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 plain text, stored locally. You can pin a note, reorder the stack, and soft-delete what you no longer need.
- 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. - 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
Native apps are coming soon — Windows first, then macOS, Linux, iOS and Android. But you don’t have to wait: 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.