Set Document Type
Set Document Type turns a markdown document into a tracked Plan or Decision from the editor's Actions menu, without hand-writing YAML frontmatter.
Set Document Type promotes the markdown document you are looking at into a tracked item. Pick a type and Nimbalyst writes the tracker frontmatter for you, the tracker header appears at the top of the document, and the document starts showing up on the kanban board alongside everything else in your tracker.
It is the one-click version of the YAML frontmatter route to creating a tracker item.
Where to find it
Open the three-dot Actions menu at the top right of a markdown document and hover Set Document Type. A submenu lists the available types.
The action is available when all of the following are true:
The file is a markdown file (
.md)You are in WYSIWYG view, not raw Markdown view
The document is not already owned by a tracker item. In the tracker's own document view the type lives on the record, so the menu item is hidden
The same submenu is on the floating document actions button inside the editor.
The available types
Two types are offered:
Plan
Flag (blue)
A larger initiative with a status workflow and a progress percentage
Decision
Gavel (purple)
An architectural or product decision, with the chosen option recorded as a field
These are the two built-in types designed to live as a whole document rather than as a row on a board. Bugs, tasks, features, and ideas are usually short enough to belong in the tracker itself, so they are not offered here. See Creating Items for those.
Other types, and asking the agent
The submenu is limited to Plan and Decision, but the underlying mechanism is not. Any tracker type can own a whole document as long as its definition sets modes.fullDocument: true, so you can ask the agent for the ones the menu doesn't list:
"Make this document a milestone" "Turn this into a customer-feedback item"
The agent writes the trackerStatus frontmatter, and the tracker picks the file up on its next scan exactly as if you had used the menu. It can also create the type first — ask it to define a custom tracker type and it writes the YAML into .nimbalyst/trackers/. See Custom Tracker Types.
Among the built-ins, Milestone and Release are full-document types too, so both work when asked for by name even though they are absent from the menu.
Asking for a type that is inline-only (Bug, Task, or Idea) is a quiet no-op. The frontmatter lands in the file and looks right, but the tracker ignores it and the document never appears on the board. The same is true of a custom type whose YAML leaves fullDocument at false. If you asked for a type and nothing showed up, check modes.fullDocument in that type's definition.
What it does to the document
Choosing Plan writes a planStatus block at the top of the file with the plan's default fields:
Choosing Decision writes a decisionStatus block with the decision fields (decisionId, status, chosen, priority, owner, stakeholders, tags).
Once the frontmatter is there:
A tracker header appears at the top of the document showing the type's fields. Edit status, priority, owner, and the rest from that header.
The item appears in the tracker panel and on the kanban board.
Edits flow both ways. Change the status in the tracker UI and the file updates; change it in the file and the tracker updates.
The document is marked dirty and autosave writes it to disk.
Switch to raw Markdown view from the same three-dot menu to see the frontmatter block directly.
Changing or removing the type
Reopen the submenu at any time. The current type carries a checkmark. Picking the other type converts the document.
When a type is set, a Remove Type entry appears at the bottom of the submenu. It strips the tracker frontmatter and the document goes back to being an ordinary markdown file, dropping off the board.
Setting a type replaces the document's entire frontmatter block, and Remove Type deletes the entire frontmatter block. Any other keys you keep up there (a description, tags used by a static site generator, anything an extension reads) are lost. If your document has frontmatter you care about, copy it somewhere first, or edit the trackerStatus block by hand in raw Markdown view instead.
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