A premium, offline-first notes & reminders app for Windows 11 — Apple Notes simplicity with Windows Sticky Notes convenience, built with native Windows 11 design language. Dark mode, always.
- Rich-text editor (RichEditBox): bold, italic, underline, headings (H1–H3), font family & size
- Font color: instant quick-color swatches + a full color-spectrum picker; picked colors persist per character run
- Three list types — bullets (•), numbered (1.), and circle lists (○, Apple-style) that start right at the caret and continue on Enter; the three are mutually exclusive (conflicting list buttons disable automatically), and every new list keeps a plain line below it so you can always click out
- Title color per note (the left-hand notes list always stays in the default theme color)
- Markdown blocks (
{}tool): write Markdown, render it into the note at the caret - Tags + tag filter, full-text search (Ctrl+F), pin / favorite / duplicate / archive / soft-delete
- Image attachments: file picker, clipboard paste, drag & drop
- Debounced autosave — no save button, ever
- Reminders attached to notes (or standalone) with once / daily / weekly / monthly repeats
- Native Windows toasts, with an in-app fallback when toasts are unavailable
- Tasks section with complete/delete; convert any note to a task
- Month / week / day / year views, Ctrl+scroll zoom, multi-day events
- Two-way Google Calendar sync (DST-safe recurrence handling)
- Floating AI assistant ball: agentic plan → apply actions across your notes, summarize, rephrase
- Dictation (speech-to-text) via Deepgram or AssemblyAI — streamed live into the note
- Dark mode only — one polished theme, Mica title bar
- System tray: hide-to-tray, quick actions, global hotkey for a new note
- Compact mode, dock left/right, always-on-top pin, responsive single-pane layout at narrow widths
- Automatic daily database backups
- In-app auto-update from GitHub Releases
Offline-first. Everything lives inside the application folder (SQLite database, attachments, settings) — moving the folder moves your data. A .portable marker file next to the exe enables portable mode. Cloud features (Google sync, AI, dictation) are opt-in and only active when you provide API keys.
Grab CacheNoteSetup.exe from the latest release and run it. The app checks for updates on launch and updates itself in one click.
Prereqs: Windows 11, .NET 9 SDK.
git clone https://github.com/viseshb/CacheNote.git
cd CacheNote
dotnet build CacheNote.App\CacheNote.App.csproj -c Debug
# run the unpackaged exe:
.\CacheNote.App\bin\Debug\net9.0-windows10.0.26100.0\win-x64\CacheNote.App.exeOptional cloud features read keys from a .env file next to the exe (or environment variables):
| Key | Used for |
|---|---|
DEEPGRAM_API_KEY / ASSEMBLYAI_API_KEY |
Dictation (pick the provider in Settings) |
GEMINI_API_KEY or VERTEX_AI_API_KEY |
AI assistant (summarize / rephrase / agentic actions) |
| Google OAuth client (see Settings → Google Sync) | Two-way calendar sync |
dotnet test CacheNote.Tests # unit tests (fast)
dotnet test CacheNote.UiTests # FlaUI end-to-end tests (drives the real app)UI tests launch the actual exe against an isolated temp database (CacheNote_DATA_DIR) — they never touch your real data.
| Project | What it is |
|---|---|
CacheNote.App |
WinUI 3 (unpackaged) shell, pages, tray, updater |
CacheNote.Core |
MVVM view models, services, SQLite data layer, cloud/AI/speech integrations |
CacheNote.Tests |
xUnit unit tests for Core |
CacheNote.UiTests |
FlaUI UIA3 end-to-end smoke + regression tests |
installer/ |
Inno Setup script for CacheNoteSetup.exe |
C# 13 / .NET 9 / WinUI 3 (Windows App SDK 2.1) / CommunityToolkit.Mvvm / Microsoft.Data.Sqlite.
Pushes to master run semantic-release: Conventional Commit messages decide the version (feat: → minor, fix: → patch, BREAKING → major), CI builds the self-contained installer, tags, and publishes the GitHub Release that the in-app updater consumes.