Notr · The notebook
A notebook you can
write anywhere on.
Notr is a notebook for macOS, written in Rust on GPUI — the framework behind Zed. Notebooks hold sections and pages, and a page is free-form: double-click the paper and write there, beside a to-do list, a table, a picture or something you drew. It saves a moment after each change, keeps twenty versions of a page and a recycle bin for the ones you delete. Everything is one SQLite file on your Mac — no account, no sync, and Notr makes no network connections.
Free. macOS 13 or later on Apple silicon, signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens without warnings.
| Day | Focus |
|---|---|
| Mon | Plan the week |
| Tue | Write |
A page with a table, a to-do and ink, in the sample notebook
Download for macOS
One disk image. Open it, drag Notr to Applications. The build is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper lets it through without a warning — and the checksum is beside it so you can check what you got. Notr does not check for updates itself: new versions are published here.
macOS · Apple Silicon
Notr-1.0.0-arm64.dmg
6.4 MB
sha256 666807cdd149cb1b16de4cce1a0dd5c39ead09170b2af659a932fa25d8d0f39c
Apple silicon, macOS 13 or later. That is what Notr is built for, so no Intel build is offered.
Paper, with a memory
and an undo.
There is no document to save. Notr keeps your notebooks in its database and saves a moment after each change, when you close the window and when you quit — and the status bar says when it has.
Notebooks, sections, pages
Notebooks hold sections, sections can sit in section groups nested up to eight deep, and pages can have subpages two levels down. Drag a page by its grip to reorder it, move pages to another section, and give a section its own colour.
Write anywhere on the page
Double-click the paper and a text container starts there. Pages are free-form: move and resize containers, lay notes out beside each other, and give the page plain, ruled, grid or dot-grid paper in a colour of its own.
Text, to-dos and tags
Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, highlight, font and size, headings and styles, bulleted and numbered lists, to-do boxes and tags on a container — the formatting a notebook needs, kept as runs of rich text.
Tables
Insert a table, edit cells on the page, add and delete rows and columns, and transpose it. Copy Table gives tab-separated text ready for a spreadsheet, and Paste Cells takes it back, growing the table as needed. Up to 476 rows by 50 columns.
Ink
A pen from half a point to thirty wide in any colour, a highlighter four times as wide, and shapes. Strokes are simplified as you draw, keeping their shape while dropping redundant points, and the eraser removes whole strokes rather than nibbling at them.
Pictures and attachments
Insert a PNG, JPEG or WebP picture of up to 16 megapixels and move and resize it like any note, or attach any file up to 16 MB as a card you can save a copy from. Both are stored in the database with the page, and in backups.
Search and replace
Search every notebook as you type, from the title bar, or just the current page; Replace All follows the same scope, every notebook included, keeps the formatting around each match, and is one step you can undo.
Versions and a recycle bin
Save a version of a page and put it back later — a page keeps its twenty most recent. Deleted pages go to a recycle bin that holds up to 2,000, and come back to the section they left.
Markdown, HTML and PNG
Export a page as Markdown in reading order, as HTML, or as a picture of the whole page, paper and ink included. Markdown and text files import as new pages.
One file, one Mac,
and what that means.
Rows, not one big string
NoteSpace saves the whole workspace as one JSON string after every change. Notr keeps notebooks, sections, pages, blocks, attachments, strokes and versions in ordinary SQLite tables, and a save writes only what changed: the pages whose content differs, and attachment bytes once.
Not encrypted, not shared
The database is not encrypted: anyone who can read your user folder can read your notes, and FileVault protects them when the Mac is off. There is no collaboration — a second Notr that saves to the same database is stopped with a conflict rather than merged. No OneNote files, no handwriting recognition, no audio.
A port of NoteSpace, compatible with it
Notr ports NoteSpace from C# and Uno to Rust and GPUI. Its .notespace backups are NoteSpace’s JSON, so they move between the two apps, and Notr enforces NoteSpace’s limits — an edit that would break one is refused with a message — so everything it writes can be opened there.
Free.
No account, no sync.
Notr costs nothing and asks for nothing: no licence key, no sign-in, no subscription. Every feature on this page is in the download.
- Sends
- Nothing. No telemetry and no update check; Notr makes no network connections.
- Stores
- One SQLite database in Application Support, and the files you export. Nothing else is written.
- Backs up
- With Time Machine, which includes the database, or as a .notespace backup you export.
Open a page.
Start anywhere.
Download Notr, double-click the paper, and write. It is saved before you think to.