Every
detail.

Groups, folders, notes — and sections

NoteFlow keeps the hierarchy deliberately shallow: groups hold folders, folders hold notes — one level of nesting, no infinite trees to get lost in. Each group has its own color, and that color tints everything inside it: the dots next to its notes, its folders, its region in the brain view. Notes without a group simply live at the bottom of the sidebar.

Sections: tabs inside a note

The fourth level lives inside the note: every note can hold multiple independent sections, shown as tabs across the top of the editor. Create one with Ctrl+T (or the + button), rename with a double-click on the tab, reorder by dragging the tabs, and cycle through them with Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab.

Sections are what keep the hierarchy shallow without turning notes into junk drawers: one note = one topic, sections = its facets. A project note carries its own Notes, Tasks and Questions instead of spawning three sibling notes. And the granularity pays off everywhere else — sections show up as clickable tags on every note card, the semantic index embeds each section separately, and links point at sections, not whole notes.

Note templates

Any note whose structure you keep re-creating — a weekly review, a meeting note, a bug report — can become a template: its title plus its set of sections, ready to stamp out again.

1. 01

   Save one

   Open the ⋯ menu in the editor toolbar → Save as template. It captures the current note's title and sections; a small modal asks for the template's name.

2. 02

   Use and manage them

   Settings → Templates lists everything you saved. New note creates a fresh note from the template (with brand-new section ids) and jumps straight into it; templates can also be renamed (double-click or the ✎ button) and deleted (with confirmation).

Templates live in templates.json inside your notes directory — so with GitHub sync on, they follow you to every machine, like the rest of your metadata.

Sticky notes that float above everything

Any section can pop out of the main window as a sticky note: a small frameless window that stays always on top of whatever you're doing — the checklist next to your terminal, the reference next to your browser. Try the one below: tick the boxes, then press the ─ button to fold it.

• Ctrl+S opens the current section as a sticky; Ctrl+G opens every section of the note at once. There's also a ⧉ button in the editor toolbar.
• Stickies start at 300 × 300 px and are freely resizable (minimum 200 × 200).
• Each sticky is a full editor: WYSIWYG or raw markdown, same as the main window.
• Edits sync with the main window in real time — it's the same section, not a copy.
• Open as many as you want; folded stickies stack as pills in the corner of your screen.

Stickies at startup

In Settings → Startup, “Open as sticky at startup” lets you pick sections that appear as stickies the moment you log in — your day starts with the checklist already floating there. It requires “Launch on system startup” to be enabled, and encrypted notes are excluded from the picker.

Link sections to sections

While writing in the rich editor, type / and pick Link section: a search box lists every section of every note (filter by section name or note title). Choose one and a pill — a small chip with a link icon and the section's name — drops into your text right where you were typing.

• Click a pill to jump to the target section — in the same note or any other. Hover shows the same floating preview used across the app.
• The pill shows the target's name live: rename the section and every pill pointing at it updates. Delete the target and the pill switches to a broken state (dimmed, struck through, no navigation).
• The search excludes encrypted, archived and temporary notes; the / command exists in rich mode only.

Under the hood a pill is nothing exotic — it's a plain markdown link, [Name](noteflow://noteId/sectionId), stored inside the section's text. That's exactly what you see in raw mode, and it's why links survive sync, export and import unchanged.

These links also appear as edges in the brain view, connecting the two sections — and since they're your own explicit structure, they work even with the AI and embeddings completely disabled.

The full keyboard map

Everything below is also listed inside the app under Settings → Keyboard shortcuts.

Four ways to see everything

Beyond the editor, NoteFlow has four full-area views that replace the editing surface (the sidebar stays as context). They're mutually exclusive — opening one closes the others, and selecting any note drops you back into the editor.

Notes that clean up after themselves

Some notes deserve to die: a phone number for today, a one-off shopping list, a paste buffer. Temporary notes live for 24 hours and then remove themselves — no graveyard of stale one-liners.

• Create one with Ctrl+Shift+N, the clock button next to “New note”, or a right-click on “New note” → Temporary note (24h).
• The expiry is an expiresAt timestamp in the note's frontmatter — visible, portable, editable.
• The main process checks every minute and deletes expired notes automatically — from the remote sync repo too, so they don't resurrect on another machine.
• They're marked with a ⏱ clock icon in the sidebar, and the editor header shows exactly when: “Deletes <date · time>”.

Encrypted notes

Notes with real secrets can be locked with a password of their own, straight from the note's right-click menu: Encrypt note asks for a password; Unlock opens it for the current session only; Lock shuts it again; Remove encryption turns it back into a plain note. A locked note shows no content anywhere in the app.

• AES-256-GCM, with the key derived via PBKDF2 — 310,000 iterations of SHA-256.
• No master key, no recovery backdoor: lose the password, lose the note. That's the point.
• The CLI ignores encrypted notes entirely.
• Encrypted notes never enter the AI index or the brain graph — their plaintext stays out of every derived artifact.

Sections the AI never sees

Encryption is the heavy tool; sometimes you just want the model to skip something — a salary note, a private journal section, plain noise. Hide from AI is a per-section toggle: flip it in the editor's ⋯ menu, or right-click any section tag in the sidebar and the overviews.

• A hidden section is dropped from the semantic index (and deleted from it if it was already indexed), never enters chat context or Related notes, disappears from the brain graph, and is omitted from the agent's tools — the model never even sees its id.
• Hidden sections wear an EyeOff icon on their editor tab, sidebar tags and overview cards; Show to AI reverts the toggle and re-indexes the section.
• The rest of the app treats hidden sections completely normally — this is an AI boundary, not an app one.

The boundary is enforced in the main process, across every AI surface at once — the full picture is in How the AI works → privacy.

Make it yours

NoteFlow ships 14 hand-tuned themes — 11 dark, 3 light — each pairing its palette with its own UI font. The default is NoteFlow Dark, the same warm near-black + amber you're looking at on this site.

Beyond the theme, Settings → Appearance exposes the knobs individually: the app-wide font, the accent color, heading style and the overall UI scale. The editor has its own font and size settings, independent from the chrome.

And for long-form writing, Settings → Editor → Width switches the editor between Full (content uses the whole editor area) and Readable — a centered ~72-character column, iA-Writer style, where only tables and images break out to full width.