Why I Built HelixNotes

The Problem

I take a lot of notes. Technical documentation, project planning, random ideas at 2am — all of it goes into whatever note-taking app I'm using at the time. And over the years, I've used most of them.

Notion was slow. Like, noticeably slow. Every click had a delay. The offline mode was a joke — it barely worked, and when it did, syncing back was a coin flip. For something that's supposed to help you think faster, it sure made me wait a lot.

Evernote was fine in 2015. Then it got bloated, changed pricing three times, and I stopped trusting them with my data. When a company can't decide what it wants to be, I don't want to be the one holding the bag when they pivot again.

Then I found UpNote. Clean UI, fast, just works. Honestly, I loved it. But there was one problem: your data lives in Google Firebase. Your notes, on someone else's cloud, tied to a proprietary format. For a privacy-focused person running Linux, that's a dealbreaker.

The Obsidian Detour

So I tried Obsidian. Local files, markdown, own your data — great philosophy. But the app itself? As a plain markdown editor, it was painful. I actually stopped taking notes entirely.

Obsidian is powerful if you spend time configuring plugins, learning hotkeys, and tweaking CSS. But I don't want a hobby. I want to open an app, write something down, and close it. The default experience without plugins felt incomplete, and with plugins it felt like maintaining a side project.

What I Actually Wanted

It turned out to be pretty simple:

• UpNote's clean, intuitive UI
• Obsidian's philosophy — local .md files, no cloud, no lock-in
• Fast. Actually fast, not "fast for an Electron app"
• Open source, so you can verify what it does with your data

That app didn't exist. So I built it.

The Stack

I went with Rust + Tauri 2.0 for the backend. No Electron. The result is a small binary that uses a fraction of the RAM of Electron alternatives. It launches instantly and doesn't eat your battery.

The frontend is SvelteKit + TailwindCSS, with TipTap v3 as the editor. TipTap gives you a rich WYSIWYG markdown experience — formatting toolbar, slash commands, and a source mode toggle for when you want to see the raw markdown.

Search is powered by Tantivy, a Rust-native full-text search engine. It indexes your notes and returns results instantly. No waiting, no loading spinners.

Your notes are plain .md files on your filesystem. Notebooks are folders. Metadata lives in frontmatter. That's it. No proprietary database, no SQLite blob, no format you can't read with cat.

Sync Without Lock-in

HelixNotes doesn't have a built-in sync service. That's by design.

Because your notes are just files in a folder, you can sync them with whatever you already use — Nextcloud, Syncthing, Dropbox, rsync, Git, or nothing at all. The app watches the filesystem for external changes and picks them up automatically.

I'm not going to tell you where to put your files. That's your decision.

Open Source, AGPL-3.0

HelixNotes is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and hosted on Codeberg. Not GitHub — Codeberg. Because if you're building a privacy-focused app, hosting it on Microsoft's platform feels like missing the point.

AGPL means anyone can use, modify, and distribute the code. But if someone modifies it and runs it as a service, they have to share their changes. It protects the project from proprietary forks while keeping everything open.

Who It's For

HelixNotes is for people who've tried everything and are tired of compromising. You want a clean UI but refuse to give up local files. You want rich editing but don't want Electron eating your RAM. You want open source but won't settle for an ugly interface.

It's available on Linux (AppImage, APT, AUR), Windows, macOS, and Android. All free. No account required. No trial period. No "premium tier" that locks basic features behind a paywall.

I built HelixNotes because I needed it. Turns out other people did too. If you've been looking for the same thing, give it a try.