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 nothing from your notebooks is sent anywhere.
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. Since 1.3.7 Notr › Check for Updates… fetches new versions from here and installs one only once its signature checks out; Notr checks only when you ask, or once a day if you turn that on.
macOS · Apple Silicon
Notr-1.3.8-arm64.dmg
6.9 MB
sha256 da507544781472ddb749be5470458514862fc9330143ead9180e6494f98ff55b
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. If a save fails, Notr says so once rather than on every autosave, and ⌘S reports it again.
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. Since 1.1.0 the command palette (⌘P) runs any ribbon command, goes to a page or section, or starts a page from a template: letters must come in order, and case and Latin accents don't matter, so oyst finds Øystein.
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. Since 1.3.6 View › Theme offers twelve themes — Notr Light and Dark, Tokyo Night, Tokyo Night Storm, Tokyo Night Day, Material Darker, Material Palenight, Nord, Darcula, Catppuccin Mocha, Gruvbox Dark and Solarized Light — each colouring the whole window, its accent, and plain paper with its lines, and text follows the paper: dark on light paper, light on dark. Since 1.3.8 coloured text keeps its hue there too: links, Heading 1's purple and the picker's blue, teal, green, red and purple are drawn lighter in the same hue, at 4.5:1 or better on every dark theme, and the stored colour is kept; a picture export of a page with dark paper uses the page's own colours, as on screen. Since 1.1.0 a line ending with = shows its answer in grey after it, and Tab writes it in; type [[ in a note to link to another page, and the page header lists the pages that link to the one you're on, following it through renames and moves; and ⌘-click follows a link — web and mail links open in the browser or mail app, where links could not be opened at all before.
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. Since 1.1.0 All To-Dos (⇧⌘T) lists every open to-do in the chosen scope, grouped by page, with a box that ticks it off in place; ⌘Z undoes it.
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. Since 1.1.0 the Connect tool joins two notes with an arrow that follows them as they move, and a freehand line, rectangle or ellipse becomes that shape when you hold the pointer still for a moment before letting go. A database opened by 1.1.0 can't be opened by 1.0.x.
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. Since 1.2.0 Notr reads the text in pictures and handwriting with macOS's own text recognition, on your Mac, in the background; right-click a picture and choose Copy Text to copy what was read.
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. Since 1.2.0 search finds the text in pictures and handwriting alongside everything else.
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. Undo and redo are one set of actions — the keys and the Edit menu behave alike — and once you format a note while editing it, undo goes back through the page's history, so the format is undone first. Since 1.2.0 the page timeline (⇧⌘H) scrubs back through a page's history and shows it as it was, with the notes added, removed and changed since outlined, then restores it, from automatic snapshots: all from the last day and one a day for 30 days. And since 1.3.0 two copies of Notr on the same notebooks merge instead of stopping: a change on one side wins over none, a page you both changed is kept twice, and a notice says what came from where; Undo takes the merge back.
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, and a heading or a to-do needs no blank line before it. Since 1.0.1 the Markdown export writes bold, italic, strikethrough and links (web and mail only) wherever they fall in a note, and escapes characters that would otherwise be read as Markdown or HTML, so the text reads as written. The picture is drawn in the background, so Notr stays usable meanwhile, with pictures overlapping notes in the same order as on screen.
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. The exception is a replaced workspace — importing a .notespace backup, or undoing or redoing that — because a backup made elsewhere does not follow Notr’s rules: the next save deletes every stroke, version and attachment row and writes every page again.
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 from your notebooks, and no telemetry. Notr goes online only to check for updates: when you ask, or once a day if you turn that on.
- Stores
- One SQLite database in Application Support, and the files you export. Updates add only the daily-check choice, if made, and a download while one installs.
- 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.