Notebooks: Write and Organize
Notes, Tasks, Markdown, Files
Only for Mac
$59.99
Own your notes — forever. No subscription, no lock-in.
Your documents stay yours, stored as standard files you can access anytime.
Pay once. Use for life.
Notebooks is a powerful writing app and a trusted place for your work.
Write, plan, organize, and stay focused — all in one place.
Use Notebooks as a personal wiki, Zettelkasten, document archive, task manager, or long-term writing space. Capture quick notes, turn them into actionable tasks, combine text fragments into chapters, organize research, or keep business documents separate from personal journals — without ever switching apps.
Designed to help you stay focused and work at your own pace, Notebooks grows with your needs and is always ready to support you.
WRITE AND CREATE
Create beautifully formatted documents with styles, attachments, tables, checklists, and optional tables of contents. Choose from ready-made styles or design your own.
Write in different ways:
Formatted text (WYSIWYG)
Plain text, with smart handling of lists, automatic character pairing, and a focused writing view
Markdown, supporting MultiMarkdown and Discount, with syntax highlighting, dedicated keyboard shortcuts, wiki-style links, and interactive checklists
STORE AND ORGANIZE
Notebooks stores all documents as regular files in standard formats. You always remain in control — no lock-in, no export worries, fully compatible across devices and over time.
Organize your work in books and nested hierarchies without limits. Import PDFs, emails, web pages, MS Office and iWork documents, images, audio, video, and more. Use full-text search to find even the most deeply nested document.
PLAN AND ACT
Turn books into project lists and documents into tasks. Assign due dates and alerts, create nested projects, and track progress naturally — right where your work lives.
Use simple checklists in formatted documents or Markdown for lightweight task tracking.
STAY FOCUSED
Link documents together to build knowledge over time. Use wiki-style links, backlinks, contexts, and smart books to keep everything connected and within reach. When you rename or move documents, links stay intact.
A PLACE YOU CAN RELY ON
Sync your documents between iPhone, iPad, Mac, and PC. Work on documents stored in other apps, compile selections into PDFs or eBooks, scan documents and extract text using OCR, and trust that your data stays accessible — now and in the future.
With time, Notebooks often becomes the one place users rely on to keep everything that matters close at hand.
WHAT USERS SAY
“Notebooks is a wonderful app — sophisticated in an unassuming way. I feel more productive without spending time managing the app itself.”
“You are GTD in every way that makes it efficient — and makes me efficient.”
more I use plain text for organzing thoughts and for professional writing. I have tried dozens of the available apps, and this is probably the best of the lot. It does a nice job of displaying Markdown headings, allows me to use tabs to indent blocks of text (many apps will only indent the first line) and offers a display of all files and folders on the left, with a display (that can be immediately edited) on the right. It doesn't offer the bare screens of some "distraction free" software, but it hits a sweet spot between simplicity and functionality. One of the best features is its automatic file-naming system. Files are automatically named with the first line of the document. If you change the first line, the filename updates to match. It means you can start jotting down ideas, then create the headings as you go, or quickly split up a long document with headings into sensibly named smaller documents. The program is regularly updated, and I've found the improvements are useful and well-considered. This is an excellent choice if you're a writer looking for something to help you turn a mass of files and notes into a coherent structure.
I use plain text for organzing thoughts and for professional writing. I have tried dozens of the available apps, and this is probably the best of the lot. It does a nice job of displaying Markdown headings, allows me to use tabs to indent blocks of text (many apps will only indent the first line) and offers a display of all files and folders on the left, with a display (that can be immediately edited) on the right. It doesn't offer the bare screens of some "distraction free" software, but it hits a sweet spot between simplicity and functionality. One of the best features is its automatic file-naming system. Files are automatically named with the first line of the document. If you change the first line, the filename updates to match. It means you can start jotting down ideas, then create the headings as you go, or quickly split up a long document with headings into sensibly named smaller documents. The program is regularly updated, and I've found the improvements are useful and well-considered. This is an excellent choice if you're a writer looking for something to help you turn a mass of files and notes into a coherent structure.
If I look at a document full screen (without the directory to the left) I can’t get back to seeing the directory. There is nothing obvious under File, Window, etc. Frustrating
Developer Response When you don't see any buttons to show the left columns, then it seems that you have set Notebooks to hide the toolbar. In that case, just move the mouse pointer to the top edge of the screen and the menu will appear. Here you find the buttons to change Notebooks' view modes. - To leave full screen view (that is macOS full screen), just hit the ESC key or type cmd-ctrl-F. These are standard macOS shortcuts, it is not Notebooks specific. - I hope that helps.
If I look at a document full screen (without the directory to the left) I can’t get back to seeing the directory. There is nothing obvious under File, Window, etc. Frustrating
When you don't see any buttons to show the left columns, then it seems that you have set Notebooks to hide the toolbar. In that case, just move the mouse pointer to the top edge of the screen and the menu will appear. Here you find the buttons to change Notebooks' view modes. - To leave full screen view (that is macOS full screen), just hit the ESC key or type cmd-ctrl-F. These are standard macOS shortcuts, it is not Notebooks specific. - I hope that helps.
This update focuses on refining the user interface and making the overall Notebooks experience smoother and more polished.
4.1.1 2d ago
This update focuses on details that make everyday work in Notebooks smoother and more predictable. You'll notice improvements when editing long documents, working with formatted text and Markdown, organizing books, and handling storage locations. While there are no major new features this time, many small refinements contribute to a more polished and reliable experience throughout the app.
All the details are available on our website.
4.1 Jun 20
This update focuses on refinements, reliability, and visual consistency across the app. Several improvements enhance everyday editing, task extraction works more consistently, typing performance has been improved, the outline and document list have been refined to behave more predictably, working with PDFs is more convenient, and much more.
This update also enhances Liquid Glass support, introduces a new app icons, and resolves interface inconsistencies.
Overall, this release is about making Notebooks feel more solid, more predictable, and more polished.
You find more details on our website.
4 Mar 31
This is a just quick update with a few improvements:
• Callouts Document Style fixes a small layout issue.
• Internal Links are resolved more effectively.
• MultiMarkdown: Correctly interprets the TOC tag as "table of contents".
• Search Results: In plain text, search terms containing single quotes (‘) are correctly highlighted.
• Create PDF: Includes an option to create one PDF for each selected document instead of combining all documents in a single PDF.
• Extract Tasks: When extracting tasks from text, special characters in the task’s title no longer create duplicates.
• Cleanup Document: More carefully removes even deprecated HTML tags.
3.8.4 2025-10-21
• Extracted tasks are saved to a dedicated book, which is now automatically created again when required. This reverts a change we made in Notebooks 3.8.
• The link editor allows you to modify both the link target and the display text.
• Fixed an issue where text could become invisible when renaming books or documents.
3.8.2 2025-05-05
• Show the number of open tasks per document (Markdown and formatted).
• Formatted documents can turn selected text into Wiki Links.
• PDF documents offer a new option to summarize annotations.
• Task markers at the beginning of lines behave like list items in plain text.
• Compile Documents automatically selects the best output format and lets you set title and separator.
• Context tags (like @tag) are highlighted and colorized in plain text and rendered Markdown.
• Right-clicking an image in a formatted document allows editing it in your default app.
• On macOS, Notebooks uses your system’s Accent Color for selected icons.
• A new Send to Things action is available when Things is installed.
3.8 2025-04-23
Notebooks 3.7.3 is a minor update with several enhancements and corrections.
• iCloud: Further reduce risk of freeze on startup while checking the sync status of documents.
• Open in... no longer skips duplicate app names and sorts available apps by title.
• Due Tasks: When a task's alert time is updated on another device, make sure to display a notifications at alert time.
• Markdown: Accept tasks starting with * (e.g., "* [ ]").
• Mermaid: Make sure that graphs render correctly on older macOS versions.
• Miscellaneous improvements and fixes.
3.7.3 2025-01-10
This is a minor update to address a potential freeze when downloading a large number of documents from iCloud. It also contains a few enhancements and corrections.
• iCloud: Reduced the risk of freezes or hangs when downloading a large number of documents from iCloud.
• Duplicate as... Plain Text generates more refined results for Markdown and formatted documents.
• Links in formatted Documents: When selecting Insert/Edit Link with a URL selected (not even copied), that URL is suggested as link target. Moreover, pasting links to PDF documents functions as intended.
• Fixed a potential crash that could occur on startup in Notebooks 3.7.
• Miscellaneous improvements and fixes.
3.7.1 2024-12-07
This update enhances support for custom classes with a new document theme "Callouts", provides an option to adjust text brightness in dark appearance, and more.
Additions
The document theme "Callouts" includes the classes Box, Hint, Info, Note, Attention, and Warning. In formatted documents, these classes are selectable from the paragraph menu, in Markdown you can use the `>%...%` notation with auto-suggestions (like >%hint%).
In dark appearance, text appears "bright" by default, a new option "dimmed text colors" is available in settings. (Solarized appearance remains unchanged.)
Enhancements for Markdown
- For improved compatibility with MathJax, Notebooks replaces the commonly used inline math notation `$...$` with the official MathJax-compatible notation `\(...\)`. To ensure that this does not affect documents unintentionally, *Notebooks* applies the replacement only when the selected document theme includes MathJax, or when the word "MathJax" appears in the document, including comments.
- Fixed layout issue in checklists with empty items.
- Improved support for the `> %class%` notation in MultiMarkdown.
- Autocompletion now includes `{{TOC}}` and `{{pagebreak}}` for `{{}}` syntax.
Misc
- Resolved issues with artifacts in PDF and print output when using bold styles of Muli or STIXTwoText fonts.
- Multiple interface corrections and refinements.
3.7 2024-11-23
This update addresses a startup issue on Intel Macs and adds a few enhancements to its built in document styles.
New in version 3.6
This update introduces new options for document styling (using custom CSS classes), enhances Markdown syntax highlighting, improves MathJax compatibility, adds more flexibility when importing or bookmarking URLs, and ensures that context tags within code blocks are ignored.
Custom Classes for Document Styling
Notebooks now supports custom CSS classes for formatting Markdown and formatted documents, in addition to traditional styles like headings, bold, italic etc. Custom classes can be applied through the paragraph formatting menu in formatted documents, or with the `> %...%` notation in Markdown. - For more details, please refer to the documentation.
Formatted Documents
- The formatting menu now includes heading levels 5 and 6, plus custom classes defined in the current document theme.
Markdown
- Auto-suggestions for custom classes: `> %` followed by TAB.
- Headings use variable font sizes with syntax highlighting.
- Improved checkbox detection in rendered view.
- Enhanced MathJax compatibility, especially for inline math with subscript and superscript.
- Handle `.mmd` and `.mermaid` file extensions as Markdown for Mermaid rendering.
Document Themes
- New: Support for Custom Classes. Please refer to documentation for details.
- Handbook Theme: Introduce custom styles "Sidecar" and "Box".
- Default Theme: Empty items in numbered lists no longer overlap, and add custom style "Caption".
Document List (Book)
- When saving a URL as bookmark, Notebooks now retrieves the original title, if available.
- When selecting multiple documents, Notebooks now maintains the order of selection, important for compiling and other actions.
Contexts
- Context tags are now ignored in fenced code blocks (Markdown and plain text) or in *code* sections (formatted documents).
Misc
- Many more refinements and corrections.
3.6.1 2024-10-09
This update introduces new options for document styling (using custom CSS classes), enhances Markdown syntax highlighting, improves MathJax compatibility, adds more flexibility when importing or bookmarking URLs, and ensures that context tags within code blocks are ignored.
Custom Classes for Document Styling
Notebooks now supports custom CSS classes for formatting Markdown and formatted documents, in addition to traditional styles like headings, bold, italic etc. Custom classes can be applied through the paragraph formatting menu in formatted documents, or with the `> %...%` notation in Markdown. - For more details, please refer to the documentation.
Formatted Documents
- The formatting menu now includes heading levels 5 and 6, plus custom classes defined in the current document theme.
Markdown
- Auto-suggestions for custom classes: `> %` followed by TAB.
- Headings use variable font sizes with syntax highlighting.
- Improved checkbox detection in rendered view.
- Enhanced MathJax compatibility, especially for inline math with subscript and superscript.
- Handle `.mmd` and `.mermaid` file extensions as Markdown for Mermaid rendering.
Document Themes
- New: Support for Custom Classes. Please refer to documentation for details.
- Handbook Theme: Introduce custom styles "Sidecar" and "Box".
- Default Theme: Empty items in numbered lists no longer overlap, and add custom style "Caption".
Document List (Book)
- When saving a URL as bookmark, Notebooks now retrieves the original title, if available.
- When selecting multiple documents, Notebooks now maintains the order of selection, important for compiling and other actions.
Contexts
- Context tags are now ignored in fenced code blocks (Markdown and plain text) or in *code* sections (formatted documents).
Misc
- Many more refinements and corrections.
3.6 2024-10-08
Notebooks 3.5 adds more options to edit documents in external apps, improves support for its Combined Markdown format, allows you to sort the list of search results, and includes many more improvements and corrections.
- Introducing the new "Open With..." menu: Easily access applications capable of handling your selected documents. Available from the File menu, document list context menu, and document's ••• menu.
- Enhanced search functionality: Sort search results by title, creation date, and modification date.
- Improved "Combined Markdown" documents now reliably detect and apply external changes, use syntax highlighting while editing, and more.
- Formatted documents more consistently handle the "first line as heading" setting, correctly update toolbar buttons when toggling list styles, and automatically delete closing characters only if they match the deleted opening character.
- Default Theme correctly aligns indented ordered lists and uses the accurate font size for numbers.
- Insert location now better extracts GPS coordinates from copied data.
- Performance: Resolved issues when quickly switching between very long text documents.
- Readability in dark mode: The text colors of empty books in the outline are now more readable.
- Automatic system cleanup: Unused system files (plist) are now automatically cleaned up and deleted.
3.5 2024-07-31
- Switch storage locations directly from the File menu.
- Hyphenation in formatted documents adjusts to the document's language.
- Umlauts in a Table of Contents are now correctly escaped, ensuring that links work properly.
- The list of a document's anchors in autocomplete suggestions appears in the same order as they do in the document (don't sort by alphabet).
- Clicking a book's title in the *Breadcrumb Navigation* displays its content according to book's sort order.
- "Vollkorn" is a new custom font.
As always, you can find the complete list of changes at www.notebooksapp.com.
3.4.2 2024-05-25
This update addresses an issue with lists in formatted documents.
3.4.1 2024-03-21
This update adds extended functionality for auto-completion of links, introduces Markdown syntax for highlighting text, supports French throughout its user interface, and includes many more improvements and corrections.
- French localization.
- Suggestions for Wiki Links now search across all documents and books and can include headings and anchors.
- New Markdown syntax ==marked text== for highlighting text.
- Open tasks with due date show a time interval like "10 days" or "21 days ago" in addition to the exact due date.
- The "File" menu summarizes all options to create new objects in a "New..." submenu.
- Users can assign a global keyboard shortcut for creating a new document in Notebooks.
- When adding the "Current Location", Notebooks now adds a timestamp in addition to address and map preview.
- Smart books no longer sort pinned items at top.
- Pasting text where a colon follows the first word is no longer treated as URL (macOS 14).
- Added support for .avif files.
- More refinements and tweaks.
More details are available in a dedicated article on our website.
3.4 2024-03-12
This update fixes another display flaw on macOS 14.3, ensures that new contexts appear in the correct position according to the selected sort order, and fixes a layout issue when outdenting a list in the last line of text documents.
3.3.6 2024-02-07
Another small update to address a potential display issue in plain text documents.
3.3.5 2024-01-26
This version corrects a few user interface issues that show up in macOS 14.3. - A more significant update is on its way.
3.3.4 2024-01-24
This update improves the behavior of checklists in formatted documents, contains improvements for lists and attachments in Markdown text, and contains a couple more refinements.
3.3.3 2023-12-12
This update fixes a potential freeze when trying to rename a document on macOS 14, improves the Solarized appearance and contains a few smaller improvements and corrections.
3.3.2 2023-11-20
• "Insert Location" is selectable as soon as Notebooks is allowed to use location services.
• Improved conflict handling when synchronizing documents with iCloud.
• Reliably display email attachments with special characters in their filenames.
• Many more improvements and corrections.
More details about this update are available in the version history section of our website.
3.3.1 2023-11-06
- New option to insert the current location (Edit > Insert Current Location)
- Keyboard shortcuts to rotate list style in plain text and Markdown.
- Shortcuts for zooming the text in formatted documents.
- Option to convert OPML documents to Markdown.
- Adjustments for macOS Sonoma.
- Fixes and corrections.
For more details, please refer to our website.
3.3 2023-10-13
This update addresses the case that the list of books may appear empty on startup.
3.2.2 2023-06-10
- Typing "return" at the end of a line in a formatted document no longer deletes the first character of the next line.
- Dropping documents into a book which is listed as Favorite works as expected.
- The Default Theme no longer produces an empty page when printing a document starting with *Title* (H1).
- .bike files display using the Quicklook plug in (again).
3.2.1 2023-06-07
- The new smart book to show All Task Lists.
- A new option to turn headings into clickable links in rendered Markdown documents, which allows you to easily copy links to headings.
- Rename documents directly from the Info panel.
- System fonts are now available for selection.
- Improvements for automatically inserted closing characters, so they no longer interfere with nested LaTeX commands.
- Refined Document Themes, and much more.
For all the details, please visit our website.
3.2 2023-05-31
This update focuses on refining the user interface and making the overall Notebooks experience smoother and more polished.
more Version 4.1.1 2d ago
Data Not Collected The developer does not collect any data from this app.
