Docs / Temporary & disappearing notes

Temporary & disappearing notes

Memory-only notes for secrets and scratch work — they self-destruct on a timer, on quit, or the moment you switch away.

Not everything deserves to be saved. A temporary note lives in memory only: it’s never written to disk and never included in a backup, and it disappears by itself. It’s the right home for a secret you’ll paste once, or a quick scratch calculation you don’t want to keep.

Lifetimes

When you create a temporary note you choose how long it lasts:

You can also make any existing note disappearing from the note list — its saved copy is wiped from disk, and only the in-memory copy remains.

Create one

The note list’s create row has two buttons: New note and New temporary note (the amber one). The temporary button asks how long inline, using the lifetimes above.

A warning before it vanishes

While you edit a timed temporary note, a small red pill in the bottom-right reads when it disappears — Vanishes in 4:33 — with a live countdown, and a thin line along the bottom edge drains as the time runs down. Just before it vanishes a toast appears — counting down in step — offering:

• Open — jump to the note;
• Extend — give it another full lifetime.

Choose how far ahead the warning fires — 1, 2, 3 or 5 minutes, or once under 10% or 20% of the timer — in Settings → Temporary notes.

Secret detection on paste

Paste an API key, password or token and Notulee spots it before it lands in your note, and offers to tuck it into a memory-only disappearing note instead — including the handy Until I switch option. It works for ordinary pastes and clipboard captures, and you can tune how eager it is, or switch it off, in Settings → Temporary notes.

Disappearing notes and secret detection both run entirely on your device. See Privacy.