Where you’ll find it
The three modal surfaces (Node Summary, Flow Summary, Preview) get the full toolbar. Gallery notes on the board are deliberately chrome-free: you get the same slash commands, emoji picker, markdown shortcuts, and floating bubble menu, just without a toolbar taking up room on the card.
[!TIP] Every modal surface has a Keyboard Shortcuts & Formatting Guide button in its toolbar. It’s the same list as this page, available without leaving the app.
Slash commands
Type/ and a menu of blocks opens. Keep typing to filter, ↑/↓ to move, Enter to insert, Escape to dismiss.
/ only opens the menu at a word boundary — the start of a line, or right after a space. Typing and/or mid-word does nothing, which is intentional.- Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3
- Task List
- Bullet List
- Numbered List
- Blockquote
- Code Block
- Table of Contents
- Insert Table
- Divider
- Collapsible Details
- Insert Image
- Image Upload Box
- Embed YouTube
- Reset Formatting
- Ask Joe AI
Emoji picker
Type: followed by a few letters — :smi, :fire, :rocket — and a searchable emoji menu appears. Pick one and it replaces what you typed.
The picker matches on emoji name and keywords, and shows up to eight results at a time.
The bubble menu
Select any text and a small floating toolbar appears next to it. The same set of buttons appears on every surface, including gallery notes on the board:
When you select an image in one of the modal surfaces, the bubble menu swaps in image controls instead: align left / center / right, float left or right so text wraps around it, add a caption, add alt text, and reset to original size.
AI actions (Joe)
Click ✨ in the bubble menu (or the toolbar’s ✨, or/ → Ask Joe AI) to hand the selected text to Joe.
1
Select some text, or just place your cursor in a paragraph
2
Pick an action
- Improve writing
- Fix grammar & spelling
- Simplify
- Shorten
- Expand
- Change tone ▸ — Professional, Casual, Confident, Friendly
- Translate to ▸ — any of FlowJoe’s supported languages, or Other… to name one yourself
- Turn into bullet points
- Summarize
- Continue writing
- Ask Joe… — type any instruction you like
3
Watch it stream in
Joe’s answer appears in a card below your text, filling in as he writes. Stop cancels a request in progress.
4
Decide what to do with it
Once it’s finished, the card shows the result with changes highlighted, plus an editable box — you can tweak Joe’s answer before you use it. Then choose:
- Replace — swap your selection for the result
- Insert below — keep both
- Copy — put it on the clipboard
- Retry — ask again
- Discard — throw it away
Cmd/Ctrl+Z undoes an accepted change.
AI actions need an API key configured — see Bring Your Own Brain.
Markdown shortcuts as you type
These convert as soon as you type the trigger:Block triggers, typed at the start of a line:
# , ## , ### for headings 1–3; - or * for a bullet list; 1. for a numbered list; [ ] for a checklist item; > for a blockquote; ``` then Enter for a code block; --- then Enter for a horizontal divider.Inline triggers, anywhere: **bold**, *italic*, ~~strike~~, `code`, and ==highlight==.==text== is FlowJoe’s own addition — it round-trips both ways, so a highlight you apply with the toolbar button saves back out as ==text== in the underlying Markdown.
The toolbar
Modal surfaces (Node Summary, Flow Summary, Preview) carry a persistent toolbar. Left to right, it holds:- Heading Sizes ▸ — Normal Text, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3
- Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough
- Text & Highlight Color ▸ — a twelve-swatch palette (red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, crimson, white, gray, dark gray, black) applied as either text colour or highlight colour
- More Formatting ▸ — Inline Code, Subscript, Superscript, Clear Text Formatting, Reset All Formatting
- Hyperlink
- Text Alignment ▸ — Left, Center, Right, Justify
- Checklist / Tasks
- Bullet List
- Numbered List Formats ▸ — decimal, lowercase/uppercase alpha, lowercase/uppercase roman
- Table Tools ▸ — insert a 3×3 table, add/delete rows and columns, delete the table
- Insert Blocks ▸ — Blockquote, Code Block, Horizontal Rule, Collapsible Details, Insert Image, Embed YouTube Video, Table of Contents
- AI actions (✨)
- Find and Replace
- Undo / Redo
- Save, Print, and the Keyboard Shortcuts & Formatting Guide
Keyboard shortcuts
Undo and redo run on FlowJoe’s own 50-level, persistent history — the same one the rest of the app uses — so your edits are still there to step back through after a reload.
There are no text-alignment keyboard shortcuts.
Cmd+Shift+R collided with the browser’s hard-reload, so the whole Cmd+Shift+L/E/R/J set was removed rather than leaving an inconsistent three. Use the toolbar’s Text Alignment dropdown instead.Links
Select some text, open the bubble menu’s Link ▸ dropdown, and choose Add Link — or pressCmd/Ctrl+K. Remove link in the same dropdown takes it off again.
A link in a note at rest (not being edited) is clickable. On the desktop app it opens in the in-app browser panel in a new tab, so following a reference doesn’t pull you out of FlowJoe.
Highlighting
Three ways to highlight, all producing the same result: the highlighter button in the bubble menu, typing
==your text==, or Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+H.See also
Node Summaries
Per-node context, written in this editor.
Flow Summary
One summary for the whole tree.
Slot Preview
Full-size media plus its notes.
Keyboard Shortcuts
The app-wide hotkey reference.