Frictionless notes, like flying a kite.

No account needed, no spinner, no waiting on a server. Works on a plane, in a submarine, or on an island in the middle of nowhere.

No analytics, no telemetry, no machine-learning training data. What you write never leaves your machine unless you send it.

Type [[ to link any note. Each note shows the sentence that links to it, not just a title.

See how your notes connect. Clusters show up on their own; follow any line to the note behind it.

Every word, every note, as you type. Press ⌘K and it’s there.

Any checkbox in any note is a task. Mark it done, or cancel it with [-] so you remember you decided not to. Every open one shows up in a single list.

Write #lisbon in the sentence, or file it in a folder. Use both, either, or neither — nothing to keep tidy.

Write @elizabeth and every line about her is one keystroke away, right before the meeting.

Type : and name what you want. Everything the app can do is in there, so there’s no menu to learn.

Modal editing, motions, text objects and registers, all there if you want them. And yes, you can quit: :q. We checked.

Your vault is a folder. Keep it in git — commit it, push it, diff it — or anything else that syncs a folder. With Pro, keep it in iCloud Drive and it’s on every Mac you own.

Lock a single note behind its own password. It’s encrypted on disk, so the file is unreadable without it. Everything else stays one keystroke away.

Light, dark, and a few in between. Pick one, or write your own in a single CSS file.

Preemption window is 2ms, not 20. Re-run the bench before the #infra review with @elizabeth.

See [[cluster quotas]].

Bring your vault. Leave nothing behind.

Open your Obsidian vault as it is. paperkites reads the same markdown files, with the same wiki links, embeds, callouts and properties. Nothing needs converting, and you can use both apps on the same folder.

Close to ten years of switching apps, plus a few honest attempts at journaling with a real pen and paper. Each one got something right. None of them got all of it.

And I write a lot. Not just quick notes, but long pieces too: chapters for projectlighthouse and essays on my Substack. I wanted one place that handles both, a two-line thought and a ten-thousand-word draft, without getting in the way.

paperkites is my take; a simple place to write, the right tools close by, and privacy as the starting point rather than a setting.

I’m a software engineer by day. By night I’m an adventurer, a photographer, and someone who can’t stop building things.

It’ll miss a few features, I’m sure. That’s fine — I’d rather it did the important things well.

• Live-preview markdownvim keys optional
• Zen modefade all but the line you’re on
• Wiki links and backlinksfollow a retitle
• Tags, nested and multi-wordrename everywhere
• Todos in any note[ ] [x] @date
• ⌘K and full-text searchnotes, tags, commands
• Images, tables, Mermaid, LaTeXrendered live
• Embeds and Dataview queriesnotes, media, Bases
• Studio, Paper and Pine themeslight, dark, system
• Plain .md filesno account, no telemetry
• No machine learning model training on your notesnot now, not ever

And splits, pins, trash, folders, :daily and the rest.

Oh, one more thing.

Don’t forget about the planet. 1% of every purchase goes to carbon removal through Stripe Climate.