Docs/Settings/Formatter

Formatter

The Formatter tidies your notes to a consistent style — cleaning up stray spaces, straightening list markers, tidying footnotes, and more. You choose which touch-ups you want here on the Formatter tab, then run them whenever you like from Refactor ▸ Format. Nothing changes your notes until you run it.

A safe default, plus opt-in polish

Each touch-up is a checkbox with a plain-language description. They come in two flavors. The house style is a set of gentle, uncontroversial clean-ups that are on by default — they tidy spacing, list markers, and links without ever changing your wording, your headings, or the meaning of what you wrote. Everything else is more opinionated — things like rewording heading capitalization or auto-correcting spelling — so it's off by default and stays off until you turn it on.

Your choices are remembered for the notebook you're working in, so they stay with it wherever you open it.

Restore house style

The Restore house style button puts every setting back to its starting point in one click — the safe clean-ups on, everything else off. If you'd adjusted how a particular rule behaves, that returns to its default too. It's greyed out when you're already at the house style, and it won't ask you to confirm, because your notes aren't touched until you next run Format.

What it can tidy

The touch-ups are grouped by what they affect. A few examples from each group:

Properties
Tidies the properties block at the top of a note — trimming stray blank lines and removing duplicate values from a list. You can also opt in to sorting the property names into a consistent order.
Headings
Optional clean-ups for heading structure: gently fix a heading level that jumps out of order, or apply a consistent capitalization style (title case, sentence case, or lowercase) while preserving names you list.
Content
Optional polish for prose: turn three dots into a proper ellipsis (…), tidy up bare web links, and auto-correct a small, careful list of common misspellings.
Footnotes
Optional footnote conventions: move a footnote marker to sit after sentence-ending punctuation, and gather all your footnote definitions into a single block at the end of the note.
Spacing
Safe, on-by-default clean-ups: remove stray spaces at the ends of lines, and cap long runs of blank lines. Code, math, and the properties block are left untouched.
Links and headings in Minerva
Keeps a consistent style for your [[wiki links]], and if two headings in a note share the same name, gives them distinct anchors so links can point to the right one — updating any links that referred to them.
The Formatter tab, with a short intro about the house style, a Restore house style button, and each group of touch-ups shown as a checklist — every item a checkbox with a title and description, with the safe defaults already checked.
The Formatter tab

Leaving one note alone

These touch-ups apply to whatever you run Format over. When one note should be left exactly as you wrote it — a verbatim quote, something you hand-format, or a rough scratch pad — you can mark it to be skipped. Add a property named format set to false, and Format will pass that note by while tidying the rest.

You can set this a few ways: type format: false into the note's properties block, use Add Property… from the editor or the file list, or add it in the Properties panel in the right sidebar. In each case, set the value type to a true/false toggle and switch it off.