Home and Stats

Home

Run Deckard: Open Home, or select Home at the top of the Context view or in DECKARD ▾, to open Home, with its Home and Tags tabs. Left/Right Arrow switches tabs. Searches open search pages, and tasks have the Task board.

The Home tab

Three figures sit at the top right, beside ⋯: Due today and Overdue, as the Tasks view counts them, and Done this week, every task finished since the week began. Each opens a search for what it counts; the first two are scoped by deckard.tasks.viewQuery when that is set. Open tasks and the other workspace totals are on Stats.

What’s new: after an update that adds features, Home shows Updated to Deckard 1.23. once, with What’s new and Dismiss.

An empty workspace: with no notes yet, Home shows Create today’s note, Create a work sample, and Check my setup in place of its widgets, which would each say they had nothing to show. Customizing still draws the widgets.

Widgets. A new Home starts with Try next, the search box, the Tasks view, recently opened notes, favorite tags, and saved searches. In the Tasks view widget, the Overdue heading is red, and each row under it says so as a task row does anywhere, such as Overdue 20 days · 2026-09-01, in red. Customize Home, beside the Home and Tags tabs, adds, removes, resizes, and reorders widgets.

A widget that leads somewhere makes its title the link, with a › after it: select Tasks view 53 › to open the Tasks view. A widget that leads nowhere, such as Pinned notes, has a plain title, and so does every widget while Home is being customized.

Tasks gone stale: give a Tasks widget the search is:open AND updated < 30d and the sort Least recently updated. A task’s updated date is its note’s. A Stale tasks widget from an earlier version became this widget, with its own days.

Pinning pins the entry (a heading and what is under it), not the file:

• Deckard: Pin Note to Home pins the entry the cursor is in; Deckard: Unpin Note from Home unpins it.
• Hover a tagged entry in the editor for Pin to Home or Unpin from Home.
• Right-click a result on a search page for the same.

The first pin adds the Pinned notes widget under Home’s search, if Home does not have one and has room for it; when Home already has as many widgets as it can hold, the pin says so and shows in Find’s Pinned list until you make room. Each offers Undo. If the heading is gone, the pin stays on its note and says so. A note with no heading above the cursor is pinned whole.

Gone quiet watches people by default; its gear’s Namespace chooses another your tags use, such as project. It offers each namespace that starts with a letter, so #2026/q1 adds no 2026. It reads @ and #person/… tags, so one person written both ways counts as two tags (Stats flags this). A name’s date is its newest note’s updated: field, daily note day, or file date.

Progress lists project tags by default; its gear’s Namespace chooses another, as Gone quiet’s does. A tag’s tasks are those a search for it finds: the tasks that carry it, and those under a heading or in a note that does. A step counts as part of its task, not as a task of its own. Selecting a row opens the tag’s page, which shows the same bar.

Paging, in a widget’s gear, shows all entries a page at a time, 3, 5, 10, or 20 to a page. The Agenda widget and a saved search’s results are not paged.

⋯, at the top right, holds Customize Home… and Walkthrough, then Tag columns, Theme…, Zen and Page width, then Help on this page.

Customize: choose Customize at the right of the Home and Tags tabs, or Customize Home… in ⋯. Then:

• Drag a widget, or right-click to move it first or last. Switch it between half and full width.
• Open its gear for entry count, paging, a Tasks widget’s search and sort, a saved search, or days to look back.
• Remove it with ×, or add more from + Add widget. A new widget goes at the top, and is outlined for a moment. Home holds 30 widgets at most; once full, it says so and adds none until one is removed.
• Escape closes a widget’s gear.
• Reset widgets… asks, then restores the starting widgets; Finish ends customizing.

While Home is the active editor, the Context sidebar lists every widget Home can add. Click one to show Home, start customizing, and add it. Reset widgets… is there too.

The arrangement is kept in VS Code’s preferences, not your notes.

The Tags tab

• Tags lists namespaced and unnamespaced tags together, each named by what follows its namespace, so #project/alpha/notes reads alpha/notes. Search them, by the tag as written or as its row shows it, narrow with Namespace (a person’s @ tag counts as Person) or to tags without one, and sort alphabetically, by entry count, by most accessed, or by custom rank. The heart on a tag makes it a favorite, and favorites come first whatever the sort. In Rank mode, drag a row, use its context menu’s Move to top and Move to bottom, or press Alt+Up or Alt+Down, which move a tag within favorites or the rest; drag it across to favorite or unfavorite it. Display order does not change your files.
• Searches are kept between visits. While one narrows the list, a line such as Showing 3 of 42 tags matching “vendor” offers Clear search, which also clears Namespace.
• Saved searches are listed below the tags. Select one to reopen it where it was saved, or use Remove.
• Tag columns, in ⋯, sets one through four columns.
• Select a tag to open its page.
• Right-click a tag or entity row, or press Shift+F10 or the menu key, for Rename tag. Every right-click menu in Deckard opens from the keyboard this way.

Stats

Run Deckard: Open Stats to see what needs attention, then totals, then what you open most. A note is a headed entry, and a file holds one or more of them. Under the title, Index last refreshed says how long ago Deckard last read your notes; Reindex, the first row of ⋯ at the top right, reads every note again.

Needs attention shows only non-empty lists, each with a count, or one line saying the workspace is in order:

• Notes Deckard could not read: notes left out of the index, such as by a permissions or encoding error, with the reason. Fix the cause, then reindex.
• Links that open no note: each [[link]] name no note carries, most linked first. Create makes that note, empty, in the notes folder; Create all makes every one after asking.
• Tags that look alike: see below.
• Notes nothing links to: excludes daily, weekly, and monthly notes and parked notes. Shows ten, with Show 40 more.

Totals: every total but Files opens what it counts. Notes counts what Deckard’s search calls a note: a heading with tags of its own, with the untagged headings under it; a note tagged in its front matter, as a whole; each heading where no tag reaches; and each tagged line outside a heading (see What is a note and deckard.noteBoundaries), so it is usually more than Files. Notes, Tasks, and Open tasks open is:note, is:task, and is:open; Tags and Namespaced tags offer their tags; Links, [[links]] and [text](note.md) links alike, opens the Notes Graph with Only links I wrote on; Unlinked notes moves to the list of notes nothing links to. Notes, Tasks, and Open tasks also show a twelve-week line and a change such as +9 in the last 7 days. A task stops being open on its ✅ or ❌ date, or its note’s last change without one. When anything is parked, a line such as Parked: 312 notes, 41 open tasks opens the is:parked search. When any task is cancelled, a Cancelled tasks tile opens is:cancelled. When tasks use a character no status names, such as [!], a line says how many and opens status:unknown; name the character in deckard.tasks.statuses (see Task statuses). Checkbox lines whose status is not a task, such as a pro and con list’s, are counted on a line of their own.

Most viewed lists the tags, namespaced entities, and note entries you open most, counted locally in VS Code preferences.

How often tags are used draws six bars: used once, twice, 3–5, 6–10, 11–25, and 26 or more times, such as Used once: 41 tags. Used once lists its tags with Merge or Merge into…. Other bars offer their tags to open.

Tags written together pairs your twelve most-used tags in a triangle. Each cell counts the notes and tasks carrying both and opens that search (#project/atlas #design). Show as a table lists the pairs by count.

Terms

Last, Terms lists the short terms your notes use, most used first, in two lists of up to 50, each saying how many more there are:

• Used but never defined: each term used in three entries or more that nothing defines, with how many and where it was first used. The row searches for its uses; Define… opens New Note from Type…’s form for a Term with the term filled in.
• Defined: each term with its definition and where it comes from, a term note or the note that first wrote it. The row opens it there.

Tags that look alike

Stats lists pairs of tags that look like one idea spelled twice, clearest first, from the rarer spelling to the one your notes already use. Merge runs the usual merge, with its preview and Undo.

A tag’s own page shows the same at the top of Refine, such as Also written as #proj/atlas (6 entries)., for up to three spellings, with Include in search (searches both) and Merge (reopens on the kept tag if this one is merged away).

Spelling pairs are compared only inside one namespace, so #project/relay and #risk/relay are not a pair. deckard.entityNamespaceAliases collapses one namespace into another permanently, without touching your notes.

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