How to work with Logseq's right-hand sidebar

Documentation
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By default, the sidebar on the right is hidden. With the keyboard shortcut t r you open it. But, you can’t write in the sidebar nor drag blocks to it in this state, so what’s the use?

In the right-hand sidebar, you can open (branches of) blocks, pages, and references. Any internal link can be opened in the sidebar by holding the Shift key when clicking the link with your left mouse button (this also works to open a result from the search bar in the sidebar):

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Here, I Shift-Click’ed on the Parent A link, opening it in the sidebar. In this case, the page is empty so we only see a bullet without text. However, from the sidebar we can start typing directly on the page or drag blocks onto it from the main window.

Furthermore, we get the option to close the page in the sidebar (1) and to filter the linked references (2).

To open a block in the sidebar, Shift-Click on a bullet. You can easily add child blocks to the opened block by placing your cursor in it and hitting Enter:

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And those are the basics of Logseq’s right-hand sidebar! Many use it to have several sources of information open at once or to drag blocks between pages and branches.

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Ramses, This is a very helpful doc. Thank you. I noticed that you say in the beginning that “you can open (branches of) blocks, pages, and references” and I would like to use the sidebar mostly for pages. The only way I can find to open a page is to do a search for it and then Ctrl+Enter. Is there a more direct route to get there?

1 Like
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I completely missed this question, my bad!

There are a few ways to open a page in the sidebar:

  • One way is what you describe, by using the search bar and the Ctrl-Enter (Cmd-Enter on Mac) shortcut.
  • You can also Shift-Click on a page link/tag to open it in the sidebar (also works on search results).
  • When you have a page open you can open it (again) in the sidebar by Shift-Click’ing the page title.
  • Finally, there’s Ctrl-Shift-o (Cmd-Shift-o on Mac) to open the page link your cursor is on when you’re in block editing mode.
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I also like to keep the TODO page open on the right.

To do so,

  1. use the shortcut to open the TODO page
  2. Shift click the title to open the TODO on the right
  3. Open the home/journal on the left.
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I think the steps in your response is something I am looking for but what is the shortcut to open the todo list?

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@brechmos Search for pages (CTRL/CMD+K) and then type: TODO, it will bring up the TODO page

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This side bar concept to open a page in the sidebar is super cool… and the fact that previously opened links automatically shift down and persist across logins … I wish web browsers adopt the same UI !

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This is a great tip. …because I keep on taking TO DOs on the pages I am currently working on. Opening TODO s page in the sidebar , gives me a glimpse of my actions across all the pages, my actions are buried into. … The point being , TODOs are NOT just a journal specific thing … You can add a TODO anywhere you want , thus aggregating them in a sidebar is lot convenient particularly if you have a wide monitor …

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@Ramses is there a way to transfer a page from the sidebar and open it the main window instead?

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You can click a bullet or page name and it’ll open in the main window.

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