Cellara

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Getting started

Cellara does not work like a folder-and-document app, and the first ten minutes go much better if you know that up front. This page is the short version.

Make a cell

Everything starts with a cell. Give it a name and a body and you have a note. Pick a different type and the same thing becomes a todo, a list, an event, a person or a project. You are not choosing a container that you will be stuck with — a cell's type affects how it renders and which operations make sense, not what it is allowed to connect to.

Link it to something

A lone cell is not much use. Link it to another one and the two now show each other: open either and the other is right there. You never write the reverse link, because there is only one link and you are seeing it from the other end.

Link types carry meaning. Something can be a part of a project, an example of an idea, a question that another cell answers, or just related. Pick the one that describes the relationship and the graph starts telling you things later that you did not explicitly write down.

Stop filing things

The instinct from other tools is to build a folder tree first and then put things in it. Resist it. Make the thing, link it to whatever it obviously belongs with, and move on. Structure accumulates from use. If a cluster later deserves a name, make a cell for that name and link the cluster to it — that is what a project or a library is here.

Move by traversing

You look at one cell at a time, with its neighbours around it. Clicking a neighbour re-aims your view rather than loading a page, so wandering the graph is fast and reversible. This is the main way to get around; searching is the fallback, not the default.

Find things again

Search runs locally over your whole graph, so it is instant. There is also a semantic search that finds cells by meaning rather than exact words, which is useful when you remember what something was about but not what you called it.

Nothing is really deleted

Deleting buries a cell rather than destroying it, so a mistaken delete is recoverable. If you genuinely need something gone for good, ask us and we will destroy it.

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