If you have spent any time organising snippets into piles, you will have noticed that Pilcrow gives you two different options for getting a snippet from one place to another: Send to pile and Move to pile. At first glance they might look like two names for the same thing, but they behave quite differently, and knowing which one to reach for will save you from either losing track of a snippet or ending up with duplicates you did not mean to create.
Snippets do not belong to a single pile
Before getting into the difference between the two actions, it is worth remembering how piles work in Pilcrow. A snippet, whether it is a note, a list, a link or an image, is not filed away inside one pile the way a document sits inside a single folder. Instead, a snippet can belong to several piles at once, and each pile is really just a view onto the snippets that are relevant to it. This is the whole point of the laundry pile idea behind Pilcrow: piles are loose, flexible groupings around whatever you are currently focused on, rather than a rigid filing cabinet where every item has exactly one home.
That underlying structure is what makes both Send to pile and Move to pile possible, and it explains why they behave the way they do.
Send to pile: adding without removing
Send to pile is the additive option. When you send a snippet to a pile, it is added to that pile while remaining exactly where it already was. If the snippet was already sitting in two other piles, it will now be in three. Nothing is taken away.
This is useful whenever a piece of information is genuinely relevant to more than one thing you are working on. A packing list for a trip might belong in both your travel pile and a shared pile with the person you are travelling with. Sending it to the second pile means you can both see and tick off the same list from your own vantage point, because underneath it is still the same snippet rather than a copy.
Move to pile: adding and removing in one step
Move to pile does something different. It sends the snippet to the pile you choose, and at the same time removes it from the pile you were viewing it in when you started the action. The net effect is that the snippet leaves its current pile and lands in the new one, which is the behaviour most people expect when they hear the word “move”.
This is the option to use when a snippet’s relevance to its current pile has genuinely come to an end, and it now belongs somewhere else instead. If you have been collecting notes in a general working pile and one of them turns out to be specifically about a project you have just created a dedicated pile for, moving it tidies up the general pile without you having to remember to go back and remove it manually afterwards.
The practical difference, side by side
The simplest way to think about it is this. Send to pile only ever adds a pile to a snippet’s list of piles. Move to pile adds the new pile and takes away the one you moved it from, leaving the snippet’s membership in any other piles untouched.
So if a snippet already belongs to two piles and you move it out of one of them into a third, it will end up in the third pile and the one it still had, but not the one you moved it away from. Only the pile you were viewing it in at the time is affected.
One thing worth knowing
Move to pile is not available from every view. Your default All Snippets pile holds every snippet you have, and it is not possible to move a snippet out of it, since every snippet lives there by default regardless of which other piles it also belongs to. From All Snippets you can still send a snippet on to any pile you like, but the move option only appears once you are viewing a snippet from a pile other than the default one.
Which one should you use
As a general rule, use Send to pile when a snippet is relevant to more than one part of your life and you want it visible in both places at once. Use Move to pile when a snippet has simply changed homes and no longer needs to be cluttering up the pile it started in. Both actions are quick, and neither one is reversible from within the pile view itself, so it is worth pausing for a moment to check which behaviour you actually want before you tap through.