# Notes and Links

## Notes

Tinderbox is a personal content assistant, a tool for making, visualizing, analyzing, and sharing notes.

Notes are the basic units of writing and information in Tinderbox. Each note has:

- title: the name of the note
- text
- attributes: other pieces of information about the note.

A Tinderbox document is a collection of notes. You must create a document before you create notes. You can create many Tinderbox documents, and individual Tinderbox documents can comfortably contain thousands of notes.

You can open several different Tinderbox documents at the same time.

## Hierarchy

Notes can contain other notes. This allows you to arrange notes in a hierarchy.

A note that contains other notes is called a container. You could create chapters containing sections containing divisions; or topics containing subtopics; or any other hierarchy that fits your work.

You don’t need to create a hierarchy in your Tinderbox document; you can leave all the notes at the same level.

In this manual, we use several terms to describe relationships in the hierarchy. A note’s container is often called its parent. Other notes in the same container are siblings; the first note (in outline order) in a given container is the eldest sibling, and the last note is the youngest sibling. Notes immediately inside a container are called its children; a note’s descendants include its children and also the descendants of the children. Notes that are not inside any container are top-level notes.

## Links

A link is a connection between one note and another. Links allow you to make connections between ideas, and to quickly move between linked notes. A link can lead from a note as a whole, or from selected text within a note (like linked text on the Web).

You can also create a link to a URL—an external document on the Internet. Following the link will open that location in your Web browser.