Notulee

Getting started

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Math, units & currency

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A math region is a calculator that reads prose. Write numbers the way you’d say them — names, units and currencies included — and the answers appear inline.

Arithmetic

Standard arithmetic works as you’d expect, including parentheses, powers and functions:

team : 7
pizzas : ceil(team / 2)
slices : pizzas * 8
slices / team = 4.57

2 ^ 16 = 65,536

Percentages

Percentages are written the natural way:

Reactive variables

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Variables live inside math regions — they’re what turn a note into a tiny, living model. Assign a value once and reference it from your maths; change the source and every dependent result recalculates.

Assignments (and the expressions that use them) only evaluate inside a math region. On a plain line they’re just text — add a region with / → Math.

Assigning a value

Use name : value:

coffee : 4.50
workdays : 21
people : 3

Using it

Reference the name in any expression in the same note:

Checklists & lists

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A checklist region turns a list into something you can tick off, with a running tally of progress — no separate task app required.

Checklists

Add a checklist region and write one item per line. Toggle an item to mark it done; completed items strike through, and Notulee keeps a live count:

☐ benchmark a wide aggregation
☑ verify the DuckDB extension loads
☐ write up the findings 1 / 3 done

The 1 / 3 done indicator updates as you check items off, so a glance tells you what’s left.

Search & export

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Full-text search

Notulee searches across all your notes at once, and stays fast even with thousands of notes. Search offers several matching modes:

Contains — the default substring match
Word — whole-word matching
Anchored — matches from the start
Regex — full regular-expression matching for precise queries

There’s no index to build or maintain — search just works.

Find & replace

Within a single note, find-and-replace supports the same family of modes — plain contains, whole-word, anchored and regex — so you can make surgical edits or sweeping changes with confidence.

Keyboard & desktop

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Notulee is designed to be summoned, used and dismissed without reaching for the mouse. The native desktop app adds a few window behaviours on top of the editor.

Summon from anywhere

A global hotkey toggles the Notulee window from any application:

Shortcut	Action
`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`N`	Show / hide Notulee (global)

Because it’s global, you can capture a thought mid-task and get back to what you were doing in a couple of keystrokes.

Privacy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Notulee was built around a simple promise: your notes are yours, and they stay on your machine. This page explains, plainly, how that works — and the one small exception.

Where your notes live

Every note is stored on your own device. There is no registration and no sign-in. We never see your notes, because they are never sent anywhere.

Every smart feature is on-device

The “superpowers” — math, unit and currency conversion, reactive variables, checklists, sums, readability scoring and search — all run locally, and always give the same result for the same input. They’re deterministic, not predictive, so nothing about what you type is sent anywhere to be evaluated.