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Terminal > Drive

Notebooks

Markdown notebooks with slash-menu blocks and live preview.

Notebooks are markdown documents that live in Mel Drive — runbooks, onboarding notes, incident checklists, anything you'd otherwise scatter across gists and wiki pages. They're stored as plain *.notebook.md files under ~/.local/share/mel/drive/, and Drive seeds a short notebooks guide on first run.

Editing

Click a notebook in the Drive tree and it opens in a markdown editor in the center panel — Drive stays on the left, your terminal on the right, so you can write a runbook while actually running it.

There is no save button: edits autosave on a short debounce (about 600 ms after you stop typing). Close the editor whenever you like; your text is already on disk.

The / block menu

Type / in the editor to open the block menu — a quick way to insert structured blocks without remembering markdown syntax. Navigate with ↑ / ↓ and insert with Enter, or just click an entry; the inserted snippet replaces the / you typed. Available blocks:

  • Command — a fenced block for a shell command
  • Code — a fenced code block
  • Embed
  • Heading 1 / 2 / 3
  • Text — a plain paragraph
  • Bulleted and numbered lists
  • To-do — a checkbox item
  • Divider — a horizontal rule

Press Escape to dismiss the menu without inserting anything.

Edit / preview toggle

The editor header has a two-way toggle:

  • Editing ✎ — the raw markdown text editor with the / block menu.
  • Preview 👁 — the rendered document: headings, lists, code blocks, dividers, all formatted.

Flip to preview to read a runbook cleanly while you execute its steps in the terminal beside it.

Why notebooks in a terminal?

The point is proximity. A deploy runbook as a notebook means the commands you need to copy are one pane away from the shell that runs them — and because notebooks are plain markdown files on disk, they diff, version, and grep like everything else you own. The global search and project explorer cover your repo; notebooks cover the knowledge that isn't in any repo.

Creating one

Use the + menu in the Drive header → Notebook, or drop a something.notebook.md file into ~/.local/share/mel/drive/ yourself.

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