Properties

Properties are the typed, inspector view of frontmatter. They turn the YAML at the top of a page into a clean panel with proper input controls — checkboxes, date pickers, tag inputs, dropdowns — so you can edit metadata without remembering YAML syntax.

The Properties panel is a macOS app feature. The web app shows the underlying YAML in the editor. See platform availability at the bottom of this page.

What you see in the macOS app

The Properties panel sits at the top of every page, between the title and the body. Each property is a row with the field name on the left and a type-aware input on the right. Click any value to edit it. Add new properties with a single click.

Canonical fields appear first in a fixed order:

• title
• area
• type
• created
• updated
• confidence
• tags

After those, custom properties appear alphabetically.

Property types

MindWiki auto-detects the right input control for each property based on its value.

Detection is based on the value's shape: ISO dates become date pickers, [[...]] becomes a wikilink, http(s)://... becomes a URL, arrays become lists, booleans become checkboxes, numbers become numeric inputs. Anything else is text.

Built-in suggestions

When you add a new property, MindWiki suggests common ones first. The defaults are:

• pinned (checkbox) — adds the page to favorites
• tags (list)
• confidence (text — typically one of low / medium / high)
• status (text — your own values)
• source (url)
• owner (text)

You can ignore the suggestions and type any property name you want. There's no schema to fight with.

Special properties

A few canonical properties have special UI treatment in the macOS app:

• `area` — dropdown of your top-level vault folders, plus any values you've used before for this property in any page.
• `type` — dropdown of values you've used before across the vault.
• `confidence` — fixed options: low, medium, high.
• `pinned` — pin/unpin button, kept in sync with the favorites list in the sidebar.
• `tags` — list editor with autocomplete from every tag value used elsewhere in your vault.

Filtering and views

In the macOS app, click any property value to filter the file tree by that value. For example, clicking area: research shows only pages where area equals research. Clicking it again clears the filter.

In the web app, the Table view (selectable from the view picker or via the command palette) lets you sort and group by frontmatter columns. See Search & Views.

Adding and removing properties

In the macOS app:

• Add — click the + at the bottom of the Properties panel, type a name, hit Enter. The new property gets a default type input.
• Remove — hover the property row and click the trash icon.
• Rename — click the property name itself, type the new name. Be careful: if you rename a property that exists on many pages, only this page is updated unless you do it everywhere manually.
• Change type — there's no explicit type change. Update the value to match the new shape (e.g. type 2026-05-09 to convert text into a date) and the input control updates.

Best uses

Properties pay for themselves when you use them consistently. A few patterns:

• Project tracking. Add status, priority, and deadline to project pages. Filter by status: in-progress for a working list.
• Source library. Add source: <url>, author, and published: <date> to source pages. Sort by published date in the Table view.
• Decision log. Add decided: <date>, confidence, and outcome to decision pages. Review old decisions by date.
• People. Add email, company, last-contacted to people pages. Find anyone you haven't talked to recently.

Pick fields you'll actually use. Adding fields you never reference is busywork — every property should buy you something.

Platform availability

Where to go next

• Frontmatter & Metadata — the underlying YAML
• Search & Views — filtering and grouping by properties
• The Editor — the editor that surrounds the Properties panel