plain-text notes · keyboard first · yours on disk
A local-first Markdown editor with a focused interface: one modal
overlay, monospace type, a single accent colour, and a binding for everything.
Your notes are ordinary .md files in an ordinary folder —
openable by anything, greppable, git-able, and still yours the day slate stops
existing.
---
tags: [field, weather]
---
Read snow as snow, not as a shower. The block wears its weather now — wx: in the frontmatter and the icon resolves at paint time.
A layout bug can be a network bug when a measure is in ch.
Filed under #field · see also [[weather blocks]] and **the shipping log**.
← 3 backlinks
01 What it is
slate is not a database with a Markdown skin. It is a folder of text files with a very good editor pointed at it — which is why every decision below was easy.
Your vault is a directory of .md files. Wikilinks, tags,
frontmatter, tasks and tables are all just characters in the file. Rename a note
and inbound [[links]] are rewritten; delete slate and nothing is
trapped. There is no export because there is nothing to export from.
Every command has an id, a palette entry, and — where it earns one — a binding. Space opens a which-key leader menu so the chord vocabulary is discoverable rather than memorised, and ⌘/ lists the lot, grouped. The mouse works. It is never the fast way.
Files are read and written straight to the folder you picked, with no server in the path. Sync is optional and end-to-end encrypted — the server stores ciphertext it cannot open. Offline is not a degraded mode; it is the normal one.
02 Get slate
The desktop app and the web build read the same folder and speak the same sync protocol. Start in a browser tab, install the app later, and nothing has to move.
The native build. Real filesystem access, a built-in terminal rooted in your
vault, a dock icon, the OS keychain for AI keys, and your Android phone on
the same wifi — battery, signal, text messages, the clipboard and files, over
KDE Connect. Apple silicon, .dmg, macOS 11 or later.
Not signed by an identified developer yet, so macOS stops the first launch. On macOS 15, open it once and then allow it in System Settings → Privacy & Security. On macOS 11–14, right-click the app → Open → Open. Asked once, either way.
The same app in a tab. Chrome, Edge, Brave or Arc can open a real local
folder through the File System Access API, so the web build edits your actual
.md files — not a copy in browser storage.
Safari and Firefox can't open local folders yet — but Try a demo vault, on slate's first screen, works in every browser and writes nothing to disk.
Send a selection or a whole page into today's note. The clipper holds a vault id and a public key — no account, no session, no password, and nothing that can open a note. Clips are sealed in the browser before they leave.
Not on the Web Store yet: unzip, then Chrome →
chrome://extensions → Developer mode → Load unpacked.
03 Start here
Open slate and choose Open a folder… — an empty directory, or one that
already has notes in it. That folder is the vault. slate adds no hidden database
beside your files; the folder after slate has touched it is a folder of
.md files and whatever attachments you dropped in.
Not ready to commit? Try a demo vault loads a working vault in memory, including five example prompt notes. Nothing is written to disk.
⌘K finds notes, headings, commands, tags, panes, and desks. ⌘P runs any command. ⌘⇧F searches the vault. Space — pressed on its own, outside the editor — opens the leader menu and shows you every chord there is.
When you want the rest, ⌘/ lists every command with its binding, grouped by what it does. It is the same list the palette runs from, so nothing on it is stale.
Markdown as you type: # heading, - [ ] task,
> quote, | tables |. [[wikilinks]]
autocomplete against the vault and rename with their target.
#tags are indexed vault-wide — type # in any palette to
browse every one with its count.
Backlinks aren't chrome in a sidebar; they render at the foot of the note as one dim row that expands into the sentence each link sits in.
⌘⌥D opens today's note, creating it from your template if it doesn't exist. ⌘⇧↵ logs the line you're on — or the selection — into today's note without leaving the note you're in. The Chrome clipper lands in the same place.
Set up sync for this vault from ⌘P asks for an account and a vault password. The password never leaves the device: it unwraps a key that encrypts every file before upload. The server holds ciphertext and filenames it cannot read, which also means we cannot reset that password for you.
Sync is optional and per-vault. Choose what syncs excludes folders, attachments or plugins; Earlier versions of this note pulls any synced revision back.
>, /,
@, #. Learn it once.
04 Terminal plugin · Mac
Open a real interactive terminal beside the note you are working on. It starts in the current vault, follows slate's theme and type settings, and stays inside the pane system you already know.
Ctrl-C and Ctrl-D
behaviour — not a simulated command box.git, search, scripts, static-site builds, or whatever the folder needs.05 Keyboard shortcuts
A handful of keys differ between the desktop app and a browser tab, because the browser owns some of them. slate resolves that per platform, so the binding shown inside the app is always the one that works there.
tag: path: "phrase" -exclude⌘⇧F⌘B belongs to bold⌘\[[links]]⌘⇧Rprompts/*.md⌘⌥PSpace on its own opens a which-key hint menu, so the chord vocabulary is discoverable rather than memorised. Keep holding the thought; the menu tells you the letter.
06 Numbers in a note
= and the answer appears beside it. It is never written into the file.A note is prose first. So the trigger is a deliberate, typed gesture — the line has to end in an equals sign — and everything else stays a sentence. “The deal closed at 3” never lights up with a number.
82 + 55 =, exactly like **bold** stays four
asterisks. Click an answer to copy it, or run Insert calculation results
to write them all in at once.guests : 5 — and every line
below it can use the name. Redefine it halfway down and only the lines under
the new one change their mind.5kg + 3lbs in lbs is a
real dimensional conversion; 3 apples + 2 hours stays blank rather
than inventing a number.2 + 2 = without it answering,
and count: 99 at the top of a note stays metadata.= line, and
exchange rates only when a line names a currency.guests : 5
guests * 3 =15
12 cups to teaspoons =576 teaspoons
1 tsp + 4 tbsp + 6 cups =301 tsp
350 F to C =176.67 °C
1,200 * 3 =3,600
10% off 250 =225
$24 USD to CAD =32.88 CAD
Split it evenly and everybody owes 720 —
Every line below is a real one, with the answer slate gives it. The informality — a dollar sign in front, a fraction glyph, a question asked in words — is rewritten into arithmetic before anything is evaluated.
Thousands separators, × and ÷, an
en-dash pasted out of a word processor, 3 x 4, and 5k
for five thousand. Not 5m — that already means five metres.
Length, mass, area, volume, speed, time, data, temperature.
into reads better than to in a sentence and means the
same thing; a bare 20 C is Celsius, not coulombs.
200 + 15% means fifteen percent of the thing
on the left — the reading on every receipt and every calculator, rather than
the arithmetically literal one.
The spoons are US customary, so 16 tablespoons and 48 teaspoons make a cup — the numbers on the measuring spoons in your drawer, not the metric ones a standards body would defend.
ECB reference rates for fiat, CoinGecko for crypto. Neither is told what the note says — only which symbols to price — and nothing is fetched until a line names a currency. A failed fetch says so rather than quietly using yesterday's number.
A colon, deliberately — so x = 5 stays prose. A
definition applies to the lines below it, exactly as it reads, and
total guests is one variable rather than two multiplied.
07 History & connections
Local-first apps usually give up the one thing hosted apps do well:
what did this say last Tuesday. slate's answer isn't a server. The
version a save is about to replace is written into
.slate/history/ — inside your vault, skipped by the file tree,
travelling with the folder like everything else.
history: 30 in
slate.md keeps thirty per note; false turns it off
entirely. Deleted notes wait in .trash/ on the same terms.Open Connections beside a note and you get three lists: the links going
out, the backlinks coming in, and — the useful one — unlinked mentions,
every note that says this note's name or one of its aliases without linking it.
One keystroke turns a mention into a [[link]], rewriting the other
file where it stands.
Put aliases: [MOC, index] in a note's frontmatter and it answers
to all of them — in the palette, in a [[link]], and in the unlinked
mention scan. Rename the note later and inbound links are rewritten; the aliases
keep working, because they were never the filename.
08 Also in the box
Each of these is small, and each is a file — which is the test everything has to pass before it ships.
Each workspace holds its own pane layout — a split for writing, a split for
research, a terminal beside a note. ⌃⌥1–⌃⌥9 to switch,
⌃⌥N to name one. Empty desks stay hidden behind a single +
rather than advertising capacity you aren't using.
There is no preferences panel. slate.md in your vault
is the settings screen — theme, vim mode, history depth, trash days,
where daily notes live, which folder seeds templates — all frontmatter, all
documented in the note itself, all travelling with the vault.
Notes in templates/ seed new ones: {{title}},
{{date:+1w}} and numbered tab stops like
{{1:who was there}} that you tab between. Say
templates.meetings: Meeting and every new note in
meetings/ starts from it — one line of frontmatter, no rule engine.
⌘⌥D opens today's note, creating it if it's new. ⌘⇧↵ takes the line you're on — anywhere in the vault — and appends it to today, timestamped. Every unticked box in the vault, meanwhile, is one list away in the palette.
.baseA folder of records — vinyl, books, films — drawn as a grid of covers, sized and filtered by a small YAML file sitting in the folder beside the notes. It is a saved view, not a hosted database: it diffs, syncs and versions like any other file, and Obsidian reads the same one.
vim: true in the settings note and the editor takes modal
keybindings — loaded only when it's on, so nobody who doesn't use it pays for it.
The pane directions are vim's either way: ⌃⌥ plus
HJKL.
09 AI, on your terms
slate ships no model, no key, and no account for one. Point it at Ollama on
localhost, connect OpenRouter without an API key at all, or give it
any OpenAI-compatible URL.
chats/2026-08-26 0952.md. The transcript is the file:
searchable, [[linkable]], editable mid-thread..md files in prompts/
with frontmatter saying what goes in and where it comes out, and you have added an
AI feature without a release.⌂ instead of ⇡ — proof that nothing left the machine.sessionStorage, never in the vault, because
the vault is plain text headed for git. Closing the browser forgets them,
deliberately.10 Sync & the clipper
A vault password — never sent — unwraps the key that encrypts every file before upload. Filenames included. Sync is per-vault and selective: exclude a folder, skip attachments, leave plugins behind. Earlier synced revisions of any note come back from the palette.
The trade is stated plainly: nobody can reset that password for you, because nobody else ever had it.
The obvious build signs the extension in with your account. We didn't: a session grants delete and update on every file, so a compromised extension could destroy ciphertext it could never read. Instead the insert routes through a server-side function, and the extension keeps only a vault id and a public key.
Clips arrive on the next sync, timestamped when they were captured, and drain into your daily note.
11 Help & documentation
The fastest help is ⌘/ inside the app — every command with its live binding. Everything below is the long form.
What slate is, what it refuses to be, and the milestones in order.
Every featureFEATURES.mdThe complete surface: editor, palette, tags, backlinks, tasks, templates, calc.
Shipping & platformsSHIPPING.mdThe Mac build, the clipper, and what Windows and mobile still need.
How sync worksSYNC.mdThe envelope, the keyring, conflict handling, and what the server can see.
AccountsACCOUNTS-AND-SYNC.mdSign-in, devices, subscriptions, and what an account does and doesn't unlock.
AI & providersAI.mdOllama, OpenRouter's keyless connect, custom endpoints, and prompt notes.
The AI consoleAI-CONSOLE.mdScopes, landings, the instruction line, and how a run is undone.
Writing a plugin/plugins/create/The manifest, the permission model, the slate API, the block vocabulary, and a worked example.
Publishing a plugin/plugins/publish/The checklist, the review gate, what gets rejected, and what stops a malicious plugin.