Notulee

Docs / Your notes on disk

Your notes on disk

Every note is a plain Markdown file you own — pick where they live, edit them anywhere, and keep them safe with backups.

Notulee keeps no database. Every note is an ordinary Markdown file on your disk, so your notes stay yours — readable, portable and easy to back up, with or without Notulee.

Plain Markdown files

Each note is saved as a .md file named after its title, with a small block of frontmatter at the top for things like its pinned state:

---
title: Weekend trip
pinned: true
---

# Weekend trip
- passport & charger
- noise-cancelling buds

Open that file in any editor and it’s exactly what you’d expect — no proprietary format, nothing to export first.

Choose where they live

By default your notes sit in Notulee’s own data folder, but you can point them anywhere: pick a location preset or browse to any folder, and Notulee moves your existing notes into it. (Desktop app only.)

Edit them anywhere — live

Because they’re just files, you can edit them in another app while Notulee is running — Obsidian, your text editor, a script, even Claude — and the changes appear in Notulee live. Your edits inside Notulee flow straight back out to the files the same way. (Desktop app only.)

Watch extra folders

Beyond your own notes folder, Notulee can monitor additional folders — a project folder another app owns, a shared docs directory — and show their Markdown files as notes in their own sections of the list, live. You can create notes in them, edit them, and delete them without Notulee leaving any artifacts behind. Manage the folders in Settings → Files. (Desktop app only; backups cover only your own notes folder.)

A good citizen in shared folders

Notulee treats files it didn’t create with care:

  • frontmatter written by other apps is preserved byte-for-byte — and Notulee never writes into a file just for looking at it;
  • file names are respected — only files Notulee created itself are auto-renamed after their title; anything you (or another tool) drop in keeps its name, shown as the note’s title. Rename a file explicitly when you want to.

Drop-in and trash

  • Drop-in — put any .md file into your notes folder and Notulee adopts it as a note.
  • Trash — deleting a note moves its file to a hidden .trash/ folder rather than destroying it, so a mistaken delete is recoverable.

Backups

Notulee keeps your notes safe without you having to think about it:

  • an automatic daily backup, and one before every update (each can be switched off in settings);
  • Settings → Files → Backups is a manager — a list of your backups, each with Download, Apply and Delete, plus Create backup now and Import.

Backups are saved as zip files in the app’s data folder, so an update or a bad day never costs you a note.

For the full privacy picture, see Privacy.