Online Notepad

An online notepad that keeps markdown notes in folders, links them with [[double brackets]], and autosaves four tenths of a second after you stop typing.

Notes

folders hold notes, notes nest inside them, and a note lives in exactly one place

Title

Untitled

This note

0words

Kept four tenths of a second after the last keystroke, on this device only.

How to use

Start typing in the big box. Four tenths of a second after you stop, the line under the buttons says Saved on this device and that is the whole ceremony.
Press the plus at the top of the tree for another note, or New folder to start a folder. Search notes finds a note by its name or any word in it and shows the folder it lives in.
Select a word and press Bold, or type [[ to link another note. Read shows the note rendered; Write takes you back to the source.
Getting text out: Copy lifts the current note to the clipboard, Download .md saves it under the note's name, Export .md zips every note as markdown, and Back up all saves the lot as JSON for Restore.

About this tool

Open the tab, type, walk away. What you wrote is still here next week, because the note is written to storage four tenths of a second after you stop typing, and the line under the buttons reads Saved on this device once it lands. There is no Save button to forget about. The side panel is a tree: the plus starts a note, New folder makes a folder inside whichever one is chosen, and a note can be dragged into another folder or sent there with its folder button. Every delete asks first, the last note included, and a folder's delete says how much goes with it. Give a note a name in the Title field, up to 80 characters; left blank, the tree names it after its first line with any leading # or bullet stripped, cut off at 60.

Notes are markdown. Bold, Italic, Link, Heading and List sit above the note and write the asterisks and hashes for you (Cmd or Ctrl+B and I do the first two), and Read shows the note rendered, code fences coloured and a mermaid fence drawn as a diagram. Cmd or Ctrl+E flips between Write and Read. Type [[ and the notes you could link to drop down; a link points at a note's name, and renaming that note rewrites every link to it, so nothing you wrote goes stale.

Below the note, a figure counts words, with characters and lines beside it, as you type — the count is of the source, so the ** and ## are in it. The buttons above the note copy it, save it as a .md file named after it, and go full screen when the rest of the page is in the way. Back up all writes every note and folder into a single toolstray-notes.json, and Restore reads one of those files back, asking which copy to keep wherever a note exists on both sides. Export .md is the other way out: a zip with one .md per note and the folders as real directories, which drops straight into an Obsidian vault with the links still working.

Good to know

Notes are held in this browser's storage. Clearing browsing data deletes them, and a private window forgets everything when you close it.
Nothing syncs. A note written on the laptop will not appear on the phone unless you carry the backup file across yourself.
Write is plain source and Read is rendered; there is no editing inside the rendered view. Markdown's task-list boxes, tables of contents and embedded images are not drawn, and raw HTML in a note shows as text rather than running.
A link targets a note's name, so two notes with the same name in different folders need the folder in the link, as in [[Old/Deposit]]. The suggester writes that for you.
There is no history. Undo works inside the editor while the tab is open, but yesterday's version of a note is gone, and Clear empties the note after a single confirm.
Browsers usually cap a site's local storage at around 5 MB, and every note here shares that one budget. A manuscript belongs in a real file.
If the browser refuses the write, because storage is full or blocked, a red notice says the note is not saved and the line under the buttons says so too. Download the note before you close the tab.

Things people ask

Do I have to press save?

Nothing to press. Every keystroke schedules a write, the write lands four tenths of a second after you stop typing, and the line under the buttons reads Saving… until it does and Saved on this device after.

I cleared my browsing data and my notes are gone. Can I get them back?

Not from here, sorry. The notes lived in local storage under the key toolstray:notepad, and clearing site data removes that key along with everything else. The only copy that survives is one you made with Back up all, which is exactly why that button exists.

How do I move my notes to another computer, or into Obsidian?

For another browser, press Back up all, which downloads toolstray-notes.json, then press Restore on the other machine and pick that file. New notes are added, folders and all; a note that differs on the two machines is listed, and you choose whose copy stays, the one already there by default. For Obsidian, Export .md writes a zip with one markdown file per note and your folders as directories. Unzip it into a vault and the [[links]] resolve, since Obsidian reads the same double brackets. A slash in a title becomes a look-alike character so it cannot turn into a folder.

What happens if I have the notepad open in two tabs?

Each tab keeps its own copy of the whole note list in memory and writes all of it on every save, so the tab that saves last wins. Edit the same note in two tabs and one set of edits quietly disappears. Work in one tab at a time.

Can I use it to hold a bit of code?

Put it in a fenced block with the language after the opening backticks. Write keeps it plain and monospaced; Read colours it and gives the block its own copy button, so lifting the snippet back out is one press. Tab still moves focus rather than indenting, so paste code in rather than writing it here.

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