silverbullet/website/Getting Started.md

Getting started

The best way to get a good feel for what SilverBullet is to immediately start playing with it. Here are some things for you to try:

• Click on the page picker (book icon) icon at the top right, or hit Cmd-k (Mac) or Ctrl-k (Linux and Windows) to open the page switcher.
  • Type the name of a non-existent page to create it.
  • You can create pages in folders (if you’re into that type of thing) simply by putting slashes (/) in the name (even on Windows), e.g. My Folder/My Page. Don’t worry about that folder existing, we’ll automatically create it if it doesn’t.
• Click on the terminal icon (top right), hit Cmd-/ (Mac) or Ctrl-/ (Linux and Windows), or tap the screen with 3 fingers at the same time (on mobile) to open the command palette. The {[Stats: Show]} one is a safe one to try.
• Select some text and hit Alt-m to ==highlight== it, or Cmd-b (Mac) or Ctrl-b (Windows/Linux) to make it bold, or Cmd-i (Mac) or Ctrl-i (Windows/Linux) to make it italic.
• Click a link somewhere on this page to navigate there. When you link to a new page it will initially show up in red (to indicate it does not yet exist), but once you click it — you will create the page automatically (only for real when you actually enter some text).
• Start typing [[ somewhere to insert your own page link (with completion).
• Tap this box 👈 to mark this task as done.
• Start typing :party to trigger the emoji picker 🎉
• Type / somewhere in the text to invoke a slash command.
• Hit Cmd-p (Mac) or Ctrl-p (Windows, Linux) to show a preview for the current page on the side.
• If this is matching your personality type, you can click this button {[Editor: Toggle Vim Mode]} to toggle Vim mode. If you cannot figure out how to exit it, just click that button again. Phew!

Notice that as you move your cursor around on this page and you get close to or “inside” marked up text, you will get to see the underlying Markdown code. This experience is what we refer to as “live preview” — generally your text looks clean, but you still can see what’s under the covers and edit it directly, as opposed to WYSIWYG that some other applications use. To move your cursor somewhere using your mouse without navigating or activating (e.g. a wiki, regular link, or a button) hold Alt when you click. Holding Cmd or Ctrl when clicking a link will open it in a new tab or window.

Hadn’t we mentioned Markdown yet? Yeah, that’s the markup language you’ll use to add that dash of markup to your documents. It’s pretty simple to learn if you don’t know it already.

You will notice this whole page section is wrapped in a strange type of block. This is a SilverBullet specific feature called a Live Templates, which embeds another (sometime external) page into the existing one. If you hover over this section, you’ll notice a small refresh and edit button. Hit that edit button to reveal the underlying source that renders this content.

SilverBullet has even more tricks up its sleeve. Consider Live Queries which allow you to query Objects in your space easily.

Don’t believe me? Check this out, here’s a list of (max 10) pages in your space ordered by name, it updates (somewhat) dynamically 🤯. Create some new pages and come back here to see that it works:

page select name order by name limit 10 

What next?

If you are a visual learner, you may enjoy this introduction video on Youtube.

Beyond that, you can find more information about SilverBullet on its official website. You have two ways to access it:

1. Through its regular website link
2. Directly without leaving SilverBullet, through Federation, just click on this: SilverBullet (note that all of these will be read-only, for obvious reasons)

To keep up with the latest and greatest going-ons in SilverBullet land, keep an eye on the CHANGELOG, and regularly update your SilverBullet instance (silverbullet upgrade if you’re running the Deno version). If you run into any issues or have ideas on how to make SilverBullet even awesomer (yes, that’s a word), join the conversation on GitHub.