numen
Yours
Your notes stay yours
One folder, on your own disk, in files you can read without numen. No account, no cloud, nothing to escape from later.
Plain files
Markdown, in folders you named. Any editor opens them.
Nothing to import
Point numen at the notes you already keep. They are your library from the first second.
Sync it your way
Dropbox, iCloud, a drive, a repository. It is a folder, so it goes where your folders go.
Nothing leaves
Writing, searching and linking happen on your machine. Nothing is uploaded unless you ask for it.
The map
A map that moves with you
You are always in the middle of one note, with everything joined to it drawn around you. Click a neighbour and it becomes the middle. Nothing to zoom, and nothing to lose yourself in.
Every other tool gives you one kind of line, and a year later you have a hairball. Here a link knows whether it goes up, down or across — so what you built keeps its shape as it grows.
- parentWhat this note belongs to. It can belong to more than one, the way real subjects do.
- childWhat sits under it — the parts, the cases, the notes that make it up.
- jumpThe leap to something in another part of your thinking, without tangling either.
Write a couple of words on a line and they are drawn along it, so you can see why the two notes are joined.
Never the whole hairball
Only what touches where you are. A folder of ten thousand notes looks the same as a folder of ten: one note, and its own.
Drag to connect
Pull a line out of a note onto another and they are joined. Pull it into empty space and the note you needed is made there.
Side by side
Keep the map, the note you are writing and the assistant open beside each other, arranged the way you like to work.
Finding
Find it by what you meant
Type the word, or describe the idea in your own words. Either way you get the passage that answers you, out of everything you have ever written down.
The word you typed
Wherever it stands, in anything in the folder — a note from years ago, a chapter, a file you forgot you had.
Or the thought behind it
Ask the way you would ask a person. The passage that means what you asked comes back even when none of your words are in it.
Taken to the place
A result opens the note it came from at the line it stands on, with everything that note is joined to already around it.
The assistant
Ask it about your own notes
An assistant sits beside what you are writing and works inside your folder — not on the internet's idea of the subject, but on what you have actually collected.
It knows what you wrote
Ask what a note leaves out, where you contradicted yourself, or what you were reading when you wrote it.
It can do the tidying
Have it draft the note you keep meaning to write, join two ideas that belong together, or rename the mess of a title.
You see every move
Each thing it touches is written out as it happens, and it can only reach what is in your folder.
Recordings
What you recorded, in words
A lecture you taped is as searchable as anything you typed. It is listened to on your own machine — no upload, no account, no per-minute bill.
Right-click, transcribe
A recording in the folder is written down where it stands. The words arrive while it runs, so a long talk is searchable before it is finished.
Every line has a time
Press a line and the recording plays from there. Search finds the sentence and takes you to the second it was said.
The words are yours
Correct a line and it is kept against the recording, in a subtitle file you can take anywhere numen has never been.
Books
Your books, searched with your notes
PDFs and EPUBs sitting in the folder are read as documents, and a result opens the book at the page the words are on. A book that carries no text of its own is read here, on your machine, and joins the search like everything else.
Open at the page
A search sends you into the book itself, at the page and the line, with everything that book is joined to already around it.
Lit where it stands
A result opens the book at the page, with the passage lit where it sits on the paper rather than lifted out of it.
The reading follows the book
It is kept beside the vault under the book's own bytes. Move or rename the file and it keeps its reading; keep two copies and they share one.
Cards
Remember what you looked up
Cards live in the same folder as the notes, in markdown you can read. A stencil says what a card of some kind holds; the deck fills it in.
Fields, not two blank sides
Name the fields once. Every card of that kind is cut the same way, and one stencil can ask about them from several directions.
A grid you can move
Cards stand under headings you chose, and drag between them. Nothing is hidden in a database you cannot open.
Joined to the note
A card can point at the note it came out of, and the note is one press away while you are answering.
Review
A day of review, in its own window
Sitting down to your cards is a window of its own: what is due, and then one card at a time. You need not know an editor exists.
Say what a day is worth
Twenty-five minutes, a share you want to remember, or a date to be ready by. Move the one knob and the rest is worked out for you.
See the cost first
The curve says what each pace asks of you and when the backlog clears, before you commit a year to it.
Read it while you answer
Take the note beside the card, or ask the assistant about it, without leaving the session.
