How do I make a table of contents?

Select the notes you want listed, click Table of contents, and Harbor writes a new note that links to every one of them.

It’s the fastest way to give a pile of related notes a front door — an index for a research project, a hub for a trip, a syllabus, or the first page of a small public site.

Making one

Select two or more notes in the list. The bulk actions bar appears along the bottom. The buttons on it are icons — Table of contents is the indented-list one, fifth along, between merge and delete. Hover it and it tells you its name.

Harbor's note list with four notes selected. A blue bar along the bottom reads '4 notes selected' followed by six round icon buttons; the fifth, an indented-list icon, is highlighted.

That opens a small dialog with three things to decide, all of them prefilled:

The Create table of contents dialog: a Title field prefilled with 'Table of contents', a Notebook picker with My Notes ticked, an unticked Group by notebook checkbox, a '4 notes selected' caption, and Cancel and Create buttons.

Title — starts as Table of contents. Type over it.
Notebook — starts as the notebook you’re currently browsing. If you’re not in one, it’s your default notebook. Change it to anything, or type a new name to create a notebook on the spot.
Group by notebook — off for a selection that lives in one notebook, on for one that spans several. More on that below.

Click Create and Harbor writes the note and opens it:

A Harbor note titled Club handbook whose body is a bulleted list of four note links: Getting a berth, Dock etiquette, Winter haul-out and Committee contacts.

Nothing is created until you click it. Cancel leaves your account exactly as it found it, including a notebook you were about to create.

You can list up to 100 notes in one table of contents.

The order is the order you were looking at

Entries come out in the same order the note list was sorted in — not the order you clicked them.

So if you want a particular order, sort the list first, then select. Sort by title for an alphabetical index, or oldest-first for something that reads chronologically. What you see in the list is what you get in the note.

Renaming a linked note updates the page by itself

This is the part worth knowing. A table of contents doesn’t store the titles — it stores links, and each one looks up its title at the moment you read it.

Rename a note six months later and the contents page says the new name. Rename ten of them and it’s still right. There is nothing to regenerate and nothing to go stale, which is what makes one of these worth keeping rather than rebuilding.

Move a note to another notebook and the link still works too. The only thing that breaks it is deleting the note.

Grouping by notebook

When your selection spans more than one notebook, Harbor pre-ticks Group by notebook. You get a heading per notebook with that notebook’s notes underneath, notebooks in alphabetical order and notes in display order within each.

Untick it and you get one flat list instead. Tick it on a selection that’s all in one notebook and you’ll get a single heading over the whole thing, which is why Harbor leaves it off in that case.

Which apps have it

Web, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows — everywhere you can select more than one note at a time. The wording and the options are the same on all six.

The Harbor CLI has no equivalent command.

A note on encrypted notebooks

A table of contents is a normal new note, so it follows the destination notebook’s rule: file it in a notebook that encrypts by default and the contents page is encrypted too.

Encrypted notes can still be listed in one — the links are just IDs, and Harbor doesn’t need to read a note to link to it. What changes is what you can do with the result: an encrypted note can’t be made public, so an encrypted contents page can’t be the front page of a public site.