sudonotes

A lightweight, local-first notebook for prompts and ideas.

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LLM prompts end up scattered across chat histories, scratch files, and half-abandoned Notion pages. They get rewritten from scratch instead of refined. sudonotes keeps them in one place, links them to the ideas that motivated them, and finds them again instantly.

• Local-first. Your notes are plain Markdown files in a folder you choose. No account, no sync, no lock-in.
• Lightweight. Built with Tauri — the installer is ~20MB and it uses your system's webview instead of shipping a browser.
• Fast search. SQLite FTS5 over every note. Ctrl+K from anywhere.
• Linked. Wiki-style [[links]] with backlinks, so prompts and the ideas behind them stay connected.
• Open source. MIT.

AI assistance can analyze prompt/model fit, suggest refinements, and add tags. It is on by default and needs no API key of your own — requests go through the sudonotes API, which holds the provider key. Enabling it sends the note's content to that service; turn it off per vault to keep note content local. Note bodies are never logged by the sudonotes proxy, and a failed automatic-tag request can fall back to a local keyword pass.

Project linking and IDEAS.md

Link an idea to a software project and sudonotes mirrors it to IDEAS.md in the project root. The vault note remains the canonical copy, and every save refreshes the mirror so people and local coding agents can find the context next to the code.

In a Git repository, sudonotes adds IDEAS.md to .gitignore. If the project already has that file, the app asks whether to import it into the idea or replace it instead of silently overwriting it.

Read the project-linking and IDEAS.md guide. Learn how to structure IDEAS.md for a local LLM or coding agent.

Vault layout

A vault is just a directory:

<vault>/
  prompts/**.md
  ideas/**.md
  .sudonotes/index.db        # search index — a cache, rebuilt on launch
  .sudonotes/settings.json   # whether AI is on for this vault

Deleting .sudonotes/ costs you nothing but the index and that one preference, which returns to its default of on. Your notes are the .md files; nothing else in the vault is load-bearing. No credentials are ever written there.

Each note is Markdown with a small YAML frontmatter block (id, title, tags, created, updated). Edit them in any editor you like; sudonotes picks up external changes automatically.

Writing a note

Two pieces of syntax do most of the work. Both are ordinary text, so a note that uses them is still readable in any editor.

{{placeholders}} — prompts as templates

Anywhere a prompt has a value you swap out each time, write it as {{name}}:

Review this {{language}} pull request for {{concern}}.
Be concise and cite line numbers.

The editor highlights each one, and the right panel turns every distinct placeholder into a field. Fill them in and Copy filled puts the finished text on your clipboard — the note itself is never rewritten, so the template stays a template. A placeholder you leave blank is copied through as {{name}}, so a half-filled prompt still shows what is missing rather than silently going out with a hole in it.

Names are free text and matched literally: {{language}} and {{ language }} are the same placeholder, {{Language}} is a different one.

[[links]] — connecting notes

Write [[Note title]] to link one note to another:

Drafted from [[Prompt library]] while working through [[AI fridge]].

The brackets are hidden while you read and reappear when the caret enters the link, so a linked note reads as prose rather than markup. Ctrl+click opens the target. If no note by that title exists yet, following the link offers to create it.

To label a link differently from its target, use [[Target|what to show]].

The Linked from panel lists every note pointing at the one you have open, which is what to check before renaming or deleting something.

Selecting a word and pressing [ wraps it, one bracket per press — so [ twice gives you a link — and Backspace peels the levels back off one at a time.

Keyboard

Ctrl K / Ctrl F	Search every note
Ctrl Shift F	Find within the open note
Ctrl N	New note, of whatever type you are looking at
Ctrl S	Flush the pending save (saving is automatic)
Ctrl A	Select the current bubble in an idea; on a blank separator, select the whole note
Ctrl + / - / 0	Scale the interface
Ctrl Enter	From a prompt in a collection, back to the collection

See the complete context-aware shortcut reference.

Backups

sudonotes keeps compressed snapshots of the vault outside it, in the app's own data directory — the point being to survive the vault folder itself being deleted:

Windows	%APPDATA%\com.sudonotes.app\backups\
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/com.sudonotes.app/backups/
Linux	~/.local/share/com.sudonotes.app/backups/

One runs when a vault opens, at most once every six hours, and the twenty most recent are kept. The settings dialog has the switch, the folder path, and a Back up now button.

To recover, use Restore a backup… in the same dialog: pick the .bak, pick an empty folder to unpack it into, and sudonotes offers to open the result as your vault. Restoring refuses any folder that already has something in it, so a recovery can never land on top of notes you still have — your current vault is never written to.

Failing that, each archive is an ordinary ZIP despite the extension: rename it to .zip, unpack it into an empty folder, and open that folder as a vault. The prompts/ and ideas/ trees inside are exactly as they were, and nothing else in the archive is needed.

Read the full backup and recovery guide.

Repository

Directory	What it is
core/	sudonotes-core — the note format: frontmatter, filenames, links, paste splitting. Pure Rust, no filesystem, and it compiles to WebAssembly so a browser build can share it.
app/	The desktop app. React front end in src/, Tauri and the filesystem in src-tauri/.
worker/	The Cloudflare Worker behind api.sudonotes.com, which holds the AI provider key.
site/	sudonotes.com — Astro, static.

The split between core/ and app/src-tauri/ is deliberate and worth preserving: a vault is a folder that more than one program will eventually write into, and anything defining how a note is stored belongs in core/ so those programs cannot disagree.

Development

Requires Node.js and Rust, plus the Tauri system dependencies for your platform.

cd app && npm install && npm run tauri dev

Run the Rust tests:

cargo test --manifest-path core/Cargo.toml && cargo test --manifest-path app/src-tauri/Cargo.toml

Check that the core still builds for the browser:

cargo check --manifest-path core/Cargo.toml --target wasm32-unknown-unknown

Build a release installer:

cd app && npm run tauri build

Status

Early. The core loop — capture, link, search — is in place, along with project-folder linking, collection splitting, and per-note model assignment. A browser build that connects to the same vault, and vim keybindings, are planned.

License

MIT