Notes¶

Markdown in, Markdown out. Nothing in between.

A note is written as rich text — headings, lists, quotations, code — and stored as the Markdown it looks like. That is not a detail about the database: it is what makes a note yours. Export gives you the same text you were looking at, and on the day this program is gone, every note opens in any editor.

Writing¶

Start typing. The first line is the title — always, and re-derived every time you save, so a note you rewrite the top of is called by what it now says rather than by what it once did.

Style	Written as	Shortcut
Title	`#` at the start of the line	pick it in Aa
Heading	`##`
Subheading	`###`
Quote	`>`
Code block	three backticks, with an optional language
Bullet and numbered lists	`-` and `1.`, nested with Tab
Bold	two asterisks around the words	⌘B
Italic	one asterisk around the words	⌘I
Underline	a `u` tag around the words	⌘U
Strikethrough	two tildes around the words
Code	one backtick around the words

Every line becomes exactly one block. Markdown would normally join consecutive lines into a paragraph; here it does not, because you typed a line and expect to get it back.

Press the source button in the toolbar to see the note as the file it is. Edits there are edits to the note.

Pictures¶

Paste one, or drag it onto the note. It is stored with the note and travels with it in an export. Every raster format works; SVG is stored but not shown inline — it is a document that can run script, and a note is not a place to run somebody else's.

Click one to see it whole. In the note it is scaled down to the width of the column — a photo off a phone is four thousand pixels across — so what you are looking at is a thumbnail that does not look like one. The full-size view has a button that copies the picture to the clipboard, and a link that opens it in its own tab. Escape closes it and puts the cursor back where it was.

Copying converts to PNG on the way out when it has to. Clipboards take PNG and little else, and a photo off a phone is a JPEG — without the conversion the copy either fails or succeeds with something nothing will paste.

Code blocks¶

A fenced block is coloured for the language it names, and guesses when it does not. Each one carries a Copy button in its corner.

Linking¶

Three kinds of reference, parsed out of the text as you write it:

You type	It means
`#Firma`	The project — the same `#Firma` quick add understands, not a second kind of tag
`[[Møde med Anders]]`	Another note, by its title
A pasted task link	That task

Links are an index over the text, rebuilt every time the note is saved. The text stays the truth.

The interesting direction is backwards. A task shows what has been written about it, and a project shows the notes filed in it — without anybody having to remember to attach anything. Write #Firma in a note and it appears on that project's page.

A link to something that has been deleted reads as a dead link. It is a fact about the note, and it should not vanish because something it mentioned did.

A note belongs to a project, or to nobody.

In a project: everybody who can read the project can read the note, and an editor can change it. Choose it under Share in at the foot of the note.
In no project: yours, and nobody else's.

There is no folder tree. Projects, groups and labels already exist, are already shared and already have roles — a second hierarchy to file things in is one too many, and a note in a project inherits every one of those answers.

Filing a note in a project is the right tool when the note belongs with a body of work, and the wrong one when it is just let Sofie see this. Del med personer at the foot of the note does the second: this note, this person, as reader or editor. Only the note's owner can share it.

Type an email address rather than picking a name, and one of two things happens. An address that already has an account is shared with straight away. One that does not gets an invitation — a link that creates the account and the share together, so the note is theirs the moment they sign up. Invitations wait in the panel under the note, where they can be withdrawn; that is the only way back, since only the token's hash is stored and a link sent to the wrong address cannot be looked up.

Naming somebody in a note¶

Writing @Sofie in a note shares it with her and tells her. Naming somebody in a note is wanting them to read it, and doing it as two acts — write the name, then open the panel and find the person — meant the second was forgotten, and the note sat there addressing somebody who could not see it. The editor suggests names after @, the same way # suggests projects.

Only the owner's mentions share. An editor may write the name; giving somebody else's note away is the owner's alone.
As a reader, which is the least that satisfies "look at this". A role you have raised in the panel is never lowered by a mention.
Only a name that has just appeared counts. A note is saved on every typing pause, so without that every save would be another share and another notification about the same name.

Finding¶

The list groups itself: favourites first, then Today, Yesterday, This week, and then by month. Sort by created, last touched or name, and the grouping follows — sorted by name it groups by first letter instead.

Search finds a word wherever it is:

gron finds grøn. Unicode does not consider ø an accented o, so stripping diacritics is not enough for Danish. A folded copy of every note is indexed beside the original.
inventory finds keepInventory. An index is built of whole words, and a decade of notes is full of commands and identifiers that are several words in one. When the index has nothing, the text itself is read.
Results are ranked by how well they match, with the title weighted ten times the body. A word in the title is what the note is about; the same word once in a long body is a mention.

Two places to search from, and they now agree. The field above the list filters it in place. ⌘K searches everything at once — tasks, projects, notes and the settings — and picking a note from it opens that note with the rest of the matches still in the list beside it. It used to drop you on the ordinary list, so the other results existed only in the popup you had just closed. The address carries the search, which also means a search worth keeping can be bookmarked or sent to somebody.

Putting notes away¶

Two different things, and the difference matters:

Archive — this is finished and I do not want to read past it. It stays findable and comes back whenever you ask.
Trash — this was a mistake. It is gone in thirty days.

Select several with ⌘-click and shift-click to archive or delete them together.

In and out¶

Export gives you a zip of Markdown files, one per note, with the dates in a YAML front matter block that Obsidian and Bear also read:

---
created: 2019-04-02T10:15:00Z
modified: 2024-11-30T21:04:00Z
---

# Møde med Anders

Han vil gerne have kaffe hver uge.

Import takes the same shape back. Pictures travel in the zip beside the notes, and the links in the text are relative — so a note and its pictures must be in the same archive, which matters when a large export is split into parts.

Two things to know before importing:

Nothing is merged. Every run creates new notes. Importing the same archive twice gives you two of everything.
The dates are read from the front matter. Without them, a move of a thousand notes is a pile that was all written the same evening — and the order they were written in is half of what an archive is.

From Apple Notes¶

tools/apple-notes-til-markdown.py in the repository exports Apple Notes to exactly this shape, front matter and pictures included. It is macOS-only, because Apple Notes is.

For a large library, tools/pak-noter-i-portioner.py splits the export into uploadable parts, keeping each note with its own pictures.

What is encrypted, and what is not¶

A note's title and body are sealed in the database, under a key kept in a file beside it rather than inside it. A backup you download does not carry the key, so it does not carry your notes.

Both halves, not only the body: a note's title is its first line, so a readable title beside a sealed body would leave the beginning of every note in the open.

What is still in the clear: task titles, descriptions and comments — and the list of what a note links to, so a stolen file shows which projects and tasks a note points at, though not what it says.

Sealing the notes cost the search its index — a full-text index over a note's body is another copy of that body — so search reads the notes themselves now. At twelve hundred notes that is about forty milliseconds, and the box waits a quarter of a second after you stop typing, so you will not see it.