Plain text

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.

Keyboard first

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.

Yours on disk

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.

Select a handful of notes

Shift-click notes in the tree to pick them up as a group, then drag, move or delete them together. A plain click or esc lets go.

Moves you can take back

Drop a note in the wrong collapsed folder and slate says where it went, with an Undo — the same safety net a delete already had.

A task board, and a timer

Every checkbox in the vault in one window; ticking one edits the note it came from. Beside it, a countdown you can read across a room that logs focus time to today.

Connections, in a pane of their own

Three lists beside a note: links out, backlinks in, and unlinked mentions — every note that says this one's name without linking it. One keystroke turns a mention into a [[link]], rewriting the other file where it stands.

When the answer is a shape rather than a list, the map draws the neighbourhood one hop out, links and tags and people each in their own colour. The legend is the filter.

Every name a note answers to

aliases: [MOC, index] in the frontmatter and the note answers to all of them — in the palette, in a [[link]], in the mention scan. Rename it and inbound links are rewritten; the aliases keep working.

Nine desks

Each desk holds its own pane layout. ⌃⌥1–⌃⌥9 to switch — a desk is its number, so ⌃⌥3 means the same place every time.

The settings note

There is a settings menu, and it is a note. slate.md in your vault is the settings screen — every switch writes one line of frontmatter, and it travels with the vault.

Templates, per folder

Notes in templates/ seed new ones, with {{title}}, dates and tab stops. templates.meetings: Meeting and every note in that folder starts from it.

A board, from your tasks

Every - [ ] in the vault as a kanban board — where a column is a tag. Moving a card writes one word into the note it came from. No board database to lose.

Diagrams that stay text

A mermaid code fence draws itself in the note — flowcharts, sequences, timelines. Copy it as an image, or copy the source. The file is still a code fence.

Cards from a .base

A folder of records — vinyl, books, films — drawn as a grid of covers, sized and filtered by a small YAML file beside the notes. Obsidian reads the same one.

Paper mode

A reading light for long notes: warm ground, ink-coloured type, chrome pulled back. Right-click for the warmer variant. It is a preference, not a theme, so your theme survives it.

The daily brain dump

Switch it on and the daily note opens with a box for whatever is in your head, before anything else can ask for attention. ⌘⇧↵ adds to it from anywhere.

Calendars you subscribe to

Paste the secret .ics URL your calendar publishes and what's coming up sits on the top bar. The URL goes in the OS keychain; a meeting becomes a note in one keystroke.

Bring your notes with you

Importers for Obsidian, Notion, Evernote .enex, a plain Markdown folder, or JSON. Images come with them, inlined as files in the vault.

Twenty themes, and yours

⌘⌥T previews as you arrow through. A theme is a file, so writing one is editing one — type, spacing, chrome and accent included.

Vim mode, if you want it

vim: true in the settings note and the editor takes modal keybindings, loaded only when it's on. Pane directions are vim's either way: ⌃⌥ HJKL.

End-to-end encrypted sync

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 clipper holds no credential

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.