Note taking and organization, written in pure Rust: an open, clean-room notebook app for people who want their notes to stay files.

Notebooks, section groups, sections and pages are plain folders on your disk, and a page is one HTML or Markdown file beside its pictures. Any folder your sync tool already watches becomes a synced notebook. No server, no account, no database.

_{The sample notebooks. The ribbon, coloured notebooks and sections, and a page written in the type it will be read in.}

A tour · Why NoteCraft · What works today · Quick start · Downloads · How your notes are stored · How to · For agents and scripts · Architecture · How it is tested · Status · Credits and licence

A tour

Every picture below is NoteCraft itself, drawn off screen by its own test harness (cargo xtask screenshots), not a mock-up.

Home. An Office-style ribbon: groups, galleries for styles and tags, and the controls that are not built yet say so.	Tags. To Do, Important, Question, Idea and the rest, written into the page as plain text and drawn as the marks you already know.
Equations. A TeX subset drawn natively: fractions, roots, sums, integrals and scaled brackets.	14 themes. Light and dark, seven accents each, every colour checked for contrast by a test.
File. Your notebooks and where they live on disk. Anything not built says so instead of hiding.	Both formats. A page is HTML or CommonMark; the same editor, the same look, the file stays in its own format.
Inside a page. The files a page owns, and what is in each: the whole page file, head and body, to read and to edit.
Diagrams and charts. Mermaid source in the page, drawn where it stands; click one to edit it: flowcharts, sequence, pie, bar and line, and more.

Why NoteCraft

• Your notes are files. A notebook is a folder. A page is index.html or index.md with its pictures beside it. Open them in any editor, grep them, put them in git, or delete the app.
• You can look inside. A OneNote section is one binary file, and a text editor shows noise. NoteCraft's page source view lists every file a page owns and shows what is in each, the page's own text with its head, the drawing, the pictures, so you can check what your notes contain without taking anyone's word for it. See Look inside a page.
• Sync is your sync. Put a notebook in the folder OneDrive, Dropbox, Syncthing or iCloud already watches. There is no NoteCraft server and no account.
• No depth limit. Note taking apps usually cap sub-pages at a level or three, because their file format says so. Here a page is a folder, so pages nest as deep as you like.
• Familiar. The Office-style ribbon, the File screen, coloured notebooks and sections, tags, to-do boxes, a page you write on directly. Nothing new to learn.
• Fast and small. One Rust binary on the GPU through egui. No Electron, no browser engine, no database.
• Scriptable. Every action is a command with an id, shared by the window, a command line, a loopback control channel and an MCP server, so an assistant can use your notes without a cloud account.
• Honest. Everything unfinished is written down in docs/gaps.md and ROADMAP.md. The app says "not built" where it means it.

What works today

Area	What you get
Structure	Notebooks, section groups, sections and pages as folders; sub-pages to any depth; expand and collapse at every level; a new notebook starts with a section and a page, the way you expect
Writing	Write straight on the page in its finished look: headings, bold, italic, links, quotes, lists. Enter splits the line at the caret, Tab indents a list item, Backspace joins lines
Two formats	HTML (the default) and CommonMark + GFM, chosen per page, per section, per notebook or globally; the file keeps its own format when you edit it
Containers	A page is a sheet of boxes, not one column: move a box by the bar on top, resize it by the right edge; select one whole to cut, copy or delete it; each box is an element in the page's own text
Page source	The < > button opens the page's folder: every file the page owns on the left, the one you pick on the right. The page file shows its head (id, title, dates) above its body, which you can edit; a drawing's SVG shows as text, pictures as pictures, and a file nothing on the page uses is marked
Right to left	Arabic, Hebrew and the rest draw, with a direction for the page, the line or the run, kept in the text itself so it travels. Mixed lines are not reordered yet
Tags	To Do, Important, Question, Remember, Definition, Highlight, Contact, Address, Phone, Web site, Idea, Critical: stored as plain text in the page, drawn as the marks you know
Diagrams and charts	Mermaid diagrams, in a fenced block (Markdown) or <pre class="mermaid"> (HTML), drawn in the page where they stand: flowcharts, sequence, class, state, ER, Gantt, mind maps, pie, bar and line charts. Click one to edit its source. A diagram that cannot be drawn says why and stays as text
Equations	KaTeX-style TeX maths drawn natively in real maths fonts, inline and display: fractions, roots, sums, integrals, matrices, cases, accents, with a gallery to start from
Pictures and files	Drop a file on the page: copy it into the page's folder or link to it where it is, and it asks which
Colours	Nine colours for notebooks, section groups and sections, saved in the folder
Themes	14 themes, light and dark in seven accents, with contrast guaranteed by a test; a sun or moon switcher
Finding things	Search across every page of every notebook, with snippets
Ribbon	Home, Insert and View, with a Source tab that appears with the page source view; a File screen for whole notebooks
Safety	Autosave through a temporary file and a rename; a checker for the folder rules; every command tested against junk parameters
Agents	An MCP server on stdin and stdout: the tree, search, reading and writing pages, making notebooks, running any command; with the window open it can also see what you see
Import	notecraft-cli import onenote turns a folder of .one section files, the ones the Office note taking app writes on Windows, into notebooks, sections, pages and sub-pages in either page format, with pictures and attachments. Ink and password protected sections are not read yet

The honest picture is in docs/feature-parity.md (feature by feature against the app most people are moving from) and docs/gaps.md (what is missing or unproven).

Quick start

You need Rust.

cargo run --release -p notecraft                      # the app, on ~/Documents/NoteCraft
cargo run --release -p notecraft -- --notebooks ./my-notes

Try it on sample notebooks without touching your own:

cargo run -p notecraft-cli -- --notebooks ./demo sample
cargo run --release -p notecraft -- --notebooks ./demo --expand-all

To try the bundled Welcome notebook, first copy one format into the ignored ./my-notebooks folder. The copy task never writes to docs/demo/DemoNotebook:

cargo xtask demo-copy html
cargo run -p notecraft -- --notebooks ./my-notebooks --expand-all

Use cargo xtask demo-copy cmgfm for the CMGFM version. If my-notebooks/welcome-notebook already exists, add --replace to refresh that test copy; this replaces edits made to that copy.

How your notes are stored

Notes/                        the notebooks folder
  my-notebook/                notebook          _node.toml
    work/                     section group     _node.toml
      projects/               section           _node.toml
        project-x/            page              index.html + assets/
          index.html
          assets/diagram.png
          meeting-notes/      sub-page          index.md + assets/
    ideas/                    section           _node.toml (format = "cmgfm")
      format-ideas/
        index.md

A page carries its own metadata (title, id, order, created, updated) in front matter or in <meta> tags, so a page is still a page after it is copied, moved or synced. The rules, down to name length and conflict copies, are in docs/folder-format.md.

For agents and scripts

Every user-visible action is a command with an id, and every front end dispatches the same ones:

notecraft-cli commands                                  # every command and its parameters
notecraft-cli run notebook.create name=Work
notecraft-cli run node.create parent=work kind=page title="First page"
notecraft-cli tree
notecraft-cli search "quarterly"
notecraft-cli check work

The running window can be driven over a loopback port, which is how the screenshots above are made and how the UI tests work:

notecraft --control 0        # prints nothing; the port and key are in control-key.local-PORT

It speaks JSON lines: engine.execute, ui.open, ui.caret, ui.click, ui.key, ui.text, ui.theme, ui.screenshot, ui.inspect. See docs/control-protocol.md and the command list in docs/commands.md, which a test keeps in step with the code.

An assistant reaches the same commands over the Model Context Protocol, on stdin and stdout:

notecraft-cli mcp                  # the notebooks folder, nothing running
notecraft-cli mcp --connect 54321  # a running window, so it sees what you see

Tools for the tree, search, reading and writing pages, making notebooks and nodes, checking a notebook, and running any command by id; resources for the tree, the commands and any page. Deleting is not a tool of its own. It is stdio only: no network, no account, nothing uploaded. See docs/mcp.md.

Architecture

A Cargo workspace in layers. cargo xtask layers enforces that a crate only depends on lower layers, and that nothing below the UI layer knows about egui.

Layer	Crate	Job
L0	notecraft-model	Node kinds, page formats, tags, name rules, ids, time
L1	notecraft-formats	HTML and CommonMark: front matter, parsing into blocks, writing blocks back
L1	notecraft-math	TeX maths typeset into drawing items (RaTeX, with a small engine of its own as the fallback)
L1	notecraft-onenote	Reads .one section files: the revision store and its objects
L2	notecraft-store	Notebooks as folders: the tree, pages, attachments, settings, search, the checker
L4	notecraft-engine	The session and the command registry
L6	notecraft-ui-egui	The window: tree, ribbon, the page and how it is written on, themes
apps	notecraft, notecraft-cli	The desktop window and the command line
tools	xtask	cargo xtask ci and friends

More in docs/architecture.md. Guides for using it are in docs/how-to: starting a notebook, writing a page, tagging a line, adding pictures, syncing, choosing the page format, making it yours, scripting it, and moving your notes in with the importer.

How it is tested

cargo xtask ci     # fmt, clippy -D warnings, every test, layers, assets, links, text style

292 tests. The interesting ones:

• Paired pixel tests. Every icon is drawn by the app and by an independent reference in the same run and compared pixel for pixel, with negative controls that must fail. No golden images are committed, so nothing has to be regenerated on another machine.
• A real window, driven headlessly. The UI tests open the window off screen, click, type and read the page back through the control channel.
• Contrast. Every text and accent colour in all 14 themes is checked against its background.
• Hostile input. Every command runs with empty, huge, traversal and absolute-path parameters; the Markdown, HTML, TeX and .one readers are run on junk. Nothing may panic.
• Round trips. What the block writer writes, the parser reads back the same, for both page formats, so editing a page cannot quietly change it.
• The MCP server over a pipe. A whole conversation, from initialize to a notebook made, written, searched and checked, runs through the same stdio loop a client would use.

docs/testing.md explains the method, which follows the sibling Craft apps.

Downloads

The first release is not published yet. When it is, the latest release will list the builds below, and all releases will keep the earlier versions and their notes. <ver> in a file name is the version number, and SHA256SUMS.txt lists a checksum for every file.

Build	Installer	Portable
Windows x64 (64-bit Intel and AMD)	notecraft-<ver>-windows-x64.msi	notecraft-<ver>-windows-x64-portable.zip

Windows x64 is the only build. macOS and Linux are untested, so there are no builds for them; the Quick start builds from source.

The builds are not code-signed yet. Windows SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC". Choose More info, then Run anyway. Check the download against SHA256SUMS.txt, and for a release built on GitHub, against its build attestation: gh attestation verify <file> --repo AlienTechSoftware/notecraft.

The installer puts the program in Program Files and needs administrator rights. The portable zip needs neither: unzip it and run notecraft.exe. Neither one touches your notebooks, which are plain folders (by default Documents\NoteCraft), so removing the app never removes them.

Every release is an alpha and is marked a pre-release. docs/releasing.md describes the version numbers and how a release is built.

Logs

The desktop app writes notecraft.log next to its settings: %APPDATA%\NoteCraft\ on Windows. A start from the Start menu has no terminal, so this file is what to attach to a bug report. It records the start (version, folders), the window opening and closing, warnings and errors from the graphics and window libraries, and any panic with its backtrace. Page text is not logged on purpose, but a panic message can quote what the code was handling, so look before you share it. A log over 1 MB moves to notecraft.log.old. notecraft --version and notecraft-cli --version print the version and write no file.

Status and what is missing

NoteCraft is alpha, version 0.0.3. It is not a ready product: it runs and it is tested, but it is not finished, it has had little use, and a notebook you care about should have a backup. The folder format can still change before 0.1. The other Craft apps describe themselves the same way. What is missing:

• Built and run on Windows only. The code avoids OS features, but macOS and Linux are untested.
• Right-to-left text is half there. Arabic and Hebrew draw, and a page, a line or a run can be given a direction. A line that mixes the two directions is still drawn in one order, and the window is not mirrored. Measured, not assumed; the stages are in the roadmap.
• The caret belongs to egui, so there is no selection across blocks.
• Import is command line only for now, and does not read ink, tags or password protected sections.
• Mermaid diagrams are drawn in the page, and a click opens the source. They are drawn with a young renderer that is pinned to one version, and a very large one is refused.
• The koala artwork was generated by the owner with a licensed Windows Copilot (the owner's statement); it is not covered by the licence below. See ATTRIBUTION.md.

Versions. The current version is 0.0.3; the owner approves each change. NoteCraft follows the versioning of the Craft apps: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, still 0.x, tags like v0.1.0, and a hyphen such as 0.2.0-rc.1 for a pre-release. A minor release adds features, and a patch release only fixes bugs or rebuilds. We took this from the Craft apps' public tags and release guides, not from a written rule of theirs, and every release is marked a pre-release until the project says otherwise. See docs/releasing.md.

ROADMAP.md has the order of work; docs/gaps.md is the full list.

Credits and licence

NoteCraft is a clean-room project. The .one reader is built from Microsoft's published specifications ([MS-ONESTORE] and [MS-ONE]) and from using the app that writes those files, never from its code or its assets. The notes behind the format work are in docs/research.

The icons in the window are drawn in code; there are no icon files. The fonts are the ones egui bundles. Everything in assets/ and docs/images/ has a row in ATTRIBUTION.md saying where it came from, and a check fails the build if one is missing.

NoteCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option, the same as the sibling Craft apps. Copyright (c) 2026 AlienTech Software and the NoteCraft contributors; the required notices are in NOTICE. The koala artwork is not covered by it: the owner generated it with a licensed AI tool, see ATTRIBUTION.md.