Getting Started with Rho MD

Welcome to Rho MD — a Markdown reader and notebook where documents don't just sit there: they chart, animate, and respond. This guide gets you productive in five minutes.

The window, in one tour

  • Activity bar (far left): Psi library · Explorer · Bookmarks · Discover · plugins. The bottom holds Search commands, New canvas, Help, and Settings.
  • Sidebar: whatever view you picked — outline, files, your library.
  • Tabs: documents, canvases, and cloud pages all live here.
  • Status bar: word count, edit-mode slider, and document controls.

Open & create

Action Shortcut
Open a file Ctrl+O
New Markdown note Ctrl+N
New canvas Ctrl+Shift+N
Quick open (files) Ctrl+P
Command palette Ctrl+Shift+P
Today's note Ctrl+D

Everything Rho MD can do is a command. If you remember one shortcut, make it Ctrl+Shift+P — type what you want and it's there.

Read comfortably

  • The Outline follows your document's headings; click any entry to jump.
  • Bookmarks keep your place across sessions.
  • Ctrl+Shift+T flips light/dark. Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- resize text.
  • Documents can declare their own theme and layout — a novel opens as a book with page turns, a slide deck as slides.

Edit in place

  • Ctrl+E toggles edit mode: click into any paragraph and type. The document stays rendered while you edit — no raw-text whiplash.
  • Ctrl+Shift+E (while editing) opens the source editor for the full raw Markdown.
  • Ctrl+S saves. A brand-new note saves straight into your Psi library.
  • Interactive blocks (charts, scenes) are locked in the free editor — they render, and their source is always editable in source mode.

Your library: Psi

Your documents form a galaxy: each note is a star, each category a constellation. Open the Psi view to browse, search full-text, and open the 3D star map to literally fly through your knowledge. See the guide Psi & the Cloud for the full picture.

Where to go next

Press F1 any time to come back to these guides.

Open in Rho MD →