Dendron is a Visual Studio Code extension that allows you to easily manage your personal notes. 

You can use it to track your daily todos or reference notes. 

Features Dendron ships with:

- markdown
- markdown preview
- fast note navigation
- fast note creation
- backlinks
- opt-in note schemas
- note graph

Dendron is a Visual Studio Code extension that you can download and install free of charge.

To download a visual studio code extension, we press Command + Shift + P on the Mac. Then you type: install extensions. Search for Dendron and download all the related plugins.

To initialize a Dendron Workspace, we use Command + Shift + P and type `Dendron: initialize workspace`.

This activates the extension and creates the minimum amount of Dendron files we need to get started.

Download and Install a Dendron Workspace

To create a note in Dendron, we use the look up window. This modal pop up defaults to a scratch note but we want to create a note called `dendron.note.md`.

You delete the scratch text and enter `dendron`. From here, you will see all of the notes that are associated with this hierarchy. Now you can type `dendron.note` to create a new markdown file.

This note is a child note of `dendron` and a sibling note of `dendron.welcome`.

Create a new note using Dendrons look up tool

Dendron Tree View is a side panel in VSCode that renders a folder structure of your notes based on your hierarchies. 

Since all your notes are in a single flat file, Dendron has created a Tree View to render a collapsable folder like view for your notes.

Dendron Tree View

In this lesson, we take a look at the keyboard shortcuts that Dendron provides us to navigate our hierarchy of notes.

Heres a quick cheat sheet:

- `CMD+SHIFT+ down arrow`: navigate down into your hierarchy
- `CMD+SHIFT+ up arrow`: navigate up your hierarchy
- `CTRL+SHIFT+ [`: navigate over your sibling notes
- `CTRL + SHIFT+ ]`: navigate over sibling notes the other way

Navigate Hierarchical Notes in Dendron

You can use `CMD+L` to look up a note in the same hierarchy that you are currently in. 

If you know the note you want to create or find is in the same hierarchy tree, this is a fast way to find it.

Quick Note Look up in Dendron

Dendron has baked in support for creating daily notes. This is a place where you can take quick notes on something or if you don't know where to put a note yet. 

You can use `CMD + SHIFT + I` to create a daily note. 

These notes default to `daily.journal.yyyy.mm.dd` hierarchy.

Create a daily note with Dendron

Insert a Snippet In Dendron with VSCode Snippets

Insert an Image into a Note with Dendron

Create a Backlink to a Note in Dendron

You can link to a new note from selected text with `CMD + SHIFT + S`.

This is useful for when you want to take notes on a todo that you are working on or you discover that there are sub tasks to the task you are doing.

Create a link to a new note from selected text in Dendron

Sometimes you have text in a file you want to move to a new file, Dendron supports this by using the same lookup command `CMD + SHIFT + S`.

You then have to select the `Selection Extraction` option in the lookup menu. This will take the selected text and move it to the new note. 

Upgrade your note taking workflow with VS Code and Dendron

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