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Everything in your brain lives in the Documents tree in the sidebar. That tree is the only place folders appear. Inside a folder, documents are listed first and sub-folders after them. Each folder row shows its name and a badge counting what it holds (documents plus sub-folders). Folders nest, up to a total path depth of 12 segments.

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Creating documents and folders

The Documents section header has two buttons: New document and New folder. Both create at the top level of the brain. You can also use the keyboard from anywhere in the app: These shortcuts are ignored while your cursor is in a text field, so they never fire while you are writing. To create inside a specific folder, open that folder’s ⋮ menu or right-click it, and pick New document or New folder. Either way you get an inline row in the tree where you type the name. Press Enter to commit, Escape to cancel. Creating a document opens it once it exists.

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Renaming

Open a document’s or folder’s ⋮ menu, or right-click it, and choose Rename. The row turns into an input. Enter commits, Escape cancels. Renaming a folder changes the path of everything inside it. That happens across the whole subtree in one operation, and links pointing into it are updated to match.

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Context menus

The ⋮ menu and the right-click menu are the same in both cases.

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Moving a document

There are two ways to move a document.

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Drag it

Drag a document row onto a folder row, or onto the strip at the top of the tree to move it back to the brain root.
  • A plain click still opens the document. A drag only begins after you hold the press for a moment or move a short distance, so the two never conflict.
  • While dragging, a small chip follows the cursor showing the document’s icon and title, and the row you picked up dims.
  • The folder you are hovering shows a drop indicator. Hovering the folder the document already lives in shows a muted version instead, because dropping there does nothing.
  • Hovering a collapsed folder for about half a second expands it, so you can drop into a nested folder without setting up first.
  • Dropping outside any target, or back onto the current parent, does nothing.
  • If the move fails, a toast tells you: either Failed to move document or the specific reason.
On a touch screen, swiping up and down scrolls the tree as usual. Only a held press starts a drag.

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Use the Move dialog

Open the document’s menu and choose Move…. The dialog is titled Move document and has a Destination select listing every folder, indented to show nesting, plus Root (no folder) when the document is not already at the root. Choose one and click Move. If there is nowhere else to put the document, the list shows No other destinations available. The document’s path changes as soon as you confirm, and links to it are updated in the same operation.

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Moving folders

Folders cannot be moved from the web app. There is no drag target for them and no Move… item in the folder menu. The only way to move a folder is to ask a connected agent to do it.

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Paths and breadcrumbs

A document’s full path is its folder slugs followed by its own slug, for example product/pricing-page-spec. In the browser that path appears after /brain/ in the URL; the path itself does not include brain. Slugs are derived from names: lowercased, with anything that is not a letter or number collapsed to a single hyphen. The breadcrumb above an open document shows Brain, then the document’s immediate parent folder, then the title. A document three folders deep still shows one folder crumb, and that crumb is not a link. The complete path only appears in the URL. If you want to see where a document sits in full, read the address bar or find it in the tree.