Editing pages

Wikai’s pages are yours to edit, whatever wrote them. Editing is a mode, not a separate window: the page stays where it is and becomes editable.

Edit and Done

Click Edit in the page’s title bar. The toolbar and the Done button pin themselves to the top, so they don’t scroll away on a long page. Click Done to go back to reading.

New notes open in edit mode with the title selected, ready to type.

Tidy now, next to Edit, opens the editor and asks the agent to do one cleanup pass on the page.

There is no keyboard shortcut for edit or done in this version.

Saving takes care of itself

There is no Save button. Wikai writes to disk a moment after you stop typing, and the title bar tells you where it stands — Saving…, then Saved · 14:32:07.

You can navigate away or hit Done mid-sentence: pending edits are flushed first. Nothing is lost, and there’s no “you have unsaved changes” dialog to dismiss, because there’s nothing unsaved.

The title

The page title is the heading itself — click it and type. It’s stored in the page’s frontmatter, not in the body, so a # Heading at the top of the body gets absorbed into the title rather than duplicated.

The rest of the frontmatter — tags, summary, dates — isn’t editable in the UI yet. Edit the file directly, or ask the agent.

What the editor does

It’s a WYSIWYG editor: bold, italic, headings, bulleted, numbered and task lists, links, images, tables, quotes, and code blocks. Markdown shortcuts work as you type — ## makes a heading, - starts a list.

• Paste Markdown and it becomes formatting. Paste text containing **bold**, [a link](url), a list, a table or a fenced code block and Wikai converts it instead of dumping the literal characters. Plain text that merely looks punctuated — a bare URL, snake_case — is left alone.
• Images can be pasted, dragged in, or inserted from the toolbar. The file is stored next to the page and referenced by a relative path.
• Code blocks cover the common languages plus Mermaid. Mermaid diagrams edit as code and render when you’re done.
• Block ids stay out of your way. The ^id anchors that make block references work are hidden while you edit, and they survive rewording, reordering, splitting and merging a block. Anything citing that block keeps resolving.

There’s no source view — you edit the rendered page, not the Markdown behind it.

The info panel

The panel on the right holds the page’s metadata and its connections — what links here, what this links to. Toggle it from the title bar; it’s on by default, in both read and edit mode, and it remembers your choice.

Clicking a connection while reading takes you there. Clicking one while editing copies a Markdown link to it, ready to paste into the page.

Who can edit what: the shield

Every page carries an agent_edit policy, and the shield button in the title bar is that policy. Click it to cycle through three rungs:

Ingested book chapters and other verbatim sources arrive Locked, so the source text stays faithful to what you ingested. That’s a default, not a wall: unlock the shield and you can edit in place. The page is then marked edited from original ingest, so you can always tell. Your original file in raw/ is never touched.

One thing to know: if you unlock a page just to make an edit, it re-locks when you click Done unless you leave the shield set the way you want it.

Known limitations

• LaTeX math can be corrupted by repeated editing. A $$…$$ block survives one edit-and-done cycle, but on the second or third the delimiters can be lost and = signs escaped, and the formula stops rendering. This is a real bug, and it isn’t fixed yet. If a page is formula-heavy, leave it Locked and edit the Markdown file directly until we’ve sorted it out.
• Top-level * bullets are rewritten as - when saved.
• Two windows editing the same page at once isn’t merged — the last write wins.

Last updated 2026-07-12.