Your First Note

Your first note, start to finish

Ten minutes, and it touches most of what makes this product different from Notepad.

1. Open it and type something

Launch bachelorpad (or bpad). You get an empty Untitled document.

Type a few paragraphs with a heading at the top:

# Quarterly review notes

Three things came up that need a decision before the end of the month.

## Pricing
...

The status bar already shows the format it has recognised, the encoding, the line ending, and that the document has never been saved.

2. Save it somewhere ordinary

Ctrl+S, and put it in your Documents folder as notes.md.

The status bar now shows the full path and the time it was written to disk. Not when you last typed -- when it last actually reached the disk, which is the fact you want when you are wondering whether you have lost anything.

3. Let it name the file

Note > Semantic Rename...

It proposes something like Quarterly_Review_Notes_10SEP2026.md, having taken the title from your heading and the date from today. You see the proposal before anything happens, and nothing is renamed until you approve it.

That shape -- Title_DDMMMYYYY.ext -- means a folder of these sorts chronologically and reads as prose, which is the whole idea.

4. Ask what it knows

Note > Keywords shows the terms this document is indexed under. Note > Summary shows a short summary drawn from the text. Note > Outline shows your headings as a structure. Note > Document Statistics counts words, lines and characters.

None of this went anywhere. It is computed on your machine, from the document in front of you.

5. Write a second note, then connect them

Make another note on a related subject and save it. Now, from either one:

Organize > Related Notes.

A panel opens listing documents that share tags with this one, most related first. Click a row and it opens, scrolled to the relevant place.

With two notes this is not impressive. With two hundred it is the reason this product exists.

6. See the shape of the whole collection

Research > Research Report.

It reads the index and writes you a report: dominant themes, documents that are under-connected to everything else, what the store holds.

Read the end of it. It tells you what it did not look at -- how many documents it scanned, how many it capped each section at. A report about "your notes" that is quietly about some of them is a report you cannot use, so this one says which.

7. Decide what it is allowed to remember

Privacy.

Everything in steps 4 to 6 depends on the index, and whether the index records anything is your choice, per document. The other axis is whether a recovery journal is written -- the thing that saves your work when the power goes out, by writing your text to disk before you asked it to.

Both trades are real and neither has a free option. Privacy lays them out in a table.

What next

• Making it your default editor
• Searching across a folder
• The note layer in full

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