🪶 Quillpad

Local-first markdown notes. Your notes are plain .md files you own.

Quillpad is a fast, beautiful desktop notes app in the spirit of Notion and Obsidian — except there is no account, no cloud, no database, and no subscription. You point it at a folder. Every note is a real markdown file. Folders are folders. Quit the app, and your entire "knowledge base" is still sitting there in Explorer as portable plain text that will outlive every notes startup.

Pay once. Own it forever. No subscription.

Features

• 📁 Your vault is just a folder — pick any folder (or use the default under Documents). Notes are real .md files, folders are folders. Edit them in any other app; Quillpad watches the disk and refreshes live.
• ✍️ Live-styled markdown editor — CodeMirror 6 with inline preview styling: sized headings, rendered bold/italic, highlighted code. Toggle a full rendered preview with Ctrl+E.
• 🔗 [[Wikilinks]] — type [[ for a fuzzy autocomplete over every note name. Aliases ([[note|label]]) supported. Click a link to follow it — if the note doesn't exist yet, Quillpad creates it.
• 🔙 Backlinks panel — every note shows who links to it, with the context line, one click away.
• #️⃣ Tags — #hashtags anywhere in a note appear in the tag sidebar; click to filter notes by tag.
• 🔎 Full-text search — instant search across every file in the vault with highlighted matches.
• 📅 Daily notes — Ctrl+D opens (or creates) today's daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md.
• ⚡ Quick capture — Ctrl+Shift+N from anywhere in Windows pops a tiny capture window; hit Enter and it's appended to inbox.md.
• 🚀 Quick switcher — Ctrl+P jumps to any note, recent files first.
• 🖱 Full file management — create, rename, delete, and drag-and-drop notes and folders in the sidebar tree.
• 🔒 100% local — no telemetry, no network calls, ever. Your notes never leave your machine.

Quick start

npm i
npm start

That's it. Quillpad creates a starter vault at Documents/Quillpad (change it any time with the vault button).

Build a Windows installer: npm run dist. Run the test suite: npm test.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+P	Quick switcher (recent notes first)
Ctrl+D	Open/create today's daily note
Ctrl+N	New note
Ctrl+E	Toggle full preview
Ctrl+Shift+F	Search all notes
Ctrl+Shift+N	Quick capture → inbox.md (global, works outside the app)
Ctrl+S	Save now (auto-save is on anyway)

Quillpad vs. subscription note apps

	Quillpad	Notion	Evernote	Obsidian Sync
Price	$29 once	$12/mo per seat	$14.99/mo	$4–8/mo (app free)
Your data	Plain .md files in your folder	Their cloud, their format	Their cloud, their format	Files local, sync paid
Works offline	Always	Partially	Partially	Yes
Account required	No	Yes	Yes	Yes (for sync)
Telemetry	None	Yes	Yes	Optional
Export needed to leave	Never — it's already files	Yes	Yes	No
Cost after 3 years	$29	$432	$540	$144–288

☕ Skip the setup — get the 1-click installer

The source is free (MIT) and always will be. If you'd rather skip Node/npm and get a signed one-click Windows installer with auto-updates:

→ Get Quillpad on Whop — $29, yours forever

Tech stack

• Electron — main + preload + renderer, context-isolated
• CodeMirror 6 — markdown editing with live syntax-driven styling
• marked — full preview rendering
• Plain HTML/CSS/JS renderer bundled with esbuild — no framework, boots instantly
• Pure-Node core — src/indexer.js (wikilink/tag/backlink index) and src/vault.js (fs layer) have zero Electron dependencies and are covered by test/smoke.js (28 checks against a real temp-dir vault)

Architecture notes

• src/indexer.js — pure module. Parses [[wikilinks]] (aliases, headings, unicode) and #tags, ignores anything inside fenced/inline code, and maintains forward-link/backlink/tag maps with rename-aware, plain-file-semantics resolution.
• src/vault.js — the fs layer. All note I/O goes through here; it's what the tests exercise against a real filesystem.
• src/main.js — Electron main: vault lifecycle, fs.watch (with self-write suppression), IPC, global quick-capture shortcut.
• src/renderer/ — the UI; app.js is bundled to dist/bundle.js by esbuild on npm start.

License

MIT © 2026 Ben (bensblueprints)