an encrypted, private note taking app

where your notes are

on your device first. there is no account to make before you write, and nothing that profiles you. you can encrypt the local database at rest from settings. its passphrase is kept in a file only your user account can read, so the encryption protects a copied database file, not an account someone can already sign in to. the encryption page says exactly what it covers.

what end-to-end encrypted means here

when you turn sync on, every change is sealed on your device with xchacha20-poly1305 before it leaves, using keys that never leave your devices. the sealed blobs are content-addressed with blake3, which is how the relay can skip a duplicate upload without reading anything.

the honest part is what the relay does see. it sees the size of each sealed blob, its hash, when it arrives, and which blobs group into one document. it cannot see content, titles or filenames. that holds for our hosted relay and for one you run yourself. the full list, including what this does not protect against, is on the threat model, and the primitives are named on how sync is encrypted.

the keys come from a 24-word recovery phrase. nobody, including us, can recover an account without it. that is the cost of a relay that cannot read your writing: there is no reset that would not also let someone read it.

who it fits, and who it doesn't

it fits people who write things they would not want read: a journal, notes on health or money, the drafts of a hard conversation. it suits someone who wants to check the claims rather than take them on trust, since the client is apache-2.0 and the relay agpl-3.0-or-later, both on github.

if you need notes shared with a team and edited together, a collaborative tool does that better. if you want a password vault, use a password manager. shizumu is one writer's private space for thinking on the page.

what a page, a pin and a trail do

a new page starts empty. you write to think. when a line turns out to matter, you pin it. a trail is for a project, not a day: a book, a job search, anything you'll come back to tomorrow. choose a trail and the page picks up context: the pins you already kept there, already on the page. everything else lives in memory: search it, or open one trail, one date, pages, or pins.

search runs on the device, over your own database, so finding an old note sends nothing anywhere.

platforms and sync

linux from flathub (x86_64 and arm64), and a setup installer for windows. android is in a closed test on google play: join the android test. mac is a beta download and iphone is a testflight beta. hosted sync is free on two devices, and running your own relay is free on every device: pricing, and a self hosted notes app for the relay you run yourself.

moving your notes over

paste text in and it lands on the page. going the other way, every page exports as a markdown file into a folder you choose, and settings makes a full backup of the database. an export is plain text on your disk, so keep it somewhere you trust.

try it without giving anything

the app runs in your browser with a few weeks of writing already in it, and what you type there stays in that browser: try it.