GleaBetaUser Guide
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Reference

Your files

Everything you write in Glea is a plain Markdown file in a folder on your Mac. There’s no database and no account: the files are the notes.

The notes folder

Glea keeps your notes in ~/Documents/Glea, laid out like this:

Glea/
  journal/2026-10-06.md     one file per day
  notes/Reading list.md     one file per note
  notes/Books/Dune.md       a note in the group “Books”
  assets/                   images from captures, drops and pastes

Choose File ▸ Show Notes Folder in Finder to open it.

Use another folder

Choose Glea ▸ Change Notes Folder… and pick a folder. Glea switches to it straight away, and doesn’t move anything: to bring your notes along, copy the Glea folder there in Finder first, then choose it.

Editing in other apps

Open the files in any text editor. When another app changes a file, Glea picks up the change right away, in the note you have open too.

Sync and back up

Glea doesn’t sync on its own, so use what you already have. Put the notes folder in iCloud Drive, Dropbox or a Git repository, and choose it with Change Notes Folder…. Time Machine backs it up like any other folder.

Two Macs at once

Sync services handle one Mac editing a file at a time best. If you edit the same note on two Macs before they sync, your sync service may keep both versions as separate files.

Export

  • File ▸ Export Note as Markdown… saves the note you’re in. Its images and videos are copied into a folder beside it, and its links point there.
  • File ▸ Export All Notes as Markdown… copies your notes, journal and assets into a new folder.

A note’s ⋮ menu in All Notes exports it too.

Using Glea with Obsidian

Glea writes Obsidian’s flavor of Markdown, so you can open the same folder as an Obsidian vault and work in both apps. What carries over:

  • Links: [[Note]], [[Note#Heading]], [[Note#^block]], [[Note|text]]. Links written as paths, like [[Folder/Note]] or [[Note.md]], find the note by its name.
  • Embeds: ![[image.png]], ![[Note]], ![[Note#Heading]].
  • Tags, ==highlights==, %%comments%% and callouts.
  • Frontmatter, with its aliases and tags.

Glea keeps its own layout (notes/, journal/ and assets/), and groups are one level of folders inside notes/.

Frontmatter

Properties between --- lines at the top of a note show as a box of properties:

---
aliases: [LHoD]
tags: [books, sci-fi]
---

Its aliases work as other names to link to the note by, and its tags count like #tags in the text.

What else Glea keeps

Your history, open tabs, settings, reading times for the daily summary and the browser’s own data (cookies, site data, extensions) are kept in your user Library, apart from your notes. None of it leaves your Mac. See Privacy.