Docs / Getting started
Getting started
What Notulee is, the handful of concepts that make it tick, and how to run it today.
What Notulee is
Notulee is an ephemeral scratchpad. You open it, you type, and the smart features come to you — you never leave the text. It’s deliberately not a filing cabinet: notes are meant to be quick, reorderable and disposable.
What makes it different from a plain text box is that parts of a note can become regions with special behaviour: a math region calculates, a checklist region tracks progress, and so on. The text stays plain; the powers are layered on top.
The core concepts
- Notes — each note is a plain Markdown file on your disk, named after its title. You can pin a note, reorder the stack, and delete what you no longer need (deletes move to a recoverable
.trash/). - Markdown — notes are Markdown. Headings, bold, italics, lists, quotes and links style themselves as you type, with the markers kept visible so your text stays plain and portable.
- Regions — a block within a note that does something: math, a checklist, a sum, a count, and more. You add one from the toolbar at the bottom of the editor.
- Variables — name a value once (
coffee : 4.50) and reference it anywhere in the note. See Variables. - Temporary notes — keep a secret or a quick scratch calculation in a memory-only note that never touches disk and disappears on its own.
- Always the same result — every calculation runs locally and gives the same answer for the same input. Deterministic, not predictive — nothing is sent over the network.
Try it now
Notulee is available now for Windows and macOS — download the app — with iOS and Android to follow. Prefer not to install? You can try the full app right in your browser, free, with live math, conversions, variables and checklists working immediately.
A quick tour
The app ships with a short set of starter notes — one idea per note. Page through them with Ctrl+] (and Ctrl+[ to go back) to see each feature in context before you start your own.
Cleared them out and want them back later? Settings → About → Re-create demo notes restores the starter set without touching anything you’ve written or edited.