Templates Overview

A template is a reusable piece of Markdown — a slide with an image and a caption, an exercise with numbered steps, a meeting notes skeleton — that you insert into a document instead of copying it from an old file. Templates can contain placeholders for the parts that change each time, such as a title, a choice of difficulty, or today’s date. When you insert the template, MarkNode asks you for those values and fills them in.

Inserted headings fit where they land. If you insert a template as a child of a section under a level 2 heading, the template’s top heading becomes level 3 and the rest of its headings move down with it, so your outline and mind map keep the right structure.

Try It in a Minute

1. Open a Markdown document and click an empty line.
2. Type /meet and press Enter. If Where asks where the template should go, press Enter again to accept the choice. The Meeting Notes starter template is inserted, with its first field selected.
3. Type a meeting title, press Tab to move to the next field, and type again.
4. Changed your mind? Press Cmd+Z (Ctrl+Z on Windows and Linux). Straight after inserting, one Undo takes the whole template back out; once you’ve typed in its fields, Undo first takes back your typing.

Where You Can Insert a Template

• In the editor — from the / menu, the Insert template button on the toolbar, Tools > Insert Template…, or the editor’s right-click menu. A template with headings asks where it should go — as a child of the section you’re in or after it — so the headings land at the right level. See Inserting Templates.
• In the mind map and outline — from a node’s context menu, before, after or inside that node, or in place of it. See Inserting Templates.
• From the menu bar — Tools > Insert Template…, Tools > Template Library and Tools > Save Selection as Template…; the Help menu has a Templates Guide.
• By drag and drop — from the Template Library pane onto the editor, a mind map node or an outline row. See Template Library Pane.

Where Templates Come From

• Your own templates are listed under Personal. They belong to you, not to a project, so they are available in every project you open. You create and edit them in the Templates & Extensions window — see Managing Templates.
• Your team’s templates are listed under Team when you have a seat in a team with a shared library. See Team Library.
• Extensions you have turned on can add templates. Each extension’s templates are listed under From followed by the extension’s name. To change one, duplicate it into your own templates first — see Extension Templates and Styles.
• The public gallery has packs of templates and mind map themes shared by other MarkNode users. Adding a pack copies its templates into your own library. See Public Gallery.

MarkNode comes with four starter templates so you can try templates straight away:

To find the two slide templates in the editor’s / menu, type /slide — the menu stops reading at the hyphen in their triggers.

The starter templates are ordinary templates: you can edit, rename or delete them. A starter template you delete stays deleted, even after MarkNode updates, but you can still get it back from the Trash (the Recycle Bin on Windows).

To write your own templates, with fields, choices and dates, see Writing Templates.

What’s Free and What Needs a Plan

Your own templates work offline and need no account. Adding and publishing gallery packs needs you to be signed in, on any plan. A team library needs a seat in an organisation on the Ultimate plan. Templates are available in the desktop app.