What an idea is
An idea is context that is still becoming useful: a product problem, experiment, design constraint, research note, or implementation direction. It receives the same Markdown storage, search, tags, links, and backlinks as a prompt.
Ideas also have two specialized behaviors: blank-line-separated bubbles and project linking.
Work with bubbles
Separate thoughts with a blank line. Each non-blank block (including headings, subheadings, lists, and paragraphs) forms a cohesive bubble in the editor:
Offline alert queue
Store sensor alerts while the network is unavailable.
Preserve the original timestamp and retry in order.
Keep the queue bounded and make overflow visible.In the sidebar, each idea displays its total bubble count dynamically color-coded with a heat palette (transitioning from amber to hot crimson relative to other ideas in your vault).
Move the pointer over a bubble to reveal its controls. You can:
- drag the grip to reorder it;
- copy only that bubble;
- cut it to the clipboard;
- delete it;
- choose the model most suited to that part of the idea.
Press Esc to cancel a bubble drag. Ctrl/Cmd + A first selects the bubble at the caret when the editor can identify one, allowing a focused copy or edit.
Mark where an idea stands
Every idea in the sidebar carries a small orb. Clicking it cycles through three states:
| State | Meaning | Tooltip |
|---|---|---|
| Unmarked | Nothing claimed about it | Click to mark |
| Orange | In progress | In progress · Click to cycle |
| Green | Complete | Complete · Click to unmark |
The meaning is yours to decide — sudonotes never sets or clears a mark on its own. It is stored as
mark: orange or mark: green in the note’s frontmatter, and omitted entirely when unmarked, so an
untouched idea keeps a short header.
Clicking the orb does not open the note, so a list can be triaged without losing your place.
Connect the idea
Link to prompts or other ideas with [[Note title]]. The target’s backlink list preserves where the
idea came from even after the two notes move apart in the sidebar.
For software work, use the Project panel. sudonotes mirrors the complete note to IDEAS.md in
the selected project root. The vault note remains canonical and searchable.
An idea linked to a GitHub repository can send individual bubbles to it as issues, and dims the ones whose issues have closed — see GitHub issues from bubbles.
Write for later use
A useful idea answers four questions:
- What is the problem or opportunity?
- What context or evidence matters?
- Which constraints must survive implementation?
- What observable result would count as done?
That structure helps your future self and gives a local LLM enough context to propose grounded work instead of guessing from a title.