Introducing Onnoir

Some work should not begin in a shared workspace.

Private notes, client research, unfinished drafts, source PDFs, meeting fragments, copied references, screenshots, and long-running project material often need a quieter place first. They need structure, search, export, and recovery, but not necessarily an account or a hosted workspace.

That is why we built Onnoir: a free local desktop app for private notes, research, and source material. It is available for macOS and Windows, does not require an account, and keeps the core notebook workflow on your machine.

A local library before a cloud workspace

Most modern productivity tools start by asking where your team lives, which workspace you belong to, and which account should own the data.

Onnoir starts differently. It creates a local encrypted library on your computer and gives you a place to write, organize, search, and keep source material close to the work that uses it.

That shape matters. A local library is useful when the work is personal, sensitive, early, client-specific, or simply not ready to become shared infrastructure. Onnoir is not trying to replace every collaborative tool. It is built for the private stage of work: the place where ideas are still forming and the source material still matters.

Built for longer sessions

Most note apps feel comfortable when the work is small: a quick thought, a checklist, a page of notes. The friction starts when the page becomes a session.

A research session might include notes, PDFs, copied references, screenshots, drafts, diagrams, search, export, and a backup before the next update. Splitting that across too many tools makes the work feel heavier than it should.

Onnoir tries to keep that flow simple. Start with a page. Add the files around it. Search the library later. Export the readable parts when you need them elsewhere. Keep recoverable backups for the library itself.

That makes Onnoir a practical fit for work that starts unclear: a researcher building a source library, a consultant keeping client material local, a writer collecting references before the draft is ready, or anyone who wants private notes without turning every idea into a shared workspace.

What you can do today

You can write rich pages with notes, links, code, math, tables, callouts, media, and diagrams. You can organize work into notebooks, pages, threads, collections, and Today captures. Atlas gives larger libraries a visible shape, so relationships between notes and source material are easier to follow.

Cabinet keeps files and media near the pages that depend on them. PDFs, DOCX files, Markdown, plain text, and other text-like documents can contribute searchable text when document indexing succeeds. OCR-readable PDFs can also be indexed when OCR succeeds, which helps when source material arrives as a scan instead of clean embedded text.

Search is meant to get you back to the right place, not just show a matching word. A result can point to a page, a Cabinet item, or indexed document text. That makes Onnoir useful for research libraries where the source behind a note is as important as the note itself.

Recovery is part of the workflow

Private local work needs a recovery routine.

Onnoir has two separate paths because they solve different problems. Markdown export gives you readable files you can inspect outside the app. Encrypted .onbk backups preserve the local library for exact restore.

Export is for readable copies, review, migration, and archiving. Encrypted backup is for recovery. The app asks you to verify backups before relying on them, especially before updates or risky maintenance.

This is less glamorous than a feature list, but it is central to the product. A private notebook is not useful if it cannot leave cleanly or recover predictably.

What Onnoir is not

Onnoir is deliberately narrow.

It is not a team wiki, a real-time collaborative editor, a hosted project database, or a publishing platform. It does not include shared workspaces, permission models, automations, or multi-user collaboration.

Optional online services may come later, but they are not required to write, organize, back up, or export your local library. The local desktop app is the foundation.

Onnoir is also not a password manager. It is a private notebook and research library. You are responsible for keeping recovery material somewhere safe, and Onnoir cannot reset lost local vault access through an account.

Why this direction

We think there is still room for software that respects the private beginning of serious work.

Not every note should be a shared document. Not every research folder should become a cloud workspace. Not every useful tool needs to start with sign-in. Sometimes the right default is a local place to think, collect, connect, search, and leave with your work intact.

That is the direction for Onnoir: a private desktop library for work that should stay yours.

Start with Onnoir

Onnoir is available now for macOS and Windows.

Download Onnoir or start with the getting started guide. If you already use Onnoir, create and verify an encrypted backup before updating, and send feedback through the bug report page when something does not behave as expected.

We will keep the product focused: private notes, local source material, search, export, and recovery first.