Bike Guide

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Getting Started ​

Bike's goal is to give you a better place to write, think, and organize your ideas. The core commands below are all you need. Bike has many other features, but you can pick those up later, or never. See Use What You Need.

Core Commands ​

To create a row:

  • Press the Return key to create a row

To change a row's indentation level:

  • Press the Tab key to indent a row
  • Press Shift-Tab key to unindent a row

To move rows in the hierarchy:

  • Drag and drop rows by the row's triangle handle
  • Press Control-Command-Arrow to move a row with children
  • Press Control-Option-Arrow to move a row without children (like in a text editor)

To show and hide detail in your outline:

  • Click a row's triangle handle to collapse the row (Command-9)
  • Click that same handle to expand the row (Command-0)

To focus into a specific part of your outline:

  • Click the focus button to the right of a row's text (Option-Command-Right)
  • Click it again to unfocus an already focused row (Option-Command-Left)

To filter your outline to show only matching rows:

  • Show and focus the filter bar (Command-Shift-F)
  • Type a query to show matching rows

To format text in your outline:

  • Show the formatting popover with Command-E
  • Select formatting options from the popover with your mouse or with the single letter keyboard shortcuts displayed on the panel.

To format rows in your outline:

  • In an empty row, type # followed by a space to make it a heading
  • In an empty row, type [] followed by a space to make it a task
  • More row types are there when you need them. See Row Formatting

That's it, just a few commands and you've got a text editor with super powers.

Use What You Need ​

The rest of this guide is optional.

Everything else is a secondary feature, built for a particular way of working, and designed to stay invisible until you need it.

Reaching for all of Bike's features at once works against the goal. Bike gets complex, and it stops being small enough to fully understand. I don't expect any one person to use all of it.

My suggestion: learn the commands above and do real work with them. Scan the rest of the guide to see what's possible, and then come back for the details when you feel like a feature could help your workflow.

Enjoy!

See also ​