🍁 VeldNotes

A cozy, local-first daily journal for your desktop.

Open it and it's today's page. Type. Close it. That's the whole loop. 🍂

Windows & Linux · no accounts · no streaks · no guilt

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✨ Why VeldNotes?

Inspired by the calm minimalism of a pocket notebook: warm kraft-paper tones, grass-gold accents, a readable serif, generous whitespace. Your journal is a plain folder of rich-text files that you own — plain JSON, greppable, and easy to back up. No cloud, no lock-in, no "day 0 of your streak" guilt trips.

📥 Download

Grab the latest release from the Releases page.

Platform	Format	Install
🐧 Linux (any distro)	.AppImage	chmod +x VeldNotes_*.AppImage && ./VeldNotes_*.AppImage
🐧 Debian / Ubuntu / Mint	.deb	sudo dpkg -i VeldNotes_*.deb (or double-click)
🐧 Fedora / RHEL / openSUSE	.rpm	sudo rpm -i VeldNotes-*.rpm (or sudo dnf install VeldNotes-*.rpm)
🪟 Windows	.msi	Double-click the .msi installer

🧺 Tech stack

• Tauri 2 app shell (WebView2 on Windows, WebKitGTK on Linux)
• Rust core 🦀 — all app logic (storage, entries, media, autosave coordination) lives in Tauri commands under src-tauri/src/. The frontend is a thin UI layer.
• TypeScript frontend (src/) with a TipTap editor (chosen over Milkdown for its smaller dependency surface, excellent ProseMirror integration, and straightforward extension API for our custom image node)
• Plain CSS for the cozy theme (light + dark, follows system preference)

📂 Data format (your files, your data)

Everything lives in a single plain folder:

<data-dir>/
├── entries/
│   ├── 2024-01-05.json    ← one rich-text document per day, named YYYY-MM-DD.json
│   ├── 2024-03-08.json
│   └── ...
└── media/
    ├── <sha256>.png       ← pasted images, content-hash filenames (deduplicated)
    └── ...

• Entries are rich-text documents (TipTap/ProseMirror JSON) — headings, bold/italic/underline, highlights, colors, alignment, links, lists, quotes, code, tables, images, and free-form canvas sketches. Expressive formatting survives save/load round-trips losslessly, which Markdown could not represent. Older Markdown entries (YYYY-MM-DD.md) are imported automatically the first time they are opened.
• Media pasted into an entry is written to media/ under its SHA-256 content hash, so identical images are stored once. The entry file references it with a relative media reference: ../media/<sha256>.png. Images are never base64-embedded.
• Data directory: on Linux ~/.local/share/veldnotes/, on Windows %APPDATA%\com.veldnotes.app\ (resolved via Tauri's path APIs — no hardcoded paths). You can point grep or any JSON tooling at this folder.

🛠️ Development

Prerequisites: Rust, Node.js + pnpm, and the Tauri system dependencies (Linux — libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev, libgtk-3-dev, libsoup-3.0-dev, librsvg2-dev; Windows needs the WebView2 runtime, usually preinstalled).

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev        # dev workflow (Vite + Rust, hot reload)

Other commands:

pnpm test             # frontend unit tests (vitest)
pnpm typecheck        # TypeScript check
pnpm build            # production frontend build
pnpm tauri build      # bundle installers (.deb/.rpm/.AppImage, .msi/.exe)
cd src-tauri && cargo test   # Rust core unit tests

🗂️ Project structure

src-tauri/            Rust core (Tauri commands, storage, media)
  src/entry.rs        date handling + entry file naming (YYYY-MM-DD.json)
  src/media.rs        SHA-256 hashing, extension sniffing, dedup filenames
  src/store.rs        filesystem layer: atomic entry writes, media store
  src/commands.rs     Tauri commands exposed to the frontend
  src/lib.rs          app wiring
src/                  TypeScript frontend (thin UI layer)
  main.ts             boot: open today's entry, date strip
  editor.ts           TipTap editor + expressive formatting + canvas block
  freeform.ts         type-anywhere sheet: click to place blocks (OneNote-style)
  typography.ts       per-selection font family/size marks
  legacyMarkdown.ts   one-time import of old Markdown entries
  canvas.ts           free-form canvas editor overlay (Excalidraw, MIT)
  clipboard.ts        image/sketch cut & copy with real clipboard payloads
  autosave.ts         debounced autosave with in-flight chaining
  paste.ts            image paste/drop -> Rust media store
  api.ts              typed wrappers around Tauri commands
  dates.ts            date helpers
  styles.css          cozy theme (light + dark)

📱 Design notes for future mobile

All storage and logic live in the Rust core (Tauri commands); the frontend only calls commands. UI components avoid desktop-only assumptions where cheap. No desktop-only dependencies are in the core. Tauri 2 supports iOS/Android later with the same Rust core and web UI (reference architecture: Meron).

🚧 Out of scope (v0.1)

Sync, accounts, encryption, PDF export, search, streaks, plugins.

📜 License

See LICENSE.

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🍂 Happy journaling. 🍂