What’s new
Every release.
A running history of what's landed in Notulee — every release, newest first.
- Editing a region's type no longer breaks the region Retyping a region's tag — backspacing over ```math to make it a tape or a code block — now deletes one character per keystroke, the way it should. A second quick press used to swallow the entire fence line, which broke the region and left the note feeling stuck: Enter did nothing and the arrow keys stopped moving the cursor.
- Tape and Ledger: the caret stays put, tickers always colour Two fixes for the new calculation flavors. Typing on a tape or ledger line no longer throws the cursor across to the results column — it stays with your text, where you left it. And in tape or ledger regions, tickers, numbers and operators are now coloured on every line, not only on lines that end with an equals sign: those regions calculate every line, so every line is an expression.
- Two new calculation styles: Tape and Ledger Math regions now come in three flavors. Math works as before — a line shows its result when it ends with an equals sign. In a Tape region every line calculates automatically and its result sits right-aligned at the edge, like an adding-machine tape. A Ledger region puts results in a shaded column and adds a running Total at the bottom. Pick a flavor from the calculator button on the add bar, or just type the tape or ledger fence tag.
- Mac menu-bar icon: click to show/hide Clicking the Notulee icon in the macOS menu bar now toggles the window — click to bring it up, click again to tuck it away. Right-click (or ctrl-click) still opens the menu.
- External links open in your default browser Links that open a new tab — like the Yahoo Finance link in a ticker tooltip — now open in your system's default browser on both desktop apps. On the Mac they previously did nothing; on Windows they opened a bare pop-up window.
- Mac-native shortcuts + a shortcut editor On the Mac, shortcuts now follow macOS habits — ⌘W closes a note, ⌃⌘←/→ walk history, ⌥⌘F replaces, and everything is shown with ⌘/⌥ symbols — while Windows keeps its familiar Ctrl/Alt chords. And every shortcut is now editable: Settings → Shortcuts lets you record your own key for any action, with conflict protection and one-click reset.
- The note owns the whole canvas With the notes list tucked away, your note now starts at the very top of the window — no reserved title-bar gap. Move the mouse toward the top edge and the note gently slides down with it under a soft frosted strip, the window buttons fading in as it goes. When you're scrolled into a long note, the lines hidden above the window actually slide back into view — the note moves as one continuous surface, never a box with a moving cutoff.
- Notulee for Mac — signed, notarized, and on the download page The native macOS app (Apple Silicon, macOS 12+) now ships alongside the Windows app: a signed and notarized installer that Gatekeeper trusts out of the box, with the same one-click in-app updates. Grab it from notulee.com/download.
- A new editor engine — crisper at every zoom, real heading sizes, natural tables The editor has been rebuilt on a modern single-layer engine. Everything you see is the real text — no more overlay that could drift out of alignment at some zoom levels. Headings now render at real sizes, tables lay out naturally at their own height, and everything else — live results, folding markdown, checklists, region cards, find, autocomplete, tooltips, paste conversion — works exactly as before. This also lays the groundwork for diagrams and images in notes.
- Ctrl+B docks and undocks the notes list Pin the notes list to the left edge — or send it back to the fly-out — straight from the keyboard with Ctrl+B, matching the familiar sidebar-toggle chord from other editors.
- Diagram regions: ```graph renders mermaid diagrams in place A new ```graph region (alias ```mermaid) turns mermaid source into a rendered diagram right in your note — flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and every other mermaid type. Leave the region and the diagram appears in its card; click it (or move the caret in) and the raw source comes back for editing. Diagrams follow your theme, and invalid source shows a compact error instead of a broken drawing. The renderer loads only when a note actually contains a diagram, so everything else stays as fast as before.
- Launch on login A new switch in Settings → General starts Notulee automatically when you sign in to your computer — on both Windows and macOS.
- macOS: window buttons follow the app chrome With the notes list unpinned, the native close/minimize/zoom buttons now hide with the rest of the top chrome and appear when you move the mouse to the top edge (or while clipboard capture is armed) — just like the pin and capture buttons. They also sit at their natural macOS position there; the small downward nudge that centers them with the toolbar icon row now applies only while the list is pinned.
- Click away to close the notes list When the notes list is open as a fly-out, clicking anywhere outside it — on the note, the toolbar — now closes it, like any menu. The docked list is unaffected.
- Delete themes from the switcher In the theme switcher (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T) each of your themes now has a trash icon at the right end of its row — it appears when you hover or highlight the row. Click it, or press Del on the highlighted theme, to remove it (with an Undo toast). Deleting drops you onto the previous theme in the list and previews it live, so you're never left on a theme that's gone. The built-in System / Light / Dark can't be deleted, so they show no trash.
- Double-click the title bar to maximize or restore Double-clicking the title-bar strip at the top of the window now maximizes the window, or restores it if it's already maximized — on both Windows and macOS, just like a native title bar.
- Gallery refresh — Paper & Steel The bundled theme gallery is refreshed around two new material themes: Paper (Kraft) — a warm, fully solid kraft-paper light theme with an ink-pen palette, a serif note list and a paper-fibre texture — and Steel (Brushed) — a machined cool-gray dark theme with a steel-blue accent, a faint brushed-metal texture and a slightly glassy window. They replace six of the earlier themes (Voltage, Ember, Frost, Nocturne, Graphite and Oxblood); if you already have those, they stay on your machine — only fresh installs stop bundling them.
- Lighter note text Note text now renders at a slightly lighter font weight (300 instead of the default 400), for a cleaner, less heavy page — especially on the paper and daylight themes. Headings and bold text keep their weight.
- Monitor extra folders alongside your notes Notulee can now watch 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. Create notes in them, edit safely (other apps' frontmatter and file names are never touched), rename a file explicitly when you want to, and delete without leaving any Notulee artifacts behind. Manage the folders in Settings → Files; backups still cover only your own notes folder.
- Notes are good citizens in shared folders Notulee now preserves frontmatter written by other apps byte-for-byte, never writes into a note file just for looking at it, and only renames files it created itself. Files you (or another tool) drop into the vault keep their names — the file name is shown as the note's title.
- Pre-update backup can be turned off A new 'Backup before updates' switch in Settings → Files → Backups (desktop) controls the safety snapshot taken right before an app update is applied. It stays on by default.
- Web app no longer breaks after going offline-ready Fixed the web app at notulee.com/app/ failing to load (a blank browser error page) once its offline service worker had installed. Revisits now load normally, including for anyone whose browser had already cached the broken state.
- Window-opacity slider grays out when glass can't render On a system without a compositing backdrop (e.g. Windows 10, or Windows transparency effects turned off), the Window-opacity slider is now disabled with an explanation instead of silently doing nothing. Its tooltip also no longer claims Remote Desktop doesn't support translucency — it does.
- Windows: subtle overlay scrollbars, and the note gets one Scrollbars on Windows now use the thin, auto-hiding overlay style (like macOS) everywhere — settings, the notes list — and the note itself finally shows a vertical scrollbar when it's long enough.
- macOS: search/settings get their own titlebar pill; fullscreen reclaims the traffic-light gap With the notes list pinned on macOS, the search and settings buttons now sit in their own frosted pill matching the previous/next pair, and in fullscreen — where the traffic lights disappear — the previous/next buttons slide flush to the left edge instead of leaving a dead gap.
- macOS: unpinning the notes list in fullscreen no longer leaves a black strip In fullscreen, unpinning the docked notes list now lets the note flow back over the full window width — previously the vacated strip turned into a dead black band until you left fullscreen.
- Adjustable docked-list translucency A new Docked list opacity slider in Settings → Appearance sets how see-through the docked notes list is. Turn it down to let the window background — and the frosted desktop backdrop on a glassy window — bleed through the list, or up to 100% for a solid card. Themes can carry their own docked-list opacity too, applied when you pick them and still adjustable with the slider.
- Find & replace in a note (Ctrl+F) Press Ctrl/Cmd+F for a fast in-note find that highlights every match as you type, with the first match after your cursor shown as the active match (it pulses as you move). Enter or ↑/↓ jump between matches without leaving the search box; Esc drops the cursor right after the active match. Toggle Match Case, Whole Word and Regex, and expand to Replace / Replace All (Ctrl/Cmd+H) with optional case preservation. Searching across all your notes moved to Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+F.
- Make a theme on the web A new link in Settings → Appearance opens the browser Theme Editor, where you can design a theme — colours, fonts and a background — on a live preview and download a .zip to import back into Notulee.
- No fake grey glass when translucency can't render The translucent window backdrop now only turns on when it will actually render as glass. On a machine without a real GPU — a virtual machine, or a server with only basic display drivers — Windows can't composite the material and paints a flat grey fill, so Notulee keeps the window cleanly opaque there instead. It also honours your Windows 'Transparency effects' toggle: turn that off and Notulee stays solid too. Either way you get the theme's own background, never a grey 'fake glass'.
- Six new themes The theme switcher (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T) — and now the Settings → Appearance theme dropdown — gains six new themes alongside the seasonal set: Nocturne (a brand-native midnight indigo), Phosphor (a green CRT terminal, monospace throughout), Rosé (muted rose and iris at dusk), Graphite (a near-grayscale focus theme), Meridian (a crisp cool daylight — not another cream), and Oxblood (drenched wine and brass with a serif note list). Most carry their own window and docked-list translucency, applied the moment you pick them (the opacity sliders move to match), and each now paints a subtle themed background — autumn leaves, a starfield, snow crystals, terminal scanlines, sea waves or fine grain. New and updated themes show up automatically when you update — no reinstall — without disturbing themes you've added or deleted.
- Granular theming — overrides + fonts Themes can now override individual colours that used to be fixed — the pinned-note red, the icon accent and fill, and the variable colours — while still inheriting everything else, and set their own fonts for the editor, notes list, tooltips, app UI and code. A new Theme customization panel in Settings → Appearance lets you edit a theme's colours and fonts live (it makes an editable copy of a built-in theme first), and it all exports/imports with the theme.
- Searchable theme picker Press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T for a searchable theme picker — type to filter, arrow through your themes to preview each one live (colours and translucency), Enter to apply, Esc to revert, plus one-click Import. Themes can now carry their own window translucency, set when you pick them and still adjustable with the Window-opacity slider.
- Themes are folders now Themes are portable folders — one per theme, each able to carry its own editor background image — kept in their own location and included in your backups. Import a theme .zip, export the current one, and delete a theme right from the switcher (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T, then Del — with Undo). The background picker gains a “Theme defined” option that shows a theme's own background, and the switcher no longer dims your note so you can judge a theme on the real thing. Editing a theme moves to the website theme maker.
- Code syntax highlighting Code blocks in your notes are now syntax-highlighted — keywords, strings and comments coloured across dozens of languages — and it works everywhere, including the web app.
- Dock the notes list Pin the notes list to the left as an always-visible floating panel with its own toolbar; the desktop window grows to fit so your note stays put, animating smoothly. Drag to resize, click the red pin to restore the fly-out.
- Install Notulee as an app (PWA) Install the Notulee web app to your desktop or phone home screen and use it offline — it runs in its own window with its own icon, and your notes are already stored on your device.
- Notulee for macOS Notulee now has a native macOS app (Apple Silicon) to match the Windows one — a translucent window with the system blur behind your notes, Mac-style window controls, a menu-bar (tray) icon with Show/Hide · Settings · Community · Quit, a Ctrl+Alt+N global summon hotkey, single-instance, and the same live notes folder, stock/FX lookups and self-update as the Windows app.
- Agent-ready notes folder Your notes folder now contains CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md describing the note format, so you can point Claude Cowork or any other AI assistant (or editor) straight at the folder and have it create well-formed notes. Notulee ignores these two files — they're never shown or edited as notes.
- Back and forward through your notes Notulee now remembers the notes you open, like a browser. The mouse Back and Forward side buttons — and Alt+Left / Alt+Right — step through that history, and deleting or closing a note reopens the one you were looking at just before (falling back through the history if it has since been deleted) instead of jumping to the top of the list.
- Editor polish — lists, indent, copy, clean-up, a11y A handful of editor refinements from the QA pass — pressing Enter in a "-", "*" or "1." list continues it (and an empty item ends it); Tab indents inside code blocks (and still moves focus out elsewhere); copying a checklist yields [x]/[ ] instead of the raw /x marker; the ✨ clean-up no longer touches your math/code/list regions; and the slash command menu is exposed to screen readers.
- European numbers + your own exchange rates The European number format (1.000,25) now applies to calculation results too, not just what you type — and switching the format warns you that existing notes are re-read under the new rules. You can also set your own exchange rate for any currency in Settings → Numbers (a pegged or in-house rate), used by $-amount conversions in math.
- Formatted markdown tables Markdown tables now render as clean, framed tables — and open to raw markdown when you edit them.
- Optional automatic backups You can now turn the daily automatic backup on or off and choose how many automatic backups to keep (10 by default) in Settings → Backup. A safety backup is still taken right before every app update.
- Paste guard keeps your place in the note When Notulee catches a pasted secret, choosing what to do with it — tuck it into a disappearing note, or paste it anyway — no longer moves your cursor or scrambles where your typing lands. The text goes exactly where you pasted it, and the editor stays in sync.
- Pop-ups and tooltips stay on screen The pop-up menus (slash commands, variable names and $TICKER suggestions) and the hover tooltips (variable values, stock quotes) now flip above the current line or token when it sits near the bottom of the window, so they're always fully visible instead of being clipped at the bottom edge.
- Scientific notation, time units & real roots The calculator now understands scientific notation (1e3, 2.5e-10); time units — seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks — so "2 hours + 30 min" and "1 day to hours" just work; and the real odd roots of negative numbers, so (-8)^(1/3) = -2.
- See which notes changed on disk When another app (Obsidian, an editor, an AI assistant) changes one of your notes on disk, Notulee now lights a small orange dot next to it in the note list and floats it to the top — below your temporary and pinned notes, above the rest — so you can spot what changed at a glance. Open the note, or click the dot, to acknowledge it and the light clears.
- Sturdier calculator The calculator no longer breaks on results that are too large or undefined — type 2^1000, 1000! or sqrt(-1) and you get a tidy inline message instead of a blank editor. It now also understands the × and − symbols (not just * and -), and readability grades never show a confusing negative number.
- Tidier text on paste and open Text you paste or open is now cleaned up automatically. Line endings are normalized, so the cursor no longer drifts out of place in notes that came from Windows apps or older files. Pasting from a web page or rich editor no longer slips a blank line between every line. And stray invisible control characters are stripped on the way in.
- Undo a deleted note Deleting a note now shows a "Note deleted · Undo" toast — one click brings it straight back. (Deleted notes were already recoverable from the hidden .trash/ folder; now there's an in-app undo too.)
- App icon in the title bar The Notulee mark now sits at the top-left of the desktop window, with the drag-handle dots centered in the space beside it. Prefer it bare? Hide the icon from Settings → Window.
- Backup management Settings → Backup is now a backup 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, and Notulee keeps an automatic daily snapshot (and one before every update).
- Choose where your notes live Point Notulee's notes folder wherever you like — pick a location preset or browse to any folder — and Notulee moves your existing notes into it. Defaults to the app data folder. Desktop only.
- Disappearing notes (memory only) Keep a sensitive note — an API key, a password, a one-time code — in memory only. It's never written to disk, never backed up, and self-destructs when you quit, or after an hour or a day. Make any existing note disappearing from the list and its saved copy is wiped from disk. An hourglass badge shows the time it has left.
- Familiar Windows shortcuts New note is now Ctrl+N as well as Alt+N, and Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab step through your notes just like Ctrl+] / Ctrl+[. Keyboard shortcuts also start working the moment you Alt+Tab back to Notulee — no click into the window first.
- Live external-edit sync Edit your notes in another app — Obsidian, your editor, even Claude — while Notulee is running and the changes appear live; your in-app edits flow straight back out to the files. Desktop only.
- One window per install Launching Notulee when it's already running brings the existing window to the front instead of opening a second copy.
- Quicker temporary notes + "Until I switch" The note list's create row is now two clean icon buttons — New note and New temporary note — and the temporary one asks how long inline (Until I switch · 5 min · 15 min · 1 hour · 24 hours · On quit). The new "Until I switch" lifetime keeps a scratch note in memory only and drops it the moment you open another note (with a quick confirm if you've typed something). The same option is offered when the paste guard tucks a secret away.
- Re-create demo notes A button in Settings → About brings back the starter demo notes you've deleted, without touching notes you've kept or edited.
- Refreshed icon set Notulee's icons have been redrawn with the warm, hand-crafted Harmonicons set, theme-tinted to match light, dark and custom themes. Settings → About now has an expandable Open-source licenses section crediting Harmonicons and the other libraries Notulee is built with.
- 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. Works for pastes and clipboard captures; adjust how eager it is — or switch it off — in Settings → Paste.
- Temporary notes warn before they vanish While you edit a temporary note, a small red pill in the bottom-right names when it disappears (with a live countdown if it's timed), and a thin line along the bottom edge drains to show how much time is left. Before a timed note vanishes a toast appears — counting down in step with the note — offering Open (jump to the note) or Extend (give it another full lifetime); dismiss it with the ✕ and the note still vanishes right on time, as promised. Choose how far ahead the warning fires — 1, 2, 3 or 5 minutes, or once under 10% or 20% of the timer — in the new Settings → Temporary notes tab. The New temporary note button is amber to match its duration picker.
- Your notes are Markdown files Every note is now a plain Markdown file with simple frontmatter, named after its title — so you can open, edit, search, sync or back it up with any tool you like (Obsidian, your editor, git). Deleted notes move to a hidden .trash/ folder, and any .md file you drop into the folder is adopted as a note.
- Adjustable zoom Scale the whole app up or down — text, toolbar and all — and your choice is remembered between runs.
- Note backgrounds Give the note surface a subtle tiled texture — marble, paper, leather, steel or liquid — that adapts to light and dark.
- Lightweight desktop app A fast native Windows app — frameless window and system tray — with a 71% smaller installer.
- Plain-file storage Notes and settings are kept as plain files — simpler and easy to back up, no database.
- Text from pasted images Paste a screenshot and Notulee pulls the text straight out of it.
- Translucent window An optional Windows 11 acrylic backdrop with a translucency slider, so Notulee blends into your desktop.
- Automatic updates The desktop app checks for updates on launch and installs them, taking a backup automatically before each one.
- Custom themes Import, export and switch colour themes, including light and dark.
- Full-text search Search across all notes instantly (SQLite FTS5).
- Live math, units & currency Evaluate arithmetic, unit and currency conversions inline as you type.
- Stock tickers ($AAPL) Live quotes for $TICKER symbols in math regions (opt-in).