Workflowy just got a burst of color – users can now apply colors to text and tags anywhere they want. This feature makes it super simple to highlight anything you want to have stand out and lets you easily add visual markers to make organizing and navigating even easier.
What can I color?
You can choose the color of text, the color of text highlights, and the color of any tag. The colors apply everywhere within Workflowy including bullet notes.
How do I color things?
To color text:
- To add color to text, select the text with your cursor and you will see the text menu popup. Click on the arrow next to the icon of the letter “A” to choose either a text color or a background color.
- Once you’ve done this you can then select more text and simply click on the “A” in the text popup to apply the last color or use the keyboard shortcut. (CMD+Shift+H on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+H on Windows)
Note: In the mobile version, select the text you want to color and you should see the same icon above the mobile keyboard on the right-hand side.
To color tags:
- To color a tag, place your cursor over a # tag or an @ tag and then click the down arrow to the right of it.
- Choose the color for the tag – this will also update any existing tags with the same name.
Note: In the mobile version, tap and hold any tag to bring up the color menu, then tap on the color you want for the tag.
What can I use this for?
Here are some ideas on how to get started using colors in Workflowy.
- Pasting entire articles / documents into Workflowy and highlighting only the most important parts
- Using text color to signal edits made by another team member
- Highlight your top-level bullets to make it easier to spot them when you’re working several levels down
- Setting up a color coding system to tag todo items #todo #doing #done #paused #cancelled
- Set up a tag system with color to signal item priorities #low #medium #high
Back to you
We can’t wait to see how users experiment with and play with colors. Feel free to share how you plan to use colors in the comments below!
We also want to thank all the beta users that provided valuable feedback during the development of the feature. Your feedback has helped make colors more useful and easier to use for all users.
Excellent! Always nice to see companies continuing to invest in their products. 😬👍🏼
THX! it’s great!
I wonder if you could implement a search function for nodes that contain highlighted texts. I use highlight since a particular paragraph, passage or word is important to me.
While I can easily search/locate them by tagging (use either # or @), doing that on top of highlighting is cumbersome.
Awesome!!! Thank you. This app is increasingly useful
Anyway, great feature! Thanks a lot!
Still open for me: how to navigate with only keyboard to select the wanted color.
I’ve been using this feature from the experimental features settings, and it’s been working great. There are two things I wish were improved, though:
1) Any chance Workflowy can remember the last used color across page refreshes? It’s quite convenient to type Ctrl+Shift+H to automatically highlight an text selection with the last used style, but whenever I refresh the page I have to select the color manually again.
2) Could the OPML export mode make such highlighted content be indicated with proper
<mark>tags, rather than<span>? That way it would be more portable (not to mention semantically meaningful).Good points! Adding them to our things to consider
For a moment I thought there was some styling problem and that my tag colors were getting broken. Then I realized I was on a search result view and the tag highlighting was interfering with the tag colors (that work fine elsewhere). Not sure if this can be adjusted per tag, but posted in the interest of sharing the observation/confusion.
Very cool. Please incorporate a format paintbrush method similar to other office software.
console.log("Hello Workflowy")Mmm.. colorful data… Brilliant!
Thanks for this great feature! I’ve been looking for this for long time!
Awesome!!! Thank you Workflowy team!!!
Yay! I asked about color years ago and now it’s here! Wonderful! Now, if I could set up a t0-do list with dates and reminders!
I was just wondering the other day when colors would come to Workflowy. Bam! Here! Oh, thank you so very much. Rather than say “now give me this feature”, I’ll just leave it at this. I appreciate your work very much.
Love to see it 🙂
How do you color a full list of bullets? When I highlight a list, the color menu does not come up.
The best just got better! Thanks.
This is awesome. I would LOVE to see some automation options for this (as in, always color #task in yellow, #question in blue, etc). Right now this requires a lot of extra clicks every time. Automating would take this to the next level!
If you give a tag a color, it’ll applied to that tag anywhere and every time you use it. Maybe reload the page / restart the browser ?
I sometimes had the problem of a tag color not being applied everywhere while setting it on a tag during beta a few days ago, and doing this resolved the issue.
Excelente !!!! Muchas gracias
Amazing!!!
I’ve been using this already (in Beta?) and loving it. Long time WF user from 2012 and didn’t think I’d care about having colors, but I do.
Finally! now I can disable my custom script that did just that!
Me top ! YES!
nice
Yes!!! Thank you!!
Amazing..
Colors will make this platform more interactive
Nice!
I am on iOS 13.4.1. Do I need iOS 14 for this to work? I upgraded the WF app today, but color is not an option anywhere.
This is great! Can I search by color?
Not yet! We need to make search extensible so we can build this sort of thing easily and for all the features.
It’s looks great, but in reality it’s not working on my iPad. None of the new options appear when the text is highlighted.
Works for me like a charm. Did you update the app ?
I found the little symbol to activate the feature. And yes I did update the app. 👍
Great feature! Thanks!
Finally! Been using flowy since 2013 – about time.
Yes, yes, yes! thank you!
You are awesome! Please add clicking on dates and choosing: Next Week, This weekend, Later Today etc. buttons.
The drop downs by tags is somewhat annoying (gets in the way of interacting with the tag directly).
I feel this too, I am sure it’ll be improved in the near future.
This looks fun ! Thanks, Workflowy Team !!!
Thanks! Is there a way to highlight multiple tags at once?
Excellent – been using the beta and its a real benefit!
awesome!
Any shortcuts for the colors?
Great !
Better make the API…
beautiful!
Still sad I can’t impress others with this new feature – is it too early to suggest that the next step would be to offer someone I share a database with the option whether or not to accept the colour scheme too? (11/10 for the feature though!!!)
Hallelujah!
Thank you, I’ve been waiting for this feature for so long!!
Great feature, waiting for shortcuts for colors 🙂 WF is great because all can be done using keyboard, but colors for now still need mouse clicks (too much tbh).
Great job!
shift+comman+h
Hm, yes with shift+ctrl+h the color-menu pops up. But then? How can I navigate to the color I want using only keyboard? Arrows up, down, left, right do not work.
shift+command+h applies the last colour format previously applied
Exactly. So once you’ve set a colour you can never open the colour selector with the shortcut again, you can only redo the colour. You should be able to open the colour selector with the keyboard whenever you want.
So many tools neglect the keyboard! Drives me bonkers. I agree with adding more keyboard functionality here and in other features. (Still don’t know why we can’t navigate to the parent item for example with a keyboard shortcut (or compress the parent while the cursor is in a child item for another example))
Yessssss! I have wanted this feature for YEARS!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Woot! Brilliant!
Merci !