Your notes. Your Mac. Your intelligence.
A note-taking app for the Mac, made for students. Take notes in class, keep them organized by course, and turn them into revision material, with everything stored on your own Mac.
NotaBene follows a class from the lecture to the exam:
- In the lecture, write fast — and record the lecture if you like. Each paragraph remembers the moment it was typed, so you can replay what the lecturer said about it or turn the recording into a linked transcript.
- After class, file it. Courses, sections, tags,
[[wiki links]]and attachments. A PDF or Word handout can become an editable note. - Before the deadline, see what is due. Tasks with reminders and repeats, in and out of Apple Calendar, Moodle or Canvas.
- Before the exam, revise from what you wrote. Instant search, flashcards (in the app or Anki), revision sheets, mind maps, podcasts, and questions answered from your notes.
The AI tools are optional. Everything else works without an account, a subscription or a connection.
Who it is for. Students first; graduate students and researchers too — bring a library from Obsidian, Markdown or Notion, write long documents with footnotes, and annotate PDFs.
What it is not. A Mac app only, with no iPhone, iPad or web version, no cloud sync and no collaboration. Your library is a folder on your Mac.
NotaBene 1.4.3 for Apple silicon — macOS 13 Ventura or newer. On-device transcription needs macOS 26 or newer; on older versions, transcription is available through Mistral with your own API key. Apple Intelligence as a provider needs macOS 27.
Important
The DMG is ad-hoc signed and not notarized, so Gatekeeper may block it. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and choose Open Anyway. There are no automatic updates yet.
A first launch offers a short tour and asks how to begin: import your notes, explore a sample course, or start empty. Help → NotaBene help (⇧⌘/) covers the rest.
| Write | Organize | Study | Own |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rich text with Markdown shortcuts | Courses, sections, and smart folders | AI summaries and Q&A with sources | Everything stored on your Mac |
| Lecture recording anchored to blocks | Namespaced tags you can combine | Audio transcription and flashcards | API keys in the Keychain |
| LaTeX maths, tables, callouts, code | Graph, wiki links, and unlinked mentions | Mind maps and diagrams | Autosave and version history |
| Re-editable Excalidraw drawings | Tasks, subtasks, and reminders | Read aloud and note-to-podcast | Backups and portable exports |
| Abbreviations and word completion | Calendar import and export (.ics) |
Define a term in context | Images stripped of location data |
| PDF, Word, and slides as notes (+OCR) | Bulk select, move, tag, and merge | Study tools over a whole selection | No account, no telemetry |
| Attachments and saved web pages | Import Obsidian, Markdown, and Notion | An agent for multi-step jobs | Nothing leaves without asking |
Editor. Slash menu, toolbar, find and replace, footnotes and endnotes, a
document map, and word-count targets. Abbreviations expand as you type
(tvi → "théorème des valeurs intermédiaires"), and word completion learns
each course's vocabulary — Tab to accept, never inserted on its own.
Right-click a word or selection for clipboard, formatting, links and vocabulary
commands, or use Correct selection and Rewrite selection to review an AI
proposal for just that passage. Shift-right-click opens the native macOS menu.
Lecture recording. ⌥⌘R records into the open note. Every paragraph or heading started during the recording gets a marker that plays from two seconds before it. Audio stays on your Mac as an attachment; Settings → Recording picks the microphone and level. A five-second microphone warm-up precedes recording, so the countdown is not saved in the audio.
Live dictation. Hold the microphone button for five seconds to write speech directly into the open note with Voxtral 3. A visible countdown explains the gesture; click the microphone again to stop. A normal click still records audio. Dictation inserts text at the caret without saving an audio attachment. Connect your Mistral API key in Settings → AI Providers first: microphone audio is streamed to Mistral while dictation is active. View → Start/stop live dictation (⇧⌥⌘S) offers the same action from the keyboard.
Transcription. Transcribe a lecture recording or another audio attachment from its player (⇧⌥⌘R). Add the transcript to the note or create a linked note; each paragraph can play the corresponding audio, and uncertain words are highlighted for review. On macOS 26+, Apple's speech recognition runs on this Mac after you install its language assets in Settings → Recording. Mistral Voxtral 3 is an optional hosted choice that sends audio to its API using your key.
Documents and imports. File → Convert a document to note (⌘⇧O) turns PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, EPUB and more into editable notes, on-device, with Vision OCR for scans. File → Import notes from another app (⇧⌥⌘O) brings in an Obsidian vault, a Markdown folder or a Notion export, with a preview first, links intact, and re-imports that update instead of duplicating.
Search. Titles, bodies, tags and courses, accent-insensitive, with
filters such as course:Analysis has:drawing after:2026-01-01. ⌘K finds
commands beside notes.
Connect your notes. View → Graph (⌥⇧⌘G) maps your library by course, with links between notes, named course areas, and larger dots for longer notes. Pan, zoom, filter by course, tag or last edit, and find a note by name. Click for its details and connections; double-click or press Return to open it. Unlinked mentions in the graph and the inspector's Links tab show where one note names another, with a Link button to connect them. With an AI provider, the graph can suggest links for an unlinked library, show a quick summary, and open Ask or Synthesise over a note and its links. You review suggested links before accepting them; the graph and mention detection work offline. Suggestions follow your current graph filters and remain available after you have made links. Settings → Graph remembers whether to show mentions or only connected notes, and lets you adjust how many notes the AI considers, excerpt length, suggestion count and output allowance. Open it directly from the graph's Settings button; cancel a request or ask for fresh suggestions at any time.
Visualize. Turn a note into a focused mind map or a diagram that explains steps, decisions, dependencies or feedback loops. The preview shows the learning question and takeaway, with the reasoning behind the structure and what was left out. Generated mind maps stay shallow and selective; longer explanations appear below the tree. Both outputs remain editable and export with the note.
AI, on your terms. Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, Gemini, OpenRouter, Ollama, LM Studio, Apple Intelligence on-device, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — or none. Every edit a model proposes is shown before it reaches a note, and anything it returns is validated. Voices can be macOS system voices, on-device neural voices (Kokoro, Voxtral), or opt-in hosted ones. Hosted speech uses Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS or Voxtral 3, with your main Gemini or Mistral API key; configure each key once in Settings → AI Providers. Local voices are unchanged.
Agent and MCP. A local, token-protected Model Context Protocol server lets an assistant search, read, write, organize and archive notes through the same checks and history as your own typing, and never delete permanently. The in-app Agent uses the same 31 tools: it plans first, can run the study features, asks when a job is ambiguous, holds large bulk changes for your approval, and undoes as one step. It can also find unlinked mentions and turn them into links in bulk.
Exports. Markdown, HTML, PDF, DOCX and Anki, for a note, a course or a selection. Manuscript export adds a title page, contents and numbering. Secrets never appear in an export or backup.
No accounts, cloud sync, telemetry, analytics or ads. NotaBene reaches the network only when you ask it to: an AI request to the provider you chose (local models and Apple Intelligence stay on your Mac), hosted transcription or voice, a one-time voice download, saving a web page, or checking for a new version. AI requests go only to built-in providers, your own machine, or an address you approved.
NotaBene 1.4.3 gives AI tools more room to finish their answers: at least 8,192 output tokens for every mode, and 16,384 for mind maps and diagrams. Supported Mistral models use lower reasoning settings for visualization to leave room for the complete plan. Small local context windows still constrain the allowance — see the release notes. The app is not yet signed with a Developer ID or notarized, and has no automatic updates.
See also the security policy and third-party notices.
Requires macOS 13+, Node.js 20+, pnpm, a stable Rust toolchain, Xcode Command Line Tools, and CMake and Ninja (for the on-device speech runtime).
xcode-select --install
brew install cmake ninja
corepack enable
pnpm install| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
pnpm dev |
Web UI on localhost:5173 with an in-memory store (no saving) |
pnpm tauri:dev |
The full desktop app with SQLite |
pnpm tauri:build |
.app and .dmg under src-tauri/target/release/bundle/ |
The first Tauri run builds the pinned CrispASR/GGML runtime
(scripts/prepare-crispasr-macos.sh); later runs reuse it.
Before a pull request, run pnpm typecheck && pnpm lint && pnpm test, plus
cargo check in src-tauri/ when Rust changed. pnpm e2e runs the
Playwright suite and pnpm format applies Prettier.
flowchart LR
UI["React UI<br/>Editor · AI · MCP bridge"] --> CMD["Shared command layer<br/>validation · history · autosave"]
CMD --> ADAPTERS["Platform adapters"]
ADAPTERS --> MEMORY["In-memory store<br/>browser development"]
ADAPTERS --> TAURI["Tauri IPC"]
TAURI --> DB["SQLite + FTS5"]
TAURI --> OS["Keychain · files · audio · TTS"]
MCP["Authenticated local MCP client"] --> GATEWAY["Rust MCP gateway"]
GATEWAY --> CMD
Four boundaries keep the app predictable:
src/lib/commands/is the only mutation path.src/lib/adapters/isolates browser and Tauri implementations.src/lib/schema/validates everything crossing a trust boundary.- MCP writes return through the webview and the command layer, so an agent's edit gets the same validation and history as a keystroke.
React 19, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Zustand, Zod, TipTap and Excalidraw
in front; Tauri 2 and Rust with rusqlite, FTS5, rmcp and axum behind.
Read CLAUDE.md before changing code.
Issues, focused pull requests and product feedback are welcome. Open an issue before a large change, keep user-facing text in both English and French, add tests for changed behaviour, and never include real notes, keys or personal data in reports or fixtures.
NotaBene stands on a lot of other people's work. Copyright stays with each project's contributors; this list is attribution, not a substitute for the licences, which ship in full inside the installed packages.
| Project | Licence | What it does here |
|---|---|---|
| Tauri | Apache-2.0 OR MIT | Native macOS shell and plugins |
| rusqlite / SQLite | MIT / public domain | The local library and FTS5 search |
| rmcp / axum | Apache-2.0 / MIT | The authenticated local MCP server |
| Tokio / reqwest / rustls | MIT / Apache-2.0 OR MIT / Apache-2.0 OR ISC OR MIT | Async runtime and AI provider transport |
| React | MIT | Interface runtime |
| TipTap / ProseMirror | MIT | The authoring surface |
| Excalidraw | MIT | Re-editable drawings |
| KaTeX | MIT | LaTeX maths rendering |
| Tailwind CSS | MIT | Styling toolchain |
| Lucide | ISC | Interface icons |
| Zustand / Immer | MIT | Application state |
| Zod | MIT | Runtime schema validation |
| i18next | MIT | English and French localization |
| AnyDoc | MIT | Local document import |
| PDF.js | Apache-2.0 | In-app PDF preview |
| docx-preview | Apache-2.0 | In-app DOCX preview |
| docx / pdfmake | MIT | Word and PDF export |
| fflate | MIT | Backups and portable archives |
| CrispASR / GGML | MIT | On-device neural speech runtime |
| wasm-media-encoders | MIT | Local MP3 podcast encoding |
| Lora | SIL OFL 1.1 | The bundled typeface |
Speech models are not bundled. If you install one, it is downloaded from a pinned Hugging Face revision under its own terms: Kokoro 82M (Apache-2.0; voice packs and dictionaries MIT) and Voxtral 4B (CC BY-NC 4.0, non-commercial only). THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md holds the complete notices.
NotaBene is available under the Apache License 2.0.