Composing notes: extract, split & merge

Altretta lets you reshape your notes — extract a passage, split one note into many, or merge several into one — without ever losing content, because every restructuring is recorded in signed, reversible history. Notes grow messy; composing is how you clean them up with confidence.

Why compose

A single note starts as a scratchpad and slowly becomes three topics wearing one title. Or five short notes really want to be one reference. In most tools, fixing that means cut-and-paste across files and hoping you didn't drop a paragraph or break a link. Altretta treats extract, split, and merge as first-class operations that keep your links intact and your history whole.

Extract a selection

Extract pulls a highlighted passage out of the current note and into a brand-new note, leaving a link behind where the text used to be.

Select the passage

Highlight the section that deserves to be its own note.

Extract it to a new note

Altretta creates a new note from the selection and gives it a title.

A link is left in place

The original spot now holds a wikilink to the new note, so the connection is preserved and the parent note still reads cleanly.

Extract is the fastest way to grow your vault organically. When a paragraph inside a meeting note turns into its own topic, extract it — you get an atomic note plus an automatic backlink, and the original stays readable.

Split one note into several

Split breaks a long note into multiple notes at once — useful when a document has quietly become several documents. Altretta divides the content into separate notes and links them so nothing is orphaned.

Merge notes together

Merge does the reverse: it combines several notes back into one, folding their content together in order. Reach for it when a cluster of tiny notes reads better as a single reference, or when a split went one step too far.

Nothing is ever lost

Restructuring is where second brains usually accumulate quiet damage — a merge silently drops a heading, a split loses a link. Altretta rules that out:

Recoverable. Extract, split, and merge write ordinary notes, so each affected note keeps its version history — you restore a note to its pre-restructuring version rather than replaying an inverse operation.
Tracked. Because Altretta keeps a signed history of your vault, every compose operation is a signed step you can travel back through — you can see exactly which note gave up which text, and when.
Append-only. History is never rewritten; a merge adds a new signed version rather than erasing the notes it came from.

This is the payoff of Altretta's append-only design: aggressive restructuring is safe. Reshape freely, knowing time-travel can take you back to any state before the change.

Check consistency after composing

Splitting and merging can introduce subtle contradictions — a claim you edited in one half but not the other, or two merged notes that disagreed. After a big restructuring, run an AI consistency check to catch them.

The consistency review reads across your composed notes and flags claims that contradict the rest of your vault, showing each one next to its sources so you can verify and resolve it rather than letting two conflicting versions coexist.

Make it a habit: split or merge, then run the consistency review over the affected notes. It's the cheapest way to keep a fast-moving set of notes internally honest.

Writing overview

The full picture of authoring notes in Altretta.

Links & embeds

The wikilinks that hold extracted and split notes together.

Activity log & consistency review

Catch contradictions a split or merge introduced.

Signed history

Why every restructuring is tracked and reversible.

Glossary

Definitions for extract, split, merge, and signed history.