In the first of the reMarkable series, I briefly went over 12 basic features of the reMarkable. You can read Distraction-Free Learning on the reMarkable here. The final post in the series is reMarkable Use Cases.

Although the reMarkable is a simple distraction-free device and appears to be merely a good note taking scratch pad, hidden away are many features that make the device so special. Let’s dive a little deeper and I’ll show you some of the not-so-obvious hidden features that you will appreciate and use every day.

Let’s start with a few that are simple and that you will use daily.

Keeping a note in plain sight even when you’re reMarkable is asleep:

Wherever you are on your tablet tap the three lines at the top left of the screen. On the left side bar, go all the way to the bottom and tap Settings. On this screen you’ll see General, Wi-Fi, Cloud, Security, Display, Accessibility, and Help. Tap on Display. Toggle Visible content to On. Now it will show your open document or overview even when your device is asleep in standby.

1. How I use this: If I want to keep notes, tasks, a PDF, or my daily planner visible all the time, with the Visible content toggle set to On, my reMarkable can go to sleep and I can still see my note. If the tablet goes to sleep, just press the Power button and it immediately wakes. This is a setting I find very useful and I use every day.

Quick Undo And Redo:

This one is super easy. To Undo your last mark just tap the screen lightly with two fingers. To Redo your last mark that was erased, tap lightly with three fingers. You can also see arrows in your sidebar to undo and redo. Do this until it feels very natural to you. You can undo or redo as many times as you like. This will really speed up your writing and editing.

Viewing and closing a view:

Normally, if you are right handed, when you have a notebook open you have a sidebar on left side and an X at the top right corner. The X is used to close a view. The circle with a dot in it, when tapped, hides or shows the side bar and the X, leaving you more space to write unencumbered by the sidebar and the X.

1. How I use this: Generally when I’m handwriting on a page I want as much room as possible, so I tap the circle with the dot in it and hide the sidebar. Want a quicker way to exit a page without showing the X and the side bar? Simple. Just swipe down from the top of the page with one finger and voilà, you have exited that page. Want to get back to a recent screen? Swipe down from the top with two fingers as I will explain in the next tip.

Swipe down from the top with two fingers:

When you swipe down from the very top of your tablet with two fingers it will bring up a list across the top of your latest documents. You can scroll through the list and choose any document by tapping it with your finger or your marker.

1. How I use this: Using this simple gesture you can go back-and-forth between various documents you have viewed. For example, I might have my daily view and also a PDF I recently viewed. Instead of returning to the main menu from my daily view, which requires four taps to get to my PDFs, I use this technique. Swipe down from the very top with two fingers and tap on any of your recent views.

Moving the sidebar:

The sidebar for right-handers is usually on the left side, with the X on the upper right-hand side, which is used to close the view. You can change the sidebar position by going to Settings>Accessibility. There you can choose for the sidebar to be on the left or the right. Left handers prefer the sidebar to be on the right, so they don’t trigger it with their hand. A relatively new feature is that you can move the sidebar yourself right from any screen. In this instance let’s say that the side bar is on the left. At the very top is a circle with a dot in it. If you long press on that dot and move it to the right side, the top, or the bottom, when you release the dot the sidebar stays in that chosen position.

1. How I use this: I tried the sidebar on the bottom for a while, but I found that I triggered it too often with my palm, so I moved it back to the left-hand side, because I’m right handed. Next I’ll show you one of the most exciting features of this reMarkable tablet

Converting to text:

One of the most amazing and useful features of the reMarkable is converting handwriting to text. You can convert handwriting to text on your Mac or on your tablet. I don’t see any way to do that on your iPad or iPhone. You can convert a whole page to text, or just a portion of your handwritten notes on a page. Converting to text both on the Mac and on the tablet only converts the one page that you were looking at to text. If you have multiple pages in a notebook you have convert them one by one. The good thing is that when you convert a whole page, the typed text is placed on a separate page in the same notebook, so you do not lose the handwritten text. Sometimes you have to refer back to the handwritten notes to see what you actually wrote, if the converted text doesn’t make sense. For the most part the conversion is remarkably accurate.

1. To convert a handwritten page to text, open your sidebar. At the bottom of the sidebar you’ll see three vertical dots. Tap them. A number of options are exposed, the first being Convert To Text. Tap Convert To Text and the typed text magically appears on the next page. Swipe with one finger left to right to go back a page and see your handwritten page. A quick note: If you have a mix of handwriting and text on a single page, the only thing converted and showing on the next page will be the handwritten notes, excluding the typed text.
2. What if you want to convert only a portion of the handwritten notes on a page to typed text? Open the sidebar on your tablet and you will see a square icon made of dotted lines. That is called the Lasso. Tap the Lasso and draw a marquee around any of the handwriting that you want to convert to text. Once you have “lassoed” the handwriting it will be enclosed in a shaded rectangle. A box with four options will appear below the shaded rectangle. The options are Cut, Copy, Convert To Text (aa), and Trash. Tap on the Convert to Text (aa) option and the handwriting will convert to text. The big difference here is that the text appears on the same page as the handwritten notes, AND, the handwritten text is gone. Only the typed text remains. So there is no way to check to see if your handwritten text matches the typed text. None of your unselected handwriting is affected.

Using the Lasso:

Now that you know what the Lasso is, let’s look at some of the ways you can use it. We’ve already gone over the Convert To Text option. The other three options are Cut, Copy, and Move To Trash. Move to Trash is pretty obvious. It deletes whatever is selected within the marquee. The Cut and Copy options place the selection onto the reMarkable clipboard. Now it can be pasted anywhere on the same page, on another page of the notebook, or it can be pasted into any notebook page on your reMarkable, making this an easy way to move handwritten text to another location on your reMarkable.

1. But that’s not all the “Lassoed” handwritten text can do. You’ll notice that the rectangle surrounding your lassoed text has a small square at each corner and a circle in the middle of the top of the rectangle. Drag any of the squares at the corners and the handwritten text is resized. Tap and hold on the circle and drag it slightly to the right or to the left, and your marquee and all the text within it is rotated. Release it when you get it to the orientation that you like. One instance where this might be handy is if you have written some text in the normal fashion across the page but you want to use it as an annotation on a PDF and place it vertically along either edge of the PDF. To do this, rotate the text to the desired angle and then release your finger or the marker. Now touch within the marquee with your finger or the marker and hold, dragging it to any position you’d like on the page.
   It should be noted that this pertains not only to handwritten text, but to sketches also. And you can copy it to another notebook, or to a PDF you have on your reMarkable tablet.
2. One other way you can use the lasso: Yes, there’s more! What if you want to move a lot of text that extends beyond the viewing area of that page, since your page can be infinitely long? There is one little known feature that makes this super easy to do. Here’s how.
   
   1. Select the lasso icon in the sidebar. Now draw, using your marker, horizontally across the page in a relatively straight fashion (it doesn’t have to be perfectly straight) in between the text you want to move and the text you want to remain. Hold at the end of the line for about a second or two. An option will appear just below the line you’ve drawn that says Select Below. Tap in that option box and all of the text below your line will be selected, no matter how much text is below the line. Once selected you’ll see the same four options you saw when you use the Lasso earlier – Cut, Copy, Convert to Text, and Move to Trash. You can resize it, rotate it, or by placing your finger or your marker within the shaded marquee, you can move all of that text up or down the page. Press and hold within the marquee, either with your marker or with your finger, and drag it to the desired position. When it is in the correct position, tap once anywhere outside the marquee, the marquee disappears and the text remains. You can always undo what you’ve done with a two finger tap on the screen. And you can undo as many times as you want. Each two finger tap will take you back one step at a time.

There is so much more to this ”simple” tablet.

I’ll just mention a few and you can do the research if you’re interested in those features.

1. Global vs. Page-Level Tags: While nesting folders is great for high-level structure, reMarkable allows you to tag individual pages inside a notebook—not just the notebook file itself. By adding keywords to specific pages, you can filter across all your notebooks simultaneously via the Tags overview menu (Menu > Tags), creating a dynamic cross-notebook index without deep folder hierarchies. Learn more about how to set up and navigate page tags in reMarkable’s official Tags guide.
   
   2. Building a “Sticker Sheet” Page: Building a “Sticker Sheet” Page Instead of redrawing complex shapes, bullet icons, or recurring table structures from scratch every time, you can maintain a dedicated “Sticker Sheet” notebook page. Draw your custom symbols once, select them with the Selection tool (lasso), and copy them. You can then paste those elements across different pages or completely different notebooks whenever you need them. Learn more about using the selection tool to copy and paste content in reMarkable’s official Move, Copy, and Duplicate guide.
   3. Quick Sheets as a Scratchpad: When a fast thought, phone number, or sudden idea hits, tapping “Quick sheet” on the home screen immediately opens a single-page scratchpad without asking you to name a notebook or select a folder first. It keeps your primary notebooks clean by giving you a temporary workspace—once your thought is captured, you can use the selection tool to move the notes into a permanent notebook or simply delete the page later. Learn more about capturing immediate thoughts in reMarkable’s official Start Creating guide.
   4. Read on reMarkable Extension: Instead of staring at glowing screens to read long-form web articles or industry research, you can push online text directly to your tablet with a single click. Installing the Read on reMarkable browser extension strips away pop-ups, ads, and sidebars, delivering a clean EPUB or notebook file straight to your device so you can read and annotate in distraction-free focus. Learn how to set up and use the browser extension in reMarkable’s official Read on reMarkable guide.

Conclusion

In the next and final article in this series, I’ll go over some real-world workflows, and how I use my reMarkable every day.

I hope you will try some of the simpler gestures and features on your reMarkable. Even after 3 years using the tablet daily, I still manage to find some tiny little feature that becomes part of my daily routine.

I welcome your comments and questions. You can contact me by leaving a comment in the section below. If you’d like to be notified when the next post comes out, subscribe in the sidebar on the front page on in the footer at the bottom of each page. You’ll receive a confirmation email. Click on the Confirm link and that’s it. You will be notified when each post is published.

Ciao for now, this is Randino signing off.