Go deeper — Learn Omphalis

Using it day to day.

• Spaces, Trails, Threads, Collections, and tags — A Trail is a user-recognized ongoing inquiry inside one Space. A Thread is a concentration Omphalis has noticed that can be adopted as a Trail. A Collection is a deliberate curated list, and a tag is a flat retrieval label.
• Reader settings — Reader settings adjust font, size, spacing, layout width, theme, and whether Strata section labels show, and they persist across items. They never change the source.
• Manage sources deliberately — Source management controls what arrives in Inbox. It is separate from keeping or deleting individual items in Library.
• How Today brings things back — Today provides a finite, contextual return to useful Library material and has a clear done state rather than infinite scroll or streak pressure.
• Evaluate suggested connections — Suggested Connections invite comparison across exact passages. Inspect both sources and treat the relationship as uncertain until it earns trust.
• Highlight, tag, and note a passage — Select text to highlight it, optionally tag it Important, Confusing, Disagree, or Use later, and add a note: adding a note automatically keeps the mark so it will not get lost.
• Learn more on a passage — Choose Learn more on a passage to get a user-initiated annotation, then set its depth with a Quick, Standard, or Deep control until it fits, distinct from the marks Omphalis adds passively.
• Review everything you've marked — The Marks page collects your marks across every item, filtered by All, Highlights, Annotations, or Notes. Highlights are kept when you make them; Annotations are system marks you kept; adding a note also keeps a mark.
• Switch your active Space — The Space selector in the app shell sets one active Space, and Today, Inbox, Library, and Connections all narrow to it. Choose All Spaces for the wide view. Each item keeps one owning Space, and a Space is archived before it is deleted.
• How the Return card brings work back — Today's Return card brings one saved item back, anchored to a note you left, your reading position, or the save date. Bring it back now or let it wait; Not now sets it aside and is remembered. Never-opened saves are quietly brought back by age before they recede, with no queue count or streak.
• Read Currents on Today — Currents is where your Library meets today's world: Omphalis watches current stories and surfaces the few genuinely relevant to what you have kept, labeled by how each relates to your Library. A Tension challenges it, an Update revises it, an Application shows where it applies, a Continuation extends it. Tension carries a plum accent. It is descriptive, not a verdict.
• Take a course in Learn — Learn is a catalog of short courses reached from a Courses entry inside your Library. Each has a syllabus you can preview and a lesson reader, and courses you start collect under Your courses. Courses are built on grounded, openly licensed sources.
• Keep your thinking in a notebook — A notebook is your own thinking beside what you kept: a page of cells holding text, Library items, links, and questions. Start one from New notebook in Library, the New notebook sidebar row, or the command palette. Add passages with Add to notebook in the reader, reference your Library with @, add cell kinds with /, and paste links. Ask cells answer from the notebook's sources with citations. Copy a link to any cell and paste it elsewhere to show that cell live; send cells between notebooks. Export as markdown or a notebook file; the compass starts a tour and ? opens the shortcuts panel.
• Keep a spoken thought — A voice note is a recording kept in your Library. In a notebook, type / and choose voice note to record in the cell you are writing in, with a level meter and a timer; Stop recording keeps it and Discard recording lets it go. The clip becomes a player, and Transcribe puts the words beside the audio read-only, never replacing the recording. You can also share an audio file to your Library. A voice note is a Library item: it is searchable, Ask can answer from it, and it appears in Connections.
• What a notebook remembers — History, in the notebook menu, lists a notebook's earlier versions, previews the selected one read-only, and offers a single Restore. Restore is not confirmed because it snapshots the current document first, so restoring is itself undoable. Lock editing stops accidental edits on this device and others and is not sharing. Delete notebook removes the notebook and its cells while kept items and highlights stay in your Library; the notebook is restorable from trash for 30 days, and a cell referencing it shows a tombstone with a restore door.
• Let someone else read a notebook — Share a read-only copy, in the notebook menu, produces a link that anyone can read and nobody can edit; the link is the permission, with no account or approval. The shared page is a live window, not a frozen copy: it follows the notebook as you edit. Stop sharing takes the page down everywhere and that link never works again; sharing the notebook later mints a new link that has to be sent again.
• What the connection labels mean — On the Connections tab each suggestion carries a plain-language label such as Unexpected overlap, Counterpoint, Updates earlier, Related save, or Worth revisiting. The label is a reading aid, not a claim about your beliefs; open both passages, keep what clarifies, and dismiss the rest.
• Discover and add sources — Discover suggests quality-checked pieces worth keeping, ranked by substance, from inside your Library; keep one and it lands in your Library. To follow a source so its items arrive in your Inbox, use Add source in the Inbox, which resolves a publication feed or podcast show from a plain link.
• Search for sources on a topic — Discover anything runs a search on a topic you name and brings back vetted candidates, including research papers, ranked for substance and recency. Open it from the Discover anything door in Library. Keep and prepare moves a candidate into your Library, and a candidate you already kept is marked so a reopened search never offers it twice. Research papers resolve to the readable file when one exists, and a page that cannot become a readable item is refused rather than kept broken. The same search can run as a cell inside a notebook.