Your First World

Your world has two pages. That’s not a problem — every world started there. The challenge comes a little later, when you have forty pages and no clear sense of which character lives in which city, or whether that mysterious artifact has its own page or just a mention buried in someone else’s lore.

This tutorial takes your workspace from “a few pages” to “an organized world” by introducing the four structural tools Inklings gives you: hierarchy, wiki-links, tags, and types. By the end, you’ll have a skeleton world you can grow indefinitely.

Build a hierarchy

The sidebar is a tree, not a flat list. Parent pages contain child pages, which can contain their own children. This is how you impose structure on a world that might otherwise sprawl.

Let’s build a geography section.

1. Click + New Page in the sidebar to create a top-level page. Title it Geography.
2. Right-click Geography in the sidebar and select New Subpage.
3. Title the subpage Thornwall Keep.
4. Right-click Thornwall Keep and add another subpage: The Verdant Undercity.

The sidebar now shows Geography with a disclosure arrow. Expanding it reveals Thornwall Keep and The Verdant Undercity nested beneath. Your locations have a home.

Repeat the pattern for other categories your world needs: a Characters page with character subpages, a Factions page with faction subpages. The structure you choose is entirely yours — Inklings imposes no predetermined structure.

Moving pages

You can drag pages in the sidebar to reorder them or nest them under a different parent. Inklings prevents cycles automatically — you can’t drag a page to be a child of its own descendant.

When you delete a parent page, its children are also deleted. If you right-click Geography and choose Delete, a confirmation dialog tells you how many descendants will be affected — so you’re never blindsided.

Assign icons to pages

A world’s pages tend to accumulate. Icons help you tell a Characters folder from a Locations folder at a glance, without reading every label.

1. Open Thornwall Keep by clicking it in the sidebar.
2. Click the icon area near the page title (the small slot to the left of the title, or the icon picker in the editor header area).
3. Choose an icon from the picker — a tower icon, a shield, or whatever feels right.
4. Pick a color. Purple for places of power, green for nature, grey for fortifications — your call.

The icon appears in the sidebar next to Thornwall Keep immediately. To remove it later, open the icon picker and choose the clear option.

Connect pages with wiki-links

Icons organize visually. Wiki-links organize semantically.

Open your Magistrate Thorne page (from the previous tutorial). In the text, anywhere you mention Thornwall Keep, you’re going to replace the plain text with a live link.

1. Select the text “Thornwall Keep” in the editor body.
2. Delete it and type [[ — the autocomplete dropdown appears showing all your pages.
3. Type “Thor” to filter the list, then press Enter or click Thornwall Keep.

The link appears as a styled pill in the text. Click it and you navigate directly to the Thornwall Keep page. That page now knows about Magistrate Thorne — the backlink appears automatically in its page detail panel.

Ghost links — writing ahead of your world

If you type [[The Iron Accord]] but that page doesn’t exist yet, the link appears with ghost styling — dimmed, with a dashed border. It’s not broken; it’s a placeholder. When you create the The Iron Accord page later, the ghost link resolves automatically.

Wiki-links let you write your world the way you think about it — following associations rather than planning a rigid structure first. The connections accumulate as you write.

Tag your pages

Tags are lightweight labels you apply to pages. Unlike hierarchy (a page can only have one parent), a page can have as many tags as you want. This makes tags ideal for cross-cutting concerns.

A character might be in the Characters section of your hierarchy but also tagged "ally", "Iron Accord", and "deceased". You can filter by any of those tags regardless of where the page lives.

To add a tag to a page:

1. Open Magistrate Thorne.
2. Find the tag bar at the bottom of the editor — it’s a thin strip below the main content area.
3. Click into the tag bar and type a tag name. Try "ally".
4. Press Enter. The tag chip appears in the bar.
5. Type another tag: "Thornwall Keep" for location reference. Press Enter.

Tags you create here become workspace-wide tags. Every page in the workspace can use them.

Creating a new tag

Type the new tag name in the tag bar and press Enter. The tag is created automatically if it doesn’t already exist.

Reusing an existing tag

Start typing and the autocomplete shows matching tags. Select from the list to reuse an existing one, keeping your taxonomy consistent.

To filter pages by tag, use the tag filter in the sidebar. Select a tag and only pages carrying that tag are shown. You can combine tags in AND mode (pages must have all selected tags) or OR mode (pages must have at least one).

Create a custom type

Types take your pages from “a page with a title and some text” to “a page with a defined structure.” A Character type might define properties like faction, status, and role. Every page assigned that type carries those properties — consistently, across your whole world.

Creating a type:

1. Open the type management panel. The exact location depends on your sidebar layout — look for a Types section or access it through the page attributes panel on any page.
2. Click Create type.
3. Name it Character. The slug character is derived automatically.
4. Save the type.

Assigning a type to a page:

1. Open Magistrate Thorne.
2. Find the type assignment in the page attributes panel (the detail panel alongside the editor).
3. Click Assign type and choose Character.

Magistrate Thorne is now a Character-type page. If you’ve added properties to the Character type, they appear in her properties panel — empty and waiting for values.

Coming from Obsidian?

If you used frontmatter in Obsidian, types are the structured version — but enforced by a type definition, not optional YAML. The properties panel replaces the raw frontmatter editing experience with a purpose-built UI.

Two types come built-in to every workspace: Page (the default) and Folder. You can change a page to the Folder type to give it folder-style visual treatment in the sidebar — useful for organizational pages like Geography that primarily contain other pages rather than prose content.

What you’ve built

Your world now has structure. Not just pages, but:

• Hierarchy — locations nested under Geography, characters nested under Characters
• Icons — visual shorthand for page categories at a glance
• Wiki-links — live connections between pages that track themselves in backlinks
• Tags — cross-cutting labels for filtering across any dimension of your world
• Types — definitions that give certain page categories consistent properties

From here, the world grows by repetition. Add a new character, assign the Character type, fill in her properties, tag her with her faction, link her page from every location she’s been to. The web of connections builds itself as you write.

What’s Next

• Import Existing Content — If you have markdown files from Obsidian or a folder of notes, bring them in
• Page Hierarchy — Moving pages, deep nesting, and keeping the tree clean
• Organize with Tags — The full tag lifecycle and filtering
• Create Custom Types — Defining properties and building type definitions