Documentation

Notewell stores notes as Markdown in your browser and reconciles them with the sync service in the background. This page covers the file format, the sync stream and the handful of keyboard shortcuts worth learning.

Getting started

Open the app and start typing — there is no account step. Notes live in local storage until you enable sync. Ctrl+Enter creates a sibling line, Tab and Shift+Tab move a line in and out of its parent, and Ctrl+K opens the jump-to-note palette.

File format

Each note is a Markdown document with YAML front matter. Nesting is expressed as ordinary list indentation, two spaces per level, so the files stay readable in any editor:

---
id: 01J8Z4R2N
title: Thermodynamics — week 4
review: [3, 7, 21]
---

- Second law
  - Entropy of an isolated system never decreases
  - ?? State the Clausius inequality
    - $\oint \frac{\delta Q}{T} \le 0$

A line beginning ?? becomes a review prompt; its children are the answer.

The sync stream

Sync is one long-lived HTTP request rather than a websocket, which keeps it working behind corporate proxies and captive portals that drop upgrade handshakes. The client opens a streaming connection to:

POST /api/trpc/doc.sync.stream

and holds it open for the duration of the session. Document patches are sent as bounded chunks on that connection; the response body carries the reconciled operations back. If the connection drops the client resumes from the last acknowledged sequence number, so a flaky network costs you a round trip, not your edits.

Expect the connection to stay open for tens of minutes at a time. That is normal and is not a leak — closing the tab ends it.

Accounts

Local notes need no account. Enabling multi-device sync requires a workspace key, which is currently issued by hand during the beta — mail the address below and mention roughly how many devices you use.

Export

Settings → Export writes the whole workspace to a zip of Markdown files with the folder structure preserved. Import accepts the same shape, so moving between machines without sync is a two-click operation.

Contact

Beta feedback: notewell (at) proton.me. Please include the version string from Settings → About.