Left Sidebar

Top: Apps

You can think of Heptabase as an operating system, and the upper part of its left sidebar displays all the default installed Apps. Each App has a specific purpose, and all Apps share the same card database.
Below are the core features of each default App in Heptabase:
- Map: You can create whiteboards on the map, create sub-whiteboards under the top-level whiteboards, and use these whiteboards to learn and research complex topics by visualizing the knowledge structure of these topics.
- Card Library: You can see all your cards here. When you open a card, you can see on which whiteboards it appears, as well as all the tags and properties it has, in the card info section.
- Tag: You can see all the tags you have here and organize these tags into different groups.
- Journal: You can see all your diary cards here, quickly record thoughts and to-do items in the daily diary.
- Task: You can see all the incomplete to-dos in all the cards here. If you don’t have any incomplete to-dos, this app will not appear.
- Highlight: You can see all the highlights you’ve created on PDF cards or imported from Readwise here. If you don’t have any highlights, this app will not appear.

The lower half of the Heptabase left sidebar is the “Tab System”. When you expand a card from the card library, the card will open as a card tab. Similarly, when you open a whiteboard or a tag, they will each open as new tabs.
The design of the Heptabase tab system is very similar to traditional browsers, including the following types of tabs:
- Normal Tab: When you open a card, a whiteboard, or a tag, it will open into a normal tab, and you can close it at any time by clicking on the cross button.
- Pinned Tab: You can pin frequently opened tabs, keeping them always open at the top of the left sidebar.
- Tab Folder: When you have many pinned tabs at the top of the left sidebar, you might consider adding a tab folder to organize these pinned tabs.
- Tab Group: You may consider creating tab groups to separate different use case. For example, you can create a tab group for “Work” and “Life”, and when you need to access notes related to life, you go to the “Life” tab group and view all the normal tabs, pinned tabs, and tab folders in this group.