen with Encoding reopens a file in another text encoding, for files that show garbled characters. Auto detects it; the list covers Unicode, Western, Cyrillic, Central European, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai encodings. If you have unsaved changes, Typora asks first.

Settings ▸ General ▸ Open Files In decides whether files open in the current window, a new window, or a new tab.

The sidebar

Open a folder with File ▸ Open Folder… (or the button in the empty sidebar) and it becomes the window's workspace, shown as a file tree. Toggle the sidebar with Mod+Shift+L.

• The folder name at the top is a menu: open or close a folder, new file or folder, search, recent folders (with Pin Folder), and Open in another app — Finder or Explorer, Terminal, VS Code and others.
• Right-click a file or folder: Open, Open in (current tab, new tab, new window), New File, New Folder, New from Template, Rename, Move To…, Move to Trash, Copy Path, Copy Relative Path, Reveal in Finder / Explorer.
• Hover a file to see a preview.
• Sort by name (natural or alphabetical), created or modified date, ascending or descending.
• Keyboard: the tree can be navigated with the arrow keys.

To keep folders at hand, pin them; see Favorite folders. A folder synced by iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive shows that service in the folder menu.

What the tree shows is set in Settings ▸ Files ▸ File Tree: Supported Files (Markdown and plain text, the default), All Files, or Custom glob patterns. Show Hidden Folders / Files is off by default.

Searching

• Find and Replace in the current document: Mod+F. See Search.
• Search across the workspace (Mod+Shift+F) opens search in the sidebar, with Case Sensitive, Whole Word and Regular Expression options.

Saving

Setting (Settings ▸ Files)	Default
Auto Save	On for macOS, off on Windows and Linux
Save on Switch — save when switching to another file	Off
Default File Type for new documents	.md
Default File Name — what an untitled document is called until saved	Document title, then template file name
On Launch — new file, or restore the last folders / files and folders	Open new file
Record Recent Files	On

An untitled document's tab, and the name the Save panel proposes, come from Default File Name. The document title is its YAML title, else its first heading, else its first line; the template file name is the filename of the template it was created from. When neither applies, the document is Untitled — on macOS with Apple Intelligence, the Save panel may then offer the system's own suggestion.

Recover Unsaved Drafts in Settings ▸ Files ▸ Saving opens a folder holding everything you closed with Don't Save. Each draft is kept for 30 days, named with the time it was closed.

On macOS, the File menu also has Duplicate, Rename…, Revert To ▸ Last Saved and Browse All Versions…, and Reload from Disk to pick up a change made elsewhere.

Typora saves your text exactly as you wrote it. The only changes on save are the ones you choose in Settings ▸ Control ▸ Saving: Default Line Ending (keep the file's own, LF or CRLF) and Insert Final Newline.

Dragging files

Files dragged from Finder / Explorer and files dragged from the sidebar's file tree behave the same. Where you drop decides what happens; a hint beside the pointer says which:

• On the file tree: into the folder under the pointer (a file stands for its folder; blank space for the workspace folder). A file already in the workspace is moved, one from elsewhere is copied — hold ⌥ / Alt to copy anyway. Rest on a collapsed folder to open it. A move or copy can be undone from the tree's context menu.
• On the titlebar: opens it in a new tab (a folder opens in the sidebar). Over the tabs, a line marks where the new tab goes. A file that is already open just switches to its tab.
• At a split view boundary: opens it as a new column right there, between the two columns or at either end. Without a split view, drop at the document's left or right edge to split it.
• On the document: inserts it — an image or media, or a link (Settings ▸ Control ▸ When Dropping Files can open or import folders, Markdown files and other documents instead). Rest the pointer for a moment and a ring of choices opens, the setting's choice already selected; release over another choice to pick it. In Source Code mode the same Markdown is inserted as text; in a code block, math or inline code, just the file's path.
• On the Attachment tab of the detail panel: copies it to the folder images are copied to (./assets unless Settings ▸ Image or the document's typora-copy-images-to says otherwise; a TextBundle's own assets) and links it at the cursor — at the end of the document when there is no cursor. A file already in that folder is linked without copying. The detail panel's other tabs take no files.
• On an empty sidebar (no folder open): a folder opens there; a file opens the folder it is in, with the file selected.
• Out of the window: a file dragged from the tree past the window's edge becomes an ordinary file drag (macOS and Linux), which Finder and other apps — or another Typora window — take as a copy.

Links, text and web images dragged in from a browser or another app are pasted where you drop them.

In a split view, drag a column by the bar naming its file: to another place in the row to reorder the columns (resting near either end of a row too wide for the window scrolls it), or onto the titlebar to give the column a tab of its own. A split view left with one column is an ordinary tab again. Esc cancels the drag.

Images

See Images for inserting, copying, uploading and resizing images.

The detail panel

The detail panel on the right shows information about the current document, including its version history.