Managing Projects - Pointy Notebook

A project gathers the templates, steps, and display choices that organize an analysis. It selects which step templates are relevant, groups the step instances you work on, and stores its own position in the project list and whether it is hidden or visible. The definition lives in your Git-backed user repository. Every home-page change (rename, hide, reorder) is a versioned commit that stays inspectable. Nothing disappears into application state.

The project list shows all projects with row-level actions such as edit, hide, and delete.

If you want to work inside a project after opening it, continue with Building Workflows (Steps).

Opening, creating, and renaming projects

Click a project row to open it. To create one, use the + button in the Projects table header; Pointy asks for the initial name and template selection before writing the new project definition.

The Projects table header with the add-project control hovered alongside Show Hidden and Unhide All.

The new project form lets you name your project before saving.

Open a project and click Edit project in its header to change the name, preset, or active templates. The edit form is the same one used when creating a project, so the controls described in Choosing project templates apply when editing as well.

Project and step rows also show a relative last modified timestamp when Pointy can read the corresponding Git history from the user repository; hover the timestamp to see the exact time represented by that history.

Choosing project templates

The project form includes two related controls:

Preset: an admin-defined bundle of templates, such as a standard workflow type. New projects default to the first preset by sortKey when presets are available.
Templates: a custom list of active step templates for the project. Choose Custom (no preset) when the project should not follow a preset bundle.

This form appears when you create a project from the home page and again when you click Edit project in an open project's header. Changes to the preset or template list take effect immediately when editing: sections appear or disappear to match the active templates, and steps belonging to a removed template are preserved in the warning described next.

The project edit form with Preset and Templates controls, used for both creating a project and editing it from the project page header.

Only active templates get their own step sections inside the project. Existing assigned steps whose template is no longer active are not deleted; Pointy moves them into a collapsible warning at the top of the project so you can decide whether to re-enable the template, unassign the step, or leave it hidden from the main workflow tables.

If a project references an unknown preset, an unknown template, or a step id that no longer exists in the user repository, Pointy surfaces that validation error in the project row and again inside the project view instead of silently dropping the information.

Hiding and showing projects

Hiding a project removes it from the default home-page list without deleting it. This is useful when you want to keep old work around but reduce visual clutter.

Use:

Hide on a project row to hide a single project
Show Hidden in the table header to include hidden projects in the list
Unhide All in the table header to make every hidden project visible again

Reordering projects

You can reorder projects with the drag handle shown on each row. The order is saved, so the home page keeps the same project ordering on reload.

A close-up of the drag handle used to reorder rows.

Deleting projects

Deleting a project removes the project itself from the UI and deletes its projects/<id>.nix definition from the user repository.

Jumping directly to a step

The header search box is a global step search. It does not search project names. Instead, it lets you jump straight to a step from anywhere in the UI.

Selecting a result opens the corresponding project and highlights the chosen step.

For step-level organization inside a project, see Building Workflows (Steps). For running steps and browsing outputs, see Execution and Data Management.