Openote 1.0.0

What's new

• Bring a OneNote notebook over by signing in — no exporting, no files.
• Handwriting, equations, pictures, tables and attachments all come too.
• Subpages stay subpages, and your notebook's own page links still work.
• Write on a PDF or a photo, and the ink stays readable on any theme.
• Make your own pen colours, or take one off the page with the eyedropper.
• A Page tab, and undo and redo you can always reach.
• A shared notebook's history stops repeating itself as you type.

All of it, in more detail

Your notes, out of OneNote, without exporting anything. This is most of
the release.

• Sign in to Microsoft, pick a notebook, and it arrives. No exporting, no
  files, no leaving the app. On a Mac or on Linux this is not merely the
  easier way, it is the only way: OneNote for Mac cannot export a notebook
  at all, and there is no OneNote for Linux.
• The notebook fills in while you watch. Each section is written as it
  arrives, so you can read the parts already in while the rest is still
  coming, and keep typing the whole time. A line above the page says how far
  through it is.
• Handwriting comes too. So do equations, pictures, tables, lists, your
  to-do ticks, and attachments — which the file import has never managed.
  A real five-year notebook of 332 pages, 64,000 pen strokes and 548 equations
  came over three times running with nothing missing, in about three minutes.
• Subpages stay subpages, indented under the page they belong to, a
  subpage of a subpage included.
• An import that goes wrong keeps the pages it already brought you, tells
  you how many are in, and offers to finish the rest later. It survives
  closing the app. If you stopped it yourself, it never restarts on its own.
• Openote learns nothing about you. It asks to read your notebooks and
  nothing else — no name, no email, no address book, no files, no calendar —
  and it cannot change anything in OneNote even if it wanted to. There is no
  Openote server, so your notes go from Microsoft to your own machine and
  nowhere else.
• You do not have to sign in at all. The exported-file route is still
  there on the same screen, described side by side, because not wanting to
  sign in to a Microsoft account is a perfectly good reason not to.

Writing and drawing.

• Ink over a picture or a PDF stays readable. Default ink works out its
  colour when it is drawn: dark on a light page, light on a dark one, and dark
  again over a scan or a slide, which brings its own background.
• Make your own pen colours. The pen and highlighter swatches have a +
  that opens the full picker — a palette, a colour wheel and a hex box — and
  the colours you mix are there beside the ready-made ones next time. There is
  an eyedropper too: take the colour of a photograph, a PDF, a diagram or
  someone else's handwriting and write in it.
• A delete button on whatever is selected, so lassoed handwriting can be
  got rid of without a keyboard.
• The pen puts itself away. Bringing a pen near the screen switches to
  handwriting on its own, and reaching for the mouse switches back — so there
  is no "Done" button and no mode to leave. A tool you picked yourself stays
  picked.
• Table columns fit what is in them, and you can drag any column's edge to
  the width you want.

Finding your way around.

• The page's own settings are a tab. Ruling, sheet or canvas, paper size,
  the grid and the zoom are on a Page tab now instead of a third strip of
  toolbar.
• Undo and redo are always there, above the tabs, instead of only on Home.
• The word count is up top, beside the other things you glance at.
• Outline, tags and links are one button — the same question asked three
  ways — and you move between them inside the panel.
• Openote speaks six more languages and picks yours by itself, with the
  language list sorted so you can find yours.
• The pointer changes over everything you can click, not just most of it.

The fine print

• 1.0 is a promise about your notes, not a claim of completeness. The file
  format is documented and stable, Openote never sends your notes anywhere,
  and nothing it does to them is reversible only by hand.
• The six translations have not been read by a native speaker yet. They
  are seeds, and they are there so that fixing them is possible; Settings ▸
  Appearance ▸ Language links straight to how. If a word is wrong in your
  language, that is the contribution the project most wants.
• A pen's side button may not reach Openote on Windows. The eraser end of
  a pen works, and so does the eraser tool. Hold the button near the screen:
  if the eraser on the Draw tab does not light up, Openote is not being told
  about the button at all.
• Notebooks you already have open and edit normally. There is nothing
  to convert, nothing to import again, and no history is lost — 1.0
  reads everything every earlier version wrote.
• It is the other direction that has a catch. Once 1.0 has typed
  into a notebook, Openote 0.9 and earlier will open it and show you
  everything but will not let you add to it: 1.0 records an edit as
  the characters that changed rather than the whole paragraph, and a
  version that cannot read that must not write on top of it. It says
  so plainly and it is undone by updating that device. If only one
  machine of yours runs Openote, this never comes up at all.
• macOS and Linux are the least-tested platforms by far.
• Openote is still in active development. Updates are worth taking, but a
  major update may occasionally break a feature.
• On Linux, whether double-clicking a notebook folder opens Openote depends
  on your file manager; the Open this notebook file inside the folder
  works either way.

For the technically curious

The import talks to the Microsoft Graph API directly — sign-in is the device
code flow, so nothing is stored but a refresh token in the OS keychain, and
the app registration asks for Notes.Read and nothing else. OneNote never
tells you a page's depth in the hierarchy, but it will filter on it, so
subpages are recovered by asking which pages are at each level and comparing
the answers. Throttling is honoured rather than fought: Retry-After is
obeyed, a throttled batch is retried whole instead of exploded into twenty
requests, and a server fault is retried without narrowing the pipe — which
are different failures and were being treated as one. Everything a page
carries is converted rather than screenshotted: InkML into the same stroke
format the pen writes, MathML into LaTeX, HTML into the live-Markdown model.
Editing a paragraph now appends a splice — at, del, ins, in UTF-16
code units snapped to whole runes — instead of the whole block, which
was 52.6% of a real workspace's op log; forty autosaves of a
thousand-character paragraph fell from about 60 KB to 12 KB, and the
per-save cost stopped growing with the paragraph. It carries a
fingerprint of the text it was computed against and a reader refuses a
patch that does not match, so two devices' logs still merge
last-writer-wins rather than interleaving into prose neither person
wrote. That is the v: 2 envelope, and the reason it was spent before
1.0 rather than after.
Over the cycle the test suite grew from 2,764 to 3,098, and the app carries a
manual pre-release checklist
for the failures a headless suite cannot see.

Downloads

• Windows: openote-*-windows-x64-setup.exe — the installer.
  Installs for your user only, so it never asks for an
  administrator password. (Prefer no installer? The
  …-windows-x64.zip is the same build — unzip it anywhere and run
  openote.exe from inside the folder it extracts.)
• Linux: openote-*-linux-amd64.deb on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint, or
  openote-*-linux-x86_64.rpm on Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE. Double-click
  it, or install from a terminal — then Openote is in your
  applications menu like any other program. To open a notebook from
  your file manager, double-click the Open this notebook file
  inside the notebook's folder; whether double-clicking the folder
  itself opens Openote depends on which file manager you use.
  (Neither package fits? The .tar.gz runs from anywhere: extract
  it and run ./openote inside. It has no package manager to ask
  for libmpv, so if you want video to play in the page, install
  mpv-libs on Fedora or libmpv2 on Ubuntu/Debian yourself —
  the app says so too.)
• macOS: openote-*-macos-universal.dmg — drag Openote to Applications.

---

Both warnings below are expected. Here is exactly why.

Openote is not code-signed. Signing certificates cost a few hundred
dollars a year each, and while the project is this young that money
is better spent on nothing at all. Nothing about the warnings says
the software is unsafe — only that we have not paid to tell your
operating system who we are. Every build here is produced by the
public workflow in this repository, from the tagged commit, and you
can read both.

Windows: "Windows protected your PC"

Click More info, then Run anyway. SmartScreen shows this for
any installer it has not seen often enough to have an opinion about.

macOS: "openote is damaged and can't be opened"

Gatekeeper quarantines unsigned downloads. After copying to
Applications, clear the flag once:

xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app

Your notes never leave your machine either way — see the project's
local-first principles.

What's Changed

...

Openote 0.8.0

What's new

• The download is about half the size — roughly 100 MB down
  to about 50 MB. Openote used to carry a video player inside it;
  now it is fetched once, the first time you play a video. Your
  videos themselves are always on your computer, and if you are
  updating from an older Openote the player you already have
  keeps working — nothing to download.
• Notebooks can take about half the space they did. One
  button (sharing window ▸ Storage) stops Openote keeping every
  picture and drawing twice; on two real notebooks it took them
  from 63 MB down to 33 MB apiece. It checks every single picture
  is safe in the notebook's own folder before it removes
  anything, and changes nothing unless all of them are.
• Double-clicking a notebook now opens it — even when Openote
  is closed. Opening another notebook switches the window you
  already have, rather than starting a second copy.
• See who changed what on a page, and get deletions back. The
  page history button now says which computer each paragraph,
  picture or drawing last came from — and your last ten notable
  deletions (a page, a section, a picture, a recording, a long
  stretch of writing) can each be put back with one click.
  The old copy Openote quietly took of every page every ten
  minutes is gone, and those old copies cannot be brought back —
  if there is an old page version you still want, get it out
  before you update. Undo, the recycle bin and your backups all
  carry on exactly as before.
• OneNote import overhauled. Pages no longer come out cut
  off, blank lines and layout are preserved, erased ink stays
  erased, titles land on the right pages, and importing the same
  file twice no longer doubles up your handwriting or paragraphs.
  Re-import a section to pick up the fixes.
• Sharing and sync are much safer, and faster. Several ways a
  shared notebook could quietly lose things are fixed — one
  computer's bad copy of a picture can no longer delete the good
  copies everywhere else, a sync that silently stopped now picks
  itself up, a save that never reached the notebook's history now
  says so — and catching up with another computer no longer
  freezes the app.
• The whole app works from the keyboard. F6 moves between the
  sidebar, toolbar, page and panels; Ctrl+/ shows every shortcut.
  A paste that cannot be saved now tells you plainly instead of
  doing nothing, and error messages are clearer throughout.
• Your GitHub key now lives in your computer's own password
  storage — Credential Manager on Windows, the Keychain on Mac,
  the keyring on Linux — never in a plain file. A key you saved
  before is moved over automatically.
• Openote can rebuild a notebook's working file from your
  notes if it is ever damaged or lost. Your notes live in the
  notebook's own folder; the working file is only the copy
  Openote reads while the notebook is open.

The fine print

• Openote is still in active development. Updates are worth
  taking, but a major update may occasionally break a feature —
  and macOS is the least-tested platform by far.
• On Linux, whether double-clicking a notebook folder opens
  Openote depends on your file manager; the Open this
  notebook file inside the folder works either way.
• The storage format changed this release: Openote can now tuck
  a notebook's working file out of the way and rebuild it on
  demand. It is opt-in, one notebook at a time, and Put it
  back undoes it.

For the technically curious

This release lands the storage-cluster work: the append-only op
log in the notebook's folder is now the source of truth, and the
SQLite container is demoted to a working copy the app can always
reproduce from that log. Pictures and drawings are stored once,
as content-addressed files verified by re-hash on read-back —
a corrupt copy is set aside and healed rather than deleted, so
one machine's bad blob can never propagate a delete through a
shared notebook. The change set then went through adversarial
review passes whose every confirmed finding was fixed.

Downloads

• Windows: openote-*-windows-x64-setup.exe — the installer.
  Installs for your user only, so it never asks for an
  administrator password. (Prefer no installer? The
  …-windows-x64.zip is the same build — unzip it anywhere and run
  openote.exe from inside the folder it extracts.)
• Linux: openote-*-linux-amd64.deb on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint, or
  openote-*-linux-x86_64.rpm on Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE. Double-click
  it, or install from a terminal — then Openote is in your
  applications menu like any other program. To open a notebook from
  your file manager, double-click the Open this notebook file
  inside the notebook's folder; whether double-clicking the folder
  itself opens Openote depends on which file manager you use.
  (Neither package fits? The .tar.gz runs from anywhere: extract
  it and run ./openote inside. It has no package manager to ask
  for libmpv, so if you want video to play in the page, install
  mpv-libs on Fedora or libmpv2 on Ubuntu/Debian yourself —
  the app says so too.)
• macOS: openote-*-macos-universal.dmg — drag Openote to Applications.

---

Both warnings below are expected. Here is exactly why.

Openote is not code-signed. Signing certificates cost a few hundred
dollars a year each, and while the project is this young that money
is better spent on nothing at all. Nothing about the warnings says
the software is unsafe — only that we have not paid to tell your
operating system who we are. Every build here is produced by the
public workflow in this repository, from the tagged commit, and you
can read both.

Windows: "Windows protected your PC"
Click More info, then Run anyway. SmartScreen shows this for
any installer it has not seen often enough to have an opinion about.

macOS: "openote is damaged and can't be opened"
Gatekeeper quarantines unsigned downloads. After copying to
Applications, clear the flag once:

xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app

Your notes never leave your machine either way — see the project's
local-first principles.

Full Changelog: v0.7.1...v0.8.0

Openote 0.7.1

Downloads

• Windows: openote-*-windows-x64-setup.exe — the installer.
  Installs for your user only, so it never asks for an
  administrator password. (Prefer no installer? The
  …-windows-x64.zip is the same build — unzip it anywhere and run
  openote.exe from inside the folder it extracts.)
• Linux: openote-*-linux-amd64.deb on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint, or
  openote-*-linux-x86_64.rpm on Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE. Double-click
  it, or install from a terminal — then Openote is in your
  applications menu like any other program, and .onote files are
  named and iconed correctly in your file manager. (Neither fits?
  The .tar.gz runs from anywhere: extract it and run ./openote
  inside. It has no package manager to ask for libmpv, so if you
  want video to play in the page, install mpv-libs on Fedora or
  libmpv2 on Ubuntu/Debian yourself — the app says so too.)
• macOS: openote-*-macos-universal.dmg — drag Openote to Applications.

---

Both warnings below are expected. Here is exactly why.

Openote is not code-signed. Signing certificates cost a few hundred
dollars a year each, and while the project is this young that money
is better spent on nothing at all. Nothing about the warnings says
the software is unsafe — only that we have not paid to tell your
operating system who we are. Every build here is produced by the
public workflow in this repository, from the tagged commit, and you
can read both.

Windows: "Windows protected your PC"
Click More info, then Run anyway. SmartScreen shows this for
any installer it has not seen often enough to have an opinion about.

macOS: "openote is damaged and can't be opened"
Gatekeeper quarantines unsigned downloads. After copying to
Applications, clear the flag once:

xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app

Your notes never leave your machine either way — see the project's
local-first principles.

Full Changelog: v0.7.0...v0.7.1

Openote 0.7.0

Downloads

• Windows: openote-*-windows-x64-setup.exe — the installer.
  Installs for your user only, so it never asks for an
  administrator password. (Prefer no installer? The
  …-windows-x64.zip is the same build — unzip it anywhere and run
  openote.exe from inside the folder it extracts.)
• Linux: openote-*-linux-amd64.deb on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint, or
  openote-*-linux-x86_64.rpm on Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE. Double-click
  it, or install from a terminal — then Openote is in your
  applications menu like any other program, and .onote files are
  named and iconed correctly in your file manager. (Neither fits?
  The .tar.gz runs from anywhere: extract it and run ./openote
  inside. It has no package manager to ask for libmpv, so if you
  want video to play in the page, install mpv-libs on Fedora or
  libmpv2 on Ubuntu/Debian yourself — the app says so too.)
• macOS: openote-*-macos-universal.dmg — drag Openote to Applications.

---

Both warnings below are expected. Here is exactly why.

Openote is not code-signed. Signing certificates cost a few hundred
dollars a year each, and while the project is this young that money
is better spent on nothing at all. Nothing about the warnings says
the software is unsafe — only that we have not paid to tell your
operating system who we are. Every build here is produced by the
public workflow in this repository, from the tagged commit, and you
can read both.

Windows: "Windows protected your PC"
Click More info, then Run anyway. SmartScreen shows this for
any installer it has not seen often enough to have an opinion about.

macOS: "openote is damaged and can't be opened"
Gatekeeper quarantines unsigned downloads. After copying to
Applications, clear the flag once:

xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app

Your notes never leave your machine either way — see the project's
local-first principles.

Full Changelog: v0.6.2...v0.7.0

Openote 0.6.0

Downloads

• Windows: openote-*-windows-x64-setup.exe — the installer.
  Installs for your user only, so it never asks for an
  administrator password. (Prefer no installer? The
  …-windows-x64.zip is the same build — unzip it anywhere and run
  openote.exe from inside the folder it extracts.)
• Linux: openote-*-linux-amd64.deb on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint, or
  openote-*-linux-x86_64.rpm on Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE. Double-click
  it, or install from a terminal — then Openote is in your
  applications menu like any other program, and .onote files are
  named and iconed correctly in your file manager. (Neither fits?
  The .tar.gz runs from anywhere: extract it and run ./openote
  inside. It has no package manager to ask for libmpv, so if you
  want video to play in the page, install mpv-libs on Fedora or
  libmpv2 on Ubuntu/Debian yourself — the app says so too.)
• macOS: openote-*-macos-universal.dmg — drag Openote to Applications.

---

Both warnings below are expected. Here is exactly why.

Openote is not code-signed. Signing certificates cost a few hundred
dollars a year each, and while the project is this young that money
is better spent on nothing at all. Nothing about the warnings says
the software is unsafe — only that we have not paid to tell your
operating system who we are. Every build here is produced by the
public workflow in this repository, from the tagged commit, and you
can read both.

Windows: "Windows protected your PC"
Click More info, then Run anyway. SmartScreen shows this for
any installer it has not seen often enough to have an opinion about.

macOS: "openote is damaged and can't be opened"
Gatekeeper quarantines unsigned downloads. After copying to
Applications, clear the flag once:

xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app

Your notes never leave your machine either way — see the project's
local-first principles.

Full Changelog: v0.5.0...v0.6.0

Openote 0.5.0

Downloads

• Windows: openote-*-windows-x64-setup.exe — the installer.
  Installs for your user only, so it never asks for an
  administrator password. (Prefer no installer? The
  …-windows-x64.zip is the same build — unzip it anywhere and run
  openote.exe from inside the folder it extracts.)
• Linux: openote-*-linux-amd64.deb on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint, or
  openote-*-linux-x86_64.rpm on Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE. Double-click
  it, or install from a terminal — then Openote is in your
  applications menu like any other program, and .onote files are
  named and iconed correctly in your file manager. (Neither fits?
  The .tar.gz runs from anywhere: extract it and run ./openote
  inside. It has no package manager to ask for libmpv, so if you
  want video to play in the page, install mpv-libs on Fedora or
  libmpv2 on Ubuntu/Debian yourself — the app says so too.)
• macOS: openote-*-macos-universal.dmg — drag Openote to Applications.

---

Both warnings below are expected. Here is exactly why.

Openote is not code-signed. Signing certificates cost a few hundred
dollars a year each, and while the project is this young that money
is better spent on nothing at all. Nothing about the warnings says
the software is unsafe — only that we have not paid to tell your
operating system who we are. Every build here is produced by the
public workflow in this repository, from the tagged commit, and you
can read both.

Windows: "Windows protected your PC"
Click More info, then Run anyway. SmartScreen shows this for
any installer it has not seen often enough to have an opinion about.

macOS: "openote is damaged and can't be opened"
Gatekeeper quarantines unsigned downloads. After copying to
Applications, clear the flag once:

xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app

Your notes never leave your machine either way — see the project's
local-first principles.

Full Changelog: v0.4.2...v0.5.0

Openote 0.4.2

Downloads

• Windows: openote-*-windows-x64-setup.exe — the installer.
  Installs for your user only, so it never asks for an
  administrator password. (Prefer no installer? The
  …-windows-x64.zip is the same build — unzip it anywhere and run
  openote.exe from inside the folder it extracts.)
• Linux: openote-*-linux-amd64.deb on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint, or
  openote-*-linux-x86_64.rpm on Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE. Double-click
  it, or install from a terminal — then Openote is in your
  applications menu like any other program, and .onote files are
  named and iconed correctly in your file manager. (Neither fits?
  The .tar.gz runs from anywhere: extract it and run ./openote
  inside. It has no package manager to ask for libmpv, so if you
  want video to play in the page, install mpv-libs on Fedora or
  libmpv2 on Ubuntu/Debian yourself — the app says so too.)
• macOS: openote-*-macos-universal.dmg — drag Openote to Applications.

---

Both warnings below are expected. Here is exactly why.

Openote is not code-signed. Signing certificates cost a few hundred
dollars a year each, and while the project is this young that money
is better spent on nothing at all. Nothing about the warnings says
the software is unsafe — only that we have not paid to tell your
operating system who we are. Every build here is produced by the
public workflow in this repository, from the tagged commit, and you
can read both.

Windows: "Windows protected your PC"
Click More info, then Run anyway. SmartScreen shows this for
any installer it has not seen often enough to have an opinion about.

macOS: "openote is damaged and can't be opened"
Gatekeeper quarantines unsigned downloads. After copying to
Applications, clear the flag once:

xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app

Your notes never leave your machine either way — see the project's
local-first principles.

Full Changelog: v0.4.1...v0.4.2

Openote 0.4.1

Downloads

• Windows: openote-*-windows-x64-setup.exe — the installer.
  Installs for your user only, so it never asks for an
  administrator password. (Prefer no installer? The
  …-windows-x64.zip is the same build — unzip it anywhere and run
  openote.exe from inside the folder it extracts.)
• Linux: openote-*-linux-amd64.deb on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint, or
  openote-*-linux-x86_64.rpm on Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE. Double-click
  it, or install from a terminal — then Openote is in your
  applications menu like any other program, and .onote files open
  on double-click. (Neither fits? The .tar.gz runs from anywhere:
  extract it and run ./openote inside.)
• macOS: openote-*-macos-universal.dmg — drag Openote to Applications.

---

Both warnings below are expected. Here is exactly why.

Openote is not code-signed. Signing certificates cost a few hundred
dollars a year each, and while the project is this young that money
is better spent on nothing at all. Nothing about the warnings says
the software is unsafe — only that we have not paid to tell your
operating system who we are. Every build here is produced by the
public workflow in this repository, from the tagged commit, and you
can read both.

Windows: "Windows protected your PC"
Click More info, then Run anyway. SmartScreen shows this for
any installer it has not seen often enough to have an opinion about.

macOS: "openote is damaged and can't be opened"
Gatekeeper quarantines unsigned downloads. After copying to
Applications, clear the flag once:

xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app

Your notes never leave your machine either way — see the project's
local-first principles.

Full Changelog: v0.4.0...v0.4.1

Openote 0.3.1

Downloads

• Windows: openote-*-windows-x64-setup.exe — the installer.
  Installs for your user only, so it never asks for an
  administrator password. (Prefer no installer? The
  …-windows-x64.zip is the same build — unzip it anywhere and run
  openote.exe from inside the folder it extracts.)
• Linux: openote-*-linux-x86_64.AppImage — chmod +x, run. Or the .tar.gz if AppImage doesn't suit.
• macOS: openote-*-macos-universal.dmg — drag Openote to Applications.

---

Both warnings below are expected. Here is exactly why.

Openote is not code-signed. Signing certificates cost a few hundred
dollars a year each, and while the project is this young that money
is better spent on nothing at all. Nothing about the warnings says
the software is unsafe — only that we have not paid to tell your
operating system who we are. Every build here is produced by the
public workflow in this repository, from the tagged commit, and you
can read both.

Windows: "Windows protected your PC"
Click More info, then Run anyway. SmartScreen shows this for
any installer it has not seen often enough to have an opinion about.

macOS: "openote is damaged and can't be opened"
Gatekeeper quarantines unsigned downloads. After copying to
Applications, clear the flag once:

xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app

Your notes never leave your machine either way — see the project's
local-first principles.

Full Changelog: v0.3.0...v0.3.1