Bubble Menu

The bubble menu is the contextual toolbar that appears when you select text. It combines common formatting with actions for turning the selection into another note or moving selected tasks to a dated note.

How to Use the Bubble Menu

1. Select any text in your note by clicking and dragging
2. The bubble menu automatically appears above your selection
3. Click any button to apply formatting
4. The menu disappears when you click elsewhere

Available Formatting Options

The bubble menu includes:

• Common inline and block formatting tools
• Highlight — choose a background color; selecting the active color again removes the highlight
• Writing Assistant — rewrite the selection inline and review the result before accepting it
• Add to Ask Octarine — attach a snapshot of the selection to the current Ask Octarine draft
• Extract to note — create a note from the selected Markdown and replace the source selection with a doclink
• Move to an existing note — append the selected Markdown to a note you choose and replace the source selection with a doclink
• Move task to date — move a selection made entirely of tasks to Today, Tomorrow, This week, or a custom date

Extracting or moving a selection requires an active Pro or trial license. If the source changes while Octarine is saving the destination, Octarine preserves the source text rather than replacing a newer edit.

See Formatting for how dated task moves handle nested tasks, backlinks, and Undo.

When the Bubble Menu Won't Appear

The bubble menu only appears when you select text in an editable note. It doesn't appear when:

• The note is locked or otherwise read-only
• The inline Writing Assistant is already open for the selection
• You've selected an image, video, link preview, code block, horizontal divider, or math block
• The selection is part of a regular link, doclink, or tag
• You've selected an entire table cell, row, or column using the table controls

The menu can still appear when you select text inside a table cell, but it only shows inline formatting options. Headings, links, block formatting, lists, Writing Assistant actions, and the extract or move actions are hidden.

Inside a bullet, numbered, or task list, the heading, callout, code block, and quote options are hidden because those block types can't be applied to an individual list item.