Hide answers. Reveal them later. Study directly in your notes.
Active-recall masking for Microsoft OneNote — the Goodnotes-style tape tool that OneNote never shipped.
"Goodnotes has Tape. I use OneNote. Why the hell can't OneNote do this?"
If you study from your own notes, you already know the technique: cover the answer, try to recall it, then check. Goodnotes and Notability have shipped a tape tool for years. OneNote — the note app with the best pen input on Windows, the one running on every Surface in every lecture hall — has never had one.
The usual workarounds are all bad. Collapse an outline and lose your layout. Scribble over the answer with a highlighter and then undo it. Keep your notes in OneNote and your recall in a second app, and do everything twice.
RecallTape puts the tape in OneNote.
Select an answer, a term, a label on a diagram. Press a hotkey. It's covered.
(Already installed? The how-to has the buttons that exist today — the hotkeys below are still on the way.)
Then study one-handed:
Space → answer → Space → answer → Space
Reveal, check yourself, retape, advance. Straight down your own lecture notes, no flashcards to build and no second app to sync.
Why hotkeys instead of tapping each strip? Because it's better. Clicking tiny pieces of tape is fiddly on a tablet and slow on a laptop. A single key that reveals-then-advances turns a page of notes into a study loop you can run without looking at the keyboard.
| Tape | Ctrl+Alt+T on any selection |
| Study loop | reveal → retape → advance, on one key |
| Reveal All / Retape All | reset the page in one go |
| Remove Tape | non-destructive, always |
| Ink support | handwriting is the point on a Surface, not an afterthought |
| Tape all handwriting | bulk-tape a page instead of hand-picking fifty terms |
| Study stats | hits, misses, and eventually spaced repetition |
| Anki export | take your taped items with you |
Alpha. Taping and peeking work on real notes, and you can install it. It is not signed, the installer is a script rather than an MSI, and it has not been through anyone's exam week yet. Things will break. Tell us when they do — that is what an alpha is for.
Requires: Windows, OneNote desktop (the Office one, not the Store app), and .NET Framework 4.8 — which is already on every Windows 10/11 machine.
- Extract the zip anywhere — Downloads is fine
- Double-click
Install RecallTape.cmdand say yes to the admin prompt - Restart OneNote
- Delete the folder you extracted, whenever you like
RecallTape installs itself to C:\Program Files\EWC3 Labs\RecallTape and runs from there, so the
folder you extracted stops mattering the moment step 2 finishes.
(That link always fetches the newest version. If you would rather browse, the releases
page has it under Assets — grab RecallTape-install.zip, not "Source code
(zip)".)
You'll find a RecallTape tab in the ribbon.
Three buttons and one gesture. Covers taping text, ink and unselectable page backgrounds, peeking (which differs between boxes and text), removing, and what to do when something misbehaves.
Administrator is needed once — to copy into Program Files and register a COM class machine-wide. There is no per-user install: the DCOM permissions that make RecallTape work on ARM64 are machine configuration. OneMore, the add-in most OneNote users already know, is per-machine for the same reason.
Program Files is deliberate rather than tidy: it is the one location a standard user cannot write
to, so nobody can swap the DLL that OneNote loads. Logs and page dumps live under
%LOCALAPPDATA%\EWC3 Labs\RecallTape, which is per-user and needs no privilege.
Windows will warn you. The download isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen flags it as unrecognized — click More info → Run anyway. That's a real warning about a real gap, not a formality; a signing certificate is on the list before this is something we ask strangers to trust.
To uninstall: run Uninstall RecallTape.cmd from C:\Program Files\EWC3 Labs\RecallTape. It
removes every registry key and the installed folder, and leaves nothing behind. Your notes are
untouched — but tape already on a page stays there as ordinary content, so use Remove All Tape
on any page you want cleared before uninstalling.
Windows desktop OneNote, C#, against the OneNote COM API — which hands you the current page as XML including the selection, and takes your modified version back.
That's a deliberate choice, not a default. Microsoft's modern Office.js add-in API targets OneNote on the web, which is not where lecture notes get taken with a pen. The desktop API is older and weirder and it's the one that can actually reach your ink.
It's also narrower than the documentation suggests. On current Office builds OneNote no longer answers external programs at all — scripts and standalone tools get an object that fails every call. The API is reachable only from a registered add-in, which is why RecallTape ships as one: a signed installer and a ribbon, not a script you run. That single constraint shapes most of the engineering, and it was found by measurement rather than by reading docs — the receipts are in the repo, alongside how and why we keep them.
The add-in itself runs outside OneNote, in a COM surrogate process. If RecallTape ever crashes,
it takes down a dllhost.exe and OneNote keeps running with your notes intact. Given what this tool
touches, that isn't a detail.
We are standing on OneMore by Steven Cohn — an excellent open-source
OneNote add-in that already solved ribbon integration, hotkeys, and page XML manipulation, and has
been maintained against a shifting undocumented target for nine years. It is the best documentation
this API has, because it's the one that actually runs. We use it as a reference implementation
rather than a base: OneMore is MPL-2.0 and RecallTape is MIT, so we read it, learn from it, and
write our own. Our read of how it works is public too, in docs/analysis/.
The masking engine is kept deliberately host-agnostic, so OneNote is its first host rather than its only one:
RecallTape.Core the tape model — knows nothing about OneNote
RecallTape.OneNote page + selection adapters, XML, overlay rendering
RecallTape.UI ribbon, hotkeys, study controller
Built on .NET Framework 4.8 — already present on every Windows 10/11 machine, so installing RecallTape never means installing a runtime first.
Wilson's son Paul started medical school and asked:
"yo how can i tape in onenote? is there an add-on?"
There wasn't. So we're building one. The full conversation — including the platform research, the
architecture argument, and the part where a salad fork became a required feature — is preserved in
docs/origins.md.
Not yet, but soon — the structure has to land first. When it opens up, see
CONTRIBUTING.md. Issues and ideas are welcome any time.
RecallTape is free, open source, and always will be — no paywalls, no premium tier, no "unlock ink masking for $4.99."
If it saves you time before an exam, you can buy me a coffee. Entirely optional, and genuinely appreciated.
Free ways to help that matter just as much:
- Star the repo — it's most of how anyone finds a tool like this
- File an issue when something breaks, especially with a page that reproduces it
- Tell someone who takes notes on a Surface
MIT — © EWC3 Labs.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft, Goodnotes, or Notability. OneNote is a Microsoft trademark; we just wish it had tape.
EWC3 Labs — tools that make Microsoft's power-user products behave like somebody actually uses them.