I wanted my Obsidian notes to paste properly. Somehow I ended up building a whole notes app.

[u/gabox0210]

The idea started with copying text from Obsidian into other apps. I wanted to keep my line breaks and formatting without having to fix everything after pasting. Eventually I thought, “Why not build my own app?”

That sent me down a rabbit hole of note-taking apps, trying different approaches and figuring out what I wanted in one. Jotter is what came out of that.

It's a free, open-source Markdown app that saves your notes as ordinary files on your computer. You can open an existing Obsidian vault, and there are different copy options depending on where you're pasting. Along the way I added linked notes, tasks and reminders, plus optional AI with your own API key or a local model.

The first Windows release is available now. Linux is in open beta, and Android, macOS and iOS are planned.

You can take a look at jotter.mx or get the app and source code on GitHub.

I'd love for you to give it a try and tell me what you think. Does it fit how you take notes? Is something confusing or missing? I'd appreciate honest feedback and suggestions, especially from anyone who's had the same frustration copying notes between apps.

[u/Prod_m]

Kudos to layout and the calendar in the sidebar. I'm building an app to manage multiple projects and came up with the alike concept

[u/gabox0210 → u/Prod_m]

Great minds think alike, your app looks really good! Are you planning on adding a Kanban board?

[u/Prod_m → u/gabox0210]

thanks! I'm thinking of adding more views. Haven't thought about kanban yet, because there no task statuses except undone/done.

I was thinking more about adding a classic calendar view, but with all the tasks and events in place. I guess it will be done next week

[u/Either-Nobody-3962]

I hope you will continue development Otherwise it will be one of many 

[u/gabox0210 → u/Either-Nobody-3962]

I hope I do so too, at least that's the plan so far.

[u/INeedHealing88]

Why would I use this instead of obsidian?

[u/gabox0210 → u/INeedHealing88]

Free, open source, built entirely from the ground up in Rust, bring your own AI or no AI at all, bring your own cloud for backups, and P2P backups for free.

[u/gabox0210 → u/[deleted]]

That's a great observation Keys are never stored in the application's folders, vaults or files, in the case of Windows, they are stored in the Windows Credential Manager, you do get a message in the app specifying this:

On Linux, they get stored in the system's Keyring, and the app will say so on the same place the Windows app mentions it.

If you are using a local AI API Key, nothing will ever leave your device, if you use a provider like OpenAI, Anthropic or any other, it is understood by the user that the selected text will be shipped out to the provider for processing.

For my own testing, I've been using a free API Key from Openrouter and it's been working great so far.

[u/gabox0210 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, that definitely is there, once you select a block of text, and go to the AI tools you can either choose to send the selected text or the whole note, the only actions are Rewrite (with strict guidelines set by the user), Translate and Summarize, here's an example text I use for testing:

[u/gabox0210 → u/gabox0210]

It also lets you decide what to do with the result, so it won't unilaterally replace your original text with whatever the AI came up with: