Mac handbook

Boards are the foundational document type in Muse. They have an open canvas which you can write and place cards on. Boards are made to be nested within each other, similar to the folders on your Mac.

Boards are anchored to the upper-left, and expand to the lower-right as you add content. Board size is limited by which membership plan you are on. So if you run out of space, you might want to upgrade your account.

The outermost board is called your home board. It’s the starting place for everything else. Each time you want to think about something new, add a new blank board card to your home board, open it, and begin your work. You can also use your home board to organize work into different areas, projects, or sections.

Any content you add to a board will be added as a card. Cards can be moved, resized, duplicated, and deleted as your Muse board evolves.

Muse integrates block-based text editing (like you’d find in Notion or Craft) into the open canvas of your boards.

Double-tap anywhere on the board canvas to add a text block. Each paragraph becomes its own block, forming a group with each subsequent block, in which they can be edited and reordered.

Text blocks aren’t restricted to linearity. You can move text groups anywhere on the canvas, and can even drag out individual blocks to continue your train of thought elsewhere.

Stash cards onto the inbox stack on the left anytime. The inbox travels with you, like a visual copy-paste buffer. And it’s where new cards you add from outside of Muse appear, ready to be placed where you want them.

Excerpts are an important part of working with PDFs and images in Muse. Excerpt selected content to turn it into its own card, then place it on a board in-between other cards and text. And with Source Peek, you can always go back to the source document of an excerpt.

Linked cards are copies of a card which point to the same content. Any changes you make to the content of the card will be represented in all its linked cards. You can add linked cards for boards, images, videos, PDFs, and note cards.

You can use linked cards to reference boards which are related to your current work, but outside of its spatial path. Or use them to create shortcuts to often-used but deeply-nested boards, e.g. from your home board.

Once you’ve developed an idea in Muse, eventually it will be time to move it to a production app (like Notion, Keynote, or Photoshop). Muse makes it easy to take any of your content and move it to another app, or share it with a colleague, for the next stage of your work.

While Muse stores all your content locally on-device, it also automatically uploads a copy to our servers to sync across your devices. This custom local-first technology combines the reliability and speed of native apps with the convenience of cloud-based apps.

All edits are immediately synced between your devices. When you are offline, everything will continue to work as normal without spinners or loading screens. Any further local edits will simply be synced as soon as you come back online.

Muse indicates sync status in the lower right corner of the window:

• A gray dot means that Muse is connected and all edits are synced.
• A flashing black dot means that Muse is connected and currently syncing edits.
• A black-outlined circle means that Muse is offline, with queued local edits waiting to sync when you come back online.
• A gray-outlined circle means that Muse is offline, but you haven’t made any edits that would need to be synced.