Every Feature, Explained

The home screen shows all your notebooks as physical-looking books on a 3D bookcase. Each book has a coloured spine, a front cover with your custom art, and even a subtle gloss sheen. It's the first thing you see when you open the app — and it's genuinely delightful.

Books are organised into shelf rows. You can name each shelf unit (e.g., "Work", "Personal", "Archive") to group related notebooks. Hover a book to preview its title; right-click for a context menu with quick actions: Open, Rename, Change Cover, Add/Change PIN, and Delete.

• 6 rack materials: Light Wood, Dark Wood, Black Metal, Gray Metal, Aluminum, Glass
• Spine colour auto-derived from the notebook cover colour
• Custom labels per shelf unit
• One-click switch to flat grid view
• Books display a 🔒 icon when PIN-locked

Each note opens as an infinite canvas. There's no fixed page size, no columns, no grids imposed on you. Click anywhere on the blank area to drop a text box. Drag elements to reposition them. Resize them by dragging the edges. Stack them, overlap them — your layout, your rules.

The canvas grows automatically as you add more content below the visible area. Scrolling reveals everything you've written. No clipping, no pagination.

• Truly infinite vertical and horizontal canvas
• Click-to-place text boxes at any position
• All elements are independently moveable and resizable
• Elements can overlap — z-order is preserved
• Drag images in from your OS file manager

Click anywhere on the canvas to drop a text box and start typing immediately. Text boxes behave like sticky notes — each one is an independent island of text you can drag, resize, and style.

The text toolbar appears when you have a text box selected or are editing inside one. Format your text with bold, italic, font size controls, and a full colour picker for both text and background colour. Copy-paste works normally including pasting plain text from other apps.

• Bold and italic formatting
• Multiple font sizes
• Custom text colour
• Auto-grows as you type (no overflow clipping)
• Inline URL support (links open in the default browser)

Click the pen icon in the note toolbar (or press the pen FAB button) to enter drawing mode. A floating tool picker appears with four tools and size/colour controls. Draw directly on the canvas — your strokes layer on top of any text boxes or images.

• Three sizes per tool: Small, Medium, Large
• Full colour picker — any hex colour
• Drawings are rasterised to a canvas layer and saved as part of the note
• Press Escape or click the pen button again to exit drawing mode

Add images to any note canvas using drag & drop or the image picker. Images are immediately copied into the app's local media storage — they stay embedded even if you delete the original file. Images are treated as first-class canvas elements: move them, resize them, overlap them with text or drawings.

• Supported formats: JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, WEBP
• Drag multiple files from Finder or Explorer at once
• Images are stored in media/ inside your user data folder
• Deleting a note or notebook automatically cleans up the embedded images
• Resize by dragging the corner handle

Any notebook can be protected with a personal PIN. A locked notebook shows a 🔒 icon on its spine and requires the correct PIN before it opens. This protects against casual snooping — great for shared computers.

PINs are session-based: they reset every time you close the app. This is an intentional design choice — it means a PIN is never stored on disk in any recoverable form. You re-enter it each session, keeping the security model clean and simple.

• Per-notebook PIN (other notebooks stay accessible)
• PIN stored only in memory — never written to disk
• Session resets on app quit — no persistent PIN state
• Change or remove PIN at any time (requires current PIN)
• Lock icon visible on bookshelf and grid view

Assign a badge to any note and it appears as a coloured pill label next to the note title in the sidebar. Badges let you scan your notes at a glance without opening each one.

• One badge per note
• Right-click a note in the sidebar to assign or remove a badge
• Badges survive notebook renames and note moves

Press ⌘K (macOS) or Ctrl+K (Windows) from anywhere in the app — the bookshelf, inside a notebook, or while editing a note. A search panel slides in and searches across all notebooks and all notes simultaneously as you type.

Results show matched notes with their notebook name and a preview snippet. Click any result to jump straight to that note, opening the notebook first if needed. Press Escape to close the panel.

• Searches note titles and note content
• Also searches notebook names
• Case-insensitive, regex-escaped for safety
• Results update in real-time as you type (debounced)
• Keyboard navigation: arrow keys to browse results, Enter to open
• Up to 40 note results and 10 notebook results displayed

Every significant action on the note canvas — moving an element, resizing it, typing, drawing, adding or deleting — is recorded as a snapshot in the undo stack. You can undo up to 30 steps back.

The undo is snapshot-based: each step restores the entire canvas to a previous state, including all element positions, sizes, content, and drawing strokes. This makes undo feel complete and reliable — no partial undos, no weird inconsistent states.

• Up to 30 undo steps per note session
• Keyboard shortcut: ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z
• Snapshot-based — full canvas state restore
• Undo stack is per-note and resets on close

Cabinote saves your note automatically in the background as you work. There's no "Save" button and you never need to think about saving. The status area in the toolbar shows "Auto-saved ✓" after every save so you can see it's working.

Auto-save is debounced — it fires a short moment after you stop making changes, so it doesn't interrupt your flow or cause lag while you're actively writing or drawing.

• Continuous background saving — no manual save needed
• Visual confirmation in the toolbar
• Debounced to avoid saving on every keypress
• Saves note title, content, badge, and canvas state

Toggle a ruled-paper background on any note using the lines button in the toolbar. Lined pages make text-heavy notes feel more structured and help keep your writing aligned, just like physical ruled paper. Blank pages give you total creative freedom.

• Toggle per note — each note remembers its own preference
• Global default setting: new notes start lined or blank
• Lines are visual-only — they don't affect element positioning

Open the cover designer by right-clicking a notebook → "Change Cover". The designer gives you full control over how your book looks on the shelf.

• Solid colour: 15 built-in colours + custom hex input
• Gradient: Two-colour linear gradient (135°)
• Photo cover: Use any image file as the book's cover. Adjust position (X/Y%) and scale (cover, contain, fill).
• Overlay patterns: Dots, Lines, Grid, Diagonal, Waves — with custom pattern colour and opacity
• Cover text: Add text to the cover in any colour, positioned anywhere with drag-to-move controls

The spine colour is automatically derived from the main cover colour — darker for a realistic book look.

Cabinote is built on a simple principle: your notes belong to you, and only you. The app never connects to the internet. It has no analytics, no crash reporting, no telemetry, no advertising network, and no account system. The word "privacy" isn't marketing — it's just how the app works.

• Zero network requests — verified with any packet sniffer
• No account, no sign-up, no email required
• All data in a local NeDB database on your device
• No third-party SDKs except Electron + NeDB (both local)
• You can inspect the source code to verify