Reference
The words Piper uses
Piper names its own parts deliberately. This is what each name means, in the order you are likely to meet them.
Your vault
- Vault
- One self-contained library: its sources, notes, courses, highlights, settings, and the folder on disk that holds them. You can keep more than one and switch between them.
- Source
- Anything you read that Piper holds for you — an imported book, a saved article, or a placeholder for something physical. Sources are first-class, not attachments to a note.
- Stub Source
- A source with no content yet: a paper book, a course you have not started, a title you want to reference before importing it. Linkable immediately, fillable in place later without losing its links.
- Course
- An ordered set of sources you assemble yourself, with its own metadata and notes. The only container Piper builds for you.
- Module
- One ordered item inside a course, backed by a source.
- Read Later
- Where newly saved sources land — imported, but not yet something you are actively reading.
- Archive
- Where finished sources go. Removed from your active shelves, but content, highlights, notes, and metadata all stay intact.
Reading
- Reader
- The surface you read a source in, rendered from Piper's own clean copy of the text rather than the original page's layout.
- Annotation
- A highlight or underline anchored to an exact passage, in a colour and mark type you choose, optionally carrying a comment.
- Companion
- The reader's side panel: table of contents, and search within the current source.
Writing
- Page
- A note. An ordered set of blocks plus its own metadata — the thing you write in the notebook.
- Block
- One authored unit of a page — a paragraph, heading, list item, image — with a stable identity of its own. Indentation is data, not whitespace.
- Margin Comment
- A comment of your own anchored to a block and shown in the margin, rather than interrupting the text.
- Template
- A reusable block layout, authored in the full editor and inserted into any note through the Insert Picker.
- Insert Picker
- The command palette for inserting block-shaped content at your cursor. Opens with ⌘. and is how templates get into a note.
- Phrasebook
- Built-in text replacements — smart quotes, arrows, dashes, ellipses — plus any custom abbreviations you define.
- Vault words
- Your custom dictionary. Words you have told Piper are correct, remembered per vault.
Connections
- Wikilink
- An inline reference from your prose to another thing in the vault, written with [[ or @. Stored as identity rather than text, so renaming the target never rewrites what you wrote.
- Unfilled Link
- A wikilink pointing at something that does not exist yet. A real, searchable connection you can resolve later by making a note, linking an existing item, or adding a source.
- Alias
- An alternate name for a source, note, or course, so links find it under every name you actually use.
- Linked Items
- The direct neighbours of whatever you are focused on — one step out.
- Linked References
- Everything pointing at the thing you are looking at.
- Connections
- The sidebar and graph where links live: linked items, linked references, and a visual map of the whole vault with depth, direction, gravity, and spacing controls.
- Metadata Sidebar
- Where aliases, tags, authors, covers, and custom fields are edited — kept out of the body of your notes.
Appearance
- Theme Preset
- A named palette for one mode — shell colour, accent, accessory colours, ink, and per-surface fonts. Light and dark keep separate preset libraries, because they are separate designs rather than one inverted.
- Accessory Colours
- Five shared palette slots used for callouts, tags, and editorial accents, editable per preset.