At the top of the sidebar, under your vault's name, is Capture. Click it and Quick Capture opens. The small arrow beside it lists every kind of capture:

The button and every item stay greyed out until you've added a vault, because a capture needs somewhere to go.

After a capture, the floating panel and the menu-bar box show a line like Captured to October 2026 Capture Log with two buttons:

• Review opens the note the capture landed in, in the main window.
• Undo puts that note back the way it was before the capture. If the capture made a new file, Undo moves the file to the Trash. If the file has changed since (you edited it, or it synced), Header leaves it alone and tells you why.

Undo also cancels the capture's reminder in Header. Anything already sent to Apple Reminders or Calendar stays there; Header doesn't delete things in other apps for you.

Under the text box, a quiet line says where the next capture will go, for example Saves to October 2026 Capture Log. Click it to choose one of three destinations. Your choice sticks, and it's the same setting as Settings → General → Capture → Quick captures go to.

This only applies to quick captures. Notes you create with ⌘N are separate Markdown files, as always.

Click More in the capture box to show the extra controls. You can ignore all of them; they reset to a plain note after every capture.

• Type. Note and Source save your text as written. Task turns it into a checkbox (- [ ] …) so it shows up in Tasks and Today. Decision and Question start the text with Decision: or Question:. Meeting starts it with Meeting note: and today's date.
• Flags (in the options menu beside Type): Follow-up, Blocker, Waiting and Important. Each adds a tag such as #follow-up.
• Context lists the #tags, [[links]] and @names Header found in your text, so you can attach them to the capture. Flags and context are written on a Context: line under your text.
• Once More is open, up to three recipes appear as buttons; the rest are in the options menu under More recipes. A recipe is a shortcut that sets the type and flags and adds tags in one click. The built-in ones are Quick, Idea, Decision, Task, Follow-up, Blocker, Meeting, Research, Client and Writer. Follow-up, for example, makes the capture a task with the Follow-up flag.

To make your own, open the options menu and choose Manage Recipes…, then New Recipe. A recipe has a name, a short description, an icon and the tags it applies. You can also turn built-ins off, or bring them back with Reset Built-ins. Recipes label and tag a thought; they don't add headings or empty sections. For a note with a fixed structure, use the editor's Templates instead.

While you type, Header looks for patterns in the text and offers them under Suggested:. It might suggest a type (“need to” suggests Task, “we decided” suggests Decision), a date, a person (from @Sam or “ask Sam”), a [[link]], a #tag, or a flag (“blocked” suggests Blocker). Click Accept all to apply every suggestion, or Edit to pick them one at a time. Nothing is applied until you do.

Separately, a Detected row shows smart tags Header will save with the capture: #idea, #task, #follow-up, #decision, #question or #stress, depending on the wording. They're written on a Tags: line in the capture.

Hashtags you type yourself stay in your text like any other tag, so you can find the capture later under Tags.

Write “Pay the deposit Friday” and Header spots the date. A pill under the box says Detected with the date, followed by “accept the date to set a reminder”. Until you accept it, nothing is scheduled. To accept, click Accept all in the Suggested row, or Edit and pick only the date. The pill then reads Reminder set for and the exact time.

Header understands today, tomorrow (or tmrw), weekday names (the next one to come, never today), and ordinary dates such as “October 30”. For the time:

• If you wrote one, it's kept: “call the dentist tomorrow at 3pm” fires at 3 PM.
• Otherwise the reminder fires at 9 AM that day.
• A “today” reminder accepted after 9 AM moves to the next full hour. A time that has already passed isn't scheduled at all.

When it's time, macOS shows a Header task due notification with Done and Snooze 15m. If you've turned them on in Settings → Calendar, the capture also goes to Apple Reminders (Send task reminders to Apple Reminders) and to your calendar as a 15-minute event (Also add due tasks to Calendar). Both are one-way copies.

Header puts a square-and-pencil icon in the Mac menu bar, labelled Header Quick Capture. Click it for the same capture box in a small popover, without bringing the main window forward. It has the Saves to line, More, the paperclip and a microphone button, and it shares its draft with every other capture box.

The popover stays open after you capture so you can use Review or Undo right there. Below the box is Jump to Note: type in Search every vault to find and open a note. Open App brings the main window forward.

The floating panel you get with ⌃⌥Space is the same box, so everything here works there too.

Drag an image or video onto the capture box (it says Drop visual context), or click the paperclip to choose files. Thumbnails appear under the text, and you can remove one before capturing. You don't need to write anything: an image on its own is a valid capture.

When you capture, Header copies the files into your vault under Header Attachments/2026-10/ and adds them under a Visual context: line, so the photo of the whiteboard sits right below what you wrote about it.

If you clip with a browser extension that saves Markdown into your vault, such as Obsidian Web Clipper or MarkDownload, point it at a folder called Clippings (or Inbox/Clippings) at the top of your vault. When a clip lands there, Header downloads its remote images into an assets folder beside it and adds Header's web-clip properties. The clip stays where it is, so you'll find it in Inbox.

Header only touches files that name a web address in their properties (a source, url, source_url or canonical_url field). If you edit a clip while Header is working on it, Header skips it and tries again later.

The Captures group in the sidebar collects the notes that usually need sorting:

• Inbox shows notes sitting at the top level of your vault, plus anything in a folder named Inbox, Captures, Capture Inbox or Clippings. Your monthly capture log lives at the top level, so it's here too.
• Web Clips appears once your vault has notes in a folder path containing “Web Clips” or “Clipped Pages”.
• Transcripts appears once your vault has notes in a path containing “voice”, “transcripts” or “dictation”.

These are views, not folders: nothing moves when a note appears in one. Move a note to another folder and it leaves the Inbox.

Click Review Captures under Captures in the sidebar, or choose View → Show Review Inspector (⌥⌘I). A panel opens on the right listing your quick captures for Today, Week or Month. The calendar button jumps to a different day, week or month.

Hover over a capture to act on it:

• Edit opens it in the editor, in the file where it lives.
• Save as Note turns it into a note of its own at the top of your vault, with a line saying which log it came from and when. The original stays in the log.
• Delete removes it from its Markdown file after you confirm. Header can't undo this one.

The Month view also holds the Monthly Retro. See Mindprint, Review & Retro.