A premium markdown studio for chapters, notes, and everything in between.

Novelty is a local-first desktop writing app for markdown and plain text. It pairs an Obsidian-style workspace (linked notes, folders, tags, backlinks, a local graph, writing widgets) with a clean, opencode-inspired dark UI. Your vault lives in IndexedDB on your own machine — nothing is sent anywhere except the searches you explicitly run in the Web search panel.

• Editor — CodeMirror 6 with markdown highlighting, live preview, split view, line numbers, wrapping, active-line highlight, and focus/typewriter modes.
• Rendered markdown — GFM tables, task lists, colored code, callouts, ==highlight==, colored text, [[wiki-links]], and #tags.
• Organizing — nested folders, favorites, tags, full-text search, recent notes, trash with restore, and quick switcher (Ctrl/Cmd+O) + command palette (Ctrl/Cmd+P).
• Linking — backlinks, outgoing links, and an interactive local graph.
• Writing widgets — aggregated to-do list, clock + Pomodoro timer, and a calendar that creates/opens daily notes.
• Web search panel — look up a term and get a short, readable summary plus a text result list, without leaving your notes.
• Images — paste/upload images, set note covers, and export notes with an assets/ folder.
• Data — auto-save, automatic rotating backups, export a note as .md, export the whole vault as JSON, export every note as Markdown, and import a vault (merge or replace).
• Themes — OpenCode Dark, Graphite, and Paper, with an accent picker, density, content width, and font controls.

Requires Node.js 18+.

npm install     # install dependencies
npm run dev     # start in development with HMR

npm run typecheck   # type-check main/preload + renderer
npm run build       # build to out/
npm run dist        # package installers into release/

npm run dist uses electron-builder.yml and produces:

• Linux — AppImage (.deb available via npx electron-builder --linux deb)
• macOS — .dmg
• Windows — NSIS installer

Note: the .deb target uses electron-builder's bundled fpm, which needs libcrypt.so.1 (libxcrypt-compat on Arch) at build time. If that's missing on your system, stick with the AppImage.

App icons live in build/ (icon.png, icon.ico, icon.icns, and build/icons/).

Your vault is stored locally in IndexedDB. On every launch — and before any destructive action such as replacing the vault on import or erasing all data — Novelty writes a rotating JSON backup to the app's user-data directory (<userData>/backups/novelty-<timestamp>.json, newest 20 kept). To restore one, open Settings → Data → Import vault JSON and pick the backup file, then choose Merge or Replace.

On Linux the user-data directory is ~/.config/Novelty, on macOS ~/Library/Application Support/Novelty, and on Windows %APPDATA%\Novelty.

See Help → Keyboard shortcuts in the app for the full list.

Electron · electron-vite · React 18 · TypeScript · Zustand · CodeMirror 6 · marked + DOMPurify + highlight.js · idb (IndexedDB) · react-resizable-panels · lucide-react · fuse.js.

src/
  main/      Electron main process — window, menus, IPC, web search
  preload/   contextBridge API (window.api)
  renderer/  React app (components, store, lib, styles)
build/       App icons and build resources
GUIDE.md     Authoritative design + build plan

The window is frameless with contextIsolation: true and nodeIntegration: false; only whitelisted IPC channels are exposed through the preload bridge.

MIT © 2026 Sartre