Tips and tricks
Small things people have found that make Vellum nicer to use. Written by the people who use it.
Each tip is a heading. The list on the right jumps to any tip, and the search box at the top finds a word inside one.
Have a tip? Add it at the bottom of this page: a heading, a few lines, and your name under it. Put your name on the authors line at the top of the page too, so you show up in the byline. Never edited a page here before? The Contribute page walks you through it, click by click, no experience needed.
Send a note to any page with Add to
Cmd-K on any bullet, then Add to, and pick a note. The bullet stays where you wrote it, and it also shows up on the page you picked. Handy for a running log on a project without leaving today's note.
More, with pictures, in Where a note lives.
Shared by Grace.
Increment selection with consecutive cmd-A
In the outliner, consecutive presses of cmd-A (macOS) or ctrl-A (Windows and Linux) will incrementally increase the selection: first just the current node’s immediate content is selected, then its descendants, then its parent and siblings, then its grandparent and siblings of its parent, etc.
Shared by Darren.
Vellum Documents: Journaling with Structure
Vellum documents let you write in continuous prose, a journal entry, a reflection, a brain dump, while still getting the structure benefits of Vellum's tagging and querying system, paragraph by paragraph. Most note-taking tools force a choice between free writing (journals, notebooks) and structured capture (tagged nodes, outlines). Vellum documents remove that trade-off.
What's actually happening cognitively
Prose writing is generative and associative. You’re not retrieving known facts, you're letting connections surface that weren't fully formed before you started typing. Writing to think: the writing process does cognitive work your head alone can't, because articulation forces vague impressions into sequence and language.
Tagging is a completely different operation. It’s evaluative and discrete. You step back from the flow and ask 'does this matter, and as what?’ It’s classifying.
Prose writing and tagging aren’t two useful features bolted together, but two different modes of thought.
Documents in Vellum collapse that distance. The tag lives right inside the flow-state output, so moving from generating to judging is instant and not a context switch. Tagging is retroactive — you're not deciding in advance what will matter, you're recognizing it after it surfaces, which is how insight actually happens.
The result
Clarity of thought and action-orientation stay coupled, instead of drifting apart the way they do when reflection and ‘task’ capture live in separate tools.
How it works:
To create a document, start a note anywhere in your outline, say on today's daily note. Then Cmd-K (Ctrl-K on Windows and Linux), choose Convert to document, and Cmd-Enter (Ctrl-Enter) to step into it. Write normally.
As you write (or on a re-read pass), tag individual paragraphs with # where something is worth surfacing later. An insight, a decision, an open question, a task. Each tagged paragraph becomes independently queryable.
Later, pull up every paragraph you tagged, across all your documents, regardless of which entry it came from.
Example use case
You journal each morning and/or each evening. Some entries mention a recurring frustration with a project, others contain a new idea or insight worth coming back to. Tag the frustration paragraphs #friction and the idea paragraphs #idea, a thing to do as #task etc. When you sit down to work, query #friction to see the pattern, or #idea to review everything you've marked.
Shared by Joris Tillmans.
Your tip here
A heading, a few lines, and a picture if it helps. Say which version of Vellum you were on if it matters.
Shared by (your name).