Overview
What DunneNote is, what it is not, and how far along it actually is.
DunneNote is a note-taking application for Windows, macOS and Linux, built as a replacement for Microsoft OneNote for people who want their notes to stay on their own machine.
A notebook is a directory on your disk whose name ends in .calnote. Inside it
are a SQLite database, a content-addressed store for images and attachments, and
a small manifest describing the format version. Copy that directory to another
machine and the whole notebook goes with it — there is no account, no server
component, and nothing to sign into.
What it is for
Notes that mix things. A page in DunneNote is not a single document but a surface holding any number of canvases, each a different kind of content:
- prose in a Rich Text canvas,
- numbers in a Spreadsheet,
- structured records in a Database,
- dates in a Calendar,
- images with clickable regions in a Picture,
- and freehand strokes in a Sketch.
They sit side by side on the same page, and each one belongs to that page — a canvas never drifts somewhere else.
What it is not
It is not a collaborative editor. There is no real-time multi-user editing, no comment threads, and no shared workspace. One person, one notebook, on machines they control.
It is not a cloud service. Backup and replication to S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob or a self-hosted replica exist, but they are things you switch on per destination, not the way the application works by default.
Where it actually is
DunneNote is pre-alpha. There is no installer, no packaged release, and no version number that means anything yet. It builds and runs from source on all three desktop platforms, and each acceptance sweep is run on real Windows, macOS and Linux hardware.
Substantial functionality is implemented and working — the canvas kinds above, the keyboard model, search including glob patterns, links and templates, themes, and the reflow engine. Backup and replication is the work in progress.
Documentation pages on this site carry a status badge. Shipped means the feature is implemented and covered by tests. In progress means parts of it are real and parts are not, and the page will say which. Nothing is described here as finished before it is.
Where to go next
If you want to run it, start with Installing and building. If you want to understand how it is put together first, read Notebooks, pages and canvases.