Burst Notes is a little utility that lives in your Mac’s menu bar under its icon.

It is designed to be activated with a global keyboard shortcut. By default, this is set to Command-Shift-B, so go ahead:

• hold down the Command key
• hold down the Shift key
• tap the B key

Burst Notes’ command window appears in the middle of your main screen, showing a searchable list of commands and headers from whichever Markdown file you have selected during onboarding.

You can use the up arrow and down arrow cursor keys to navigate through the list, or start typing the name of the command or the header you want. Say you want the Today header:

• start typing Today until it is the highlighted item in the list
• press the Return key

The menu will “drill down” into the item and show you other sub-headers (if there are any) and command.

• select Append Bullet Point with the cursor keys or start typing
• press the Return key
• a new item with a text field preselected appears
• type Don't forget to bring the bin out!
• press Return

An editor showing the complete Markdown will open, with the cursor at the end of your new bullet point Don't forget to bring the bin out!.

In the editor, you can edit the text document normally. Note that it is all plain text, but the headers are created by adding # or ## in front of them. If you haven’t done so check out the Markdown Quick Start Page to find out how to use this powerful, yet simple and compatible, text format to do create styled text, with hyperlinks, bullet, numbered lists, headers, todos, and much more.

Your command window always pops up showing the headers in the current file, but you use the left arrow cursor key to move up to the top level, where you can see all the open files. You can have as many files open at the same time as you want. Burst Notes deals gracefully with multiple files with the same name (they obviously need to be in different folders), and you can switch between files using the Switch to commands.

Commands

Other than headers, the main window also gives you access to Commands that allow you to do a number of things:

• append bullets, todo list items, quotes, text, codeblocks, etc.
• create, open, remove and switch between markdown files
• open the current markdown document in the built-in or external editors
• change mode
• access settings
  • change the global hot key
  • access software update settings
• miscellaneous other items, like accessing help, joining the mailing list,

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