Openote

An open-source alternative to Microsoft OneNote.

Freeform canvas, pen, maths and Markdown — in a documented format, on your own disk.

Windows · macOS · Linux

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It works, and it's young. Development happens on Windows. Linux gets tested occasionally, macOS barely at all. Updates can break things for a release. What they can't do is lose your notes: those are files on your disk in a documented format that reads without Openote. TESTING.md tracks what's actually been tried by a human, as opposed to by the test suite.

Try it

openote.org/demo runs the app in a browser, with a notebook to poke at. Nothing is saved and some things — opening your own files, anything that needs a file picker — can't work there.

Install

openote.org, or the Releases page.

	Download	Then
Windows	…-windows-x64-setup.exe	Run it. Per-user, so no admin password. The .zip is the same build if you'd rather not install.
macOS	…-macos-universal.dmg	Drag Openote to Applications.
Linux	…-linux-amd64.deb or …-linux-x86_64.rpm	Double-click, or install from a terminal. The .tar.gz runs from anywhere.

No account, no sign-in, nothing uploaded.

A notebook is a folder — Physics.onotebook — with a file called Open this notebook inside it. Double-click that, or run openote path/to/Physics.onotebook.

Your OS will warn you. Openote isn't code-signed; certificates cost a few hundred a year per platform and buy nothing you'd notice yet. Every release is built by a public workflow from its tagged commit.

• Windows — "Windows protected your PC" → More info → Run anyway
• macOS — "openote is damaged" → xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app, once
• Linux — no warning

What it does

• Infinite freeform canvas. Click anywhere, put anything there. Free placement or snap-to-grid.
• Notebooks, section groups, sections, pages, subpages — the hierarchy you already know.
• Markdown that renders where you type it. No preview pane, no raw asterisks left on screen.
• Maths you type linearly and read in 2-D — summations with limits, integrals, matrices, fractions. It solves them too.
• Pressure-sensitive ink, with shapes, lasso select and palm rejection.
• Tables inside your sentences, code blocks that run, images, video, and PDFs you annotate like a printout.
• Live windows onto other pages — a region of another page, rendered here, always current, click through to the source.
• Flashcards from your own notes. Tag a line Question or Definition and it becomes a card, with spaced repetition and Anki export.
• OneNote import — .one and .onepkg, from reverse-engineered MS-ONESTORE: text at true positions, styling, images, equations, ink, hyperlinks.
• Sync with no server. A notebook is append-only per-device logs plus content-addressed blobs; put it in any folder your cloud already keeps in step. One writer per file, so two devices can't produce conflicting logs.
• A planner, notebook-wide search, tags, spell check, and export to Markdown, PDF or a plain folder of files.

Known issues

Being worked on for v1.0.2 — full write-ups, including what's been ruled out, in docs/planning/v1.0.2.md.

	What you'd notice
Screen readers can't read the editor	The Windows accessibility bridge rejects our semantics tree. Console errors, and no usable Narrator/NVDA support.
Formatting buttons are grey in a table cell	Type Markdown in the cell instead — that works.
Opening a cloud notebook freezes the app	Only when its folder is not set "Available offline". Set that on each device; the app reads synchronously and waits on the download.
Text scaling is ignored	Columns and auto-sized boxes are measured at 100%, so Windows' "Make text bigger" misreports widths.
Images dropped on empty canvas can't be inlined	Two code paths for one thing. Drop onto a text box and it inlines properly.

Longer-standing defects are carried openly in the roadmap.

What's next

v1.0.2 clears the list above. Beyond that: using the macOS and Linux builds for real, splitting the state class everything has landed in, and letting a notebook reclaim the space a deleted video left behind. The ranked list is the backlog; the phase plan is in the roadmap.

Documentation

docs/README.md is the index. The ones worth knowing about:

• File Format Spec — the .onote container. CC0, implement it freely.
• Architecture Overview — Flutter/Dart UI, Rust core over dart:ffi, SQLite container.
• ADRs — the decisions and why, including the ones that turned out wrong.
• Product Vision — what this is for, and what it deliberately isn't.

Licence

Three tiers (ADR-0005, mapped in LICENSING.md):

• AGPL-3.0-or-later — the app. Improvements stay open, hosted forks included.
• Apache-2.0 — onote_core, the format reader/writer and importers. Build anything on it, commercial and closed included.
• CC0-1.0 — the format spec. No attribution needed.

The asymmetry is deliberate: the app resists closed forks, while reading and writing your own notes is legally frictionless.

Contributions are inbound = outbound, DCO sign-off (git commit -s), no CLA.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests welcome. Ink on real touch and stylus hardware, rich-text editing, CRDTs and maths input are where help goes furthest — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Build instructions are in app/README.md.

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