A free notes app that keeps your notes as files on your own disk

Notes is a markdown notebook that runs in your browser. Write in plain markdown; link one note to another with its name in double brackets; see, beside every note, which notes link to it; tag, star, search, and open today's note with one press. On a desktop in Chrome or Edge, press Use a folder and choose one on your disk: from then on every note is an ordinary .md file in it, your folders are real subfolders, and a folder of markdown you already have is read as it is. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account.

Why files, and why markdown

Every notes service eventually asks you to trust it with the archive: the export is partial, or in its own format, or behind a paid tier, or the service is bought and the terms change. A folder of .md files has none of those failure modes. Markdown is plain text with a handful of conventions (a hash for a heading, a dash for a list, asterisks for emphasis) that every editor reads and every other notebook imports. If this site disappeared tomorrow, your notes would still be in a folder on your disk, readable in anything, with the links between them still written in the text. That is the whole argument for the format, and it is the reason the notebook is built round it rather than round a database.

What is there

• Links between notes. A note's name in double brackets is a link to it. Typing the brackets offers the names as you go, and a link to a note that does not exist yet creates it when you follow it.
• Backlinks. The side panel lists every note that links to the one you are reading, and, below it, the places that mention its name without linking, so you can turn a mention into a link with a click.
• Embeds. A note or a picture can be embedded inside another with an exclamation mark before the brackets, so a note can be built out of others.
• Tags. A hash and a word, anywhere in a note. The tags panel lists them with counts, and a tag is a filter.
• The graph. Every note is a point and every link a line, drawn in the tab, so a cluster you have written round one idea is visible as a cluster.
• Daily notes. Today opens the note for today's date, creating it if it is not there, which is the simplest journal there is.
• Search, starred, folders, an outline of the headings in the open note, callouts, task lists you can tick in the reading view, and a command list for everything, with keyboard shortcuts.
• A formatting row over the editor for people who would rather press a button than remember the asterisks, and an Edit and Read switch.
• Export. Every note as .md files in a zip, at any time, in one press, whether or not a folder is connected.

Where the notes are

Until you connect a folder, in the browser's storage on this device, which is private and is not a backup: clearing the site's data deletes it. Connect a folder and the notes become files in it, and that copy is the one that outlives the browser. The folder can be one that another program syncs between your machines, if you want the notes in two places; the site never uses a server for it, and it says nothing to anybody about what is in the folder. On a phone, where browsers do not offer a folder, the notes stay in the browser and can be exported, or carried across in the site's backup.

What is not there

• Sync. Nothing moves between devices unless you point the folder at something that does the moving.
• A phone app. The page works on a phone in the browser, with the panels sliding over the editor, and can be installed to the home screen; the folder on disk is a desktop feature.
• Plugins. There is no marketplace of things to bolt on. What is here is here.
• Collaboration. One person at a time, on their own files.
• Encryption of the notes at rest. They are plain files, on purpose. If a notebook needs to be secret, keep it in an encrypted folder or disk, which is the operating system's job and which it does well; LOCKBOX encrypts a file for sending.

If your notebook is shared with a team and lives on your phone, this is not the one. If it is yours, and you want it in ten years, the table is the short version.