FineNotes Get FineNotes

Real pages for your pen.

FineNotes adds handwritten notebooks to Obsidian, the free notes app, on your iPad, Android tablet or pen tablet. You write on real pages, and search finds your handwriting.

Get FineNotes View on GitHub

Join 1,149 people who have downloaded FineNotes.

  • Free, open source
  • Apple Pencil & any pen
  • Plain files you own

The handwritten question 'Still paying for a notes app?' is scribbled out and erased. Then the FineNotes notebook with its page sidebar, the cover and paper pickers, a hand-drawn star that snaps to a clean star, and a search that finds a handwritten word. It ends on: Free, in Obsidian's Community plugins, for Apple Pencil, Android pens and pen tablets.

FineNotes started as a personal project because I was tired of all the paid note-taking apps on the App Store, such as Goodnotes and Notability … I was also tired of companies being the ones responsible for keeping your notes in their cloud, something that Obsidian fixes.

Joost, creator of FineNotes

A look inside FineNotes.

FineNotes 2.3's own views, drawn by its code. The biology notebook and its search results are sample data, and the Shapes page is from the built-in welcome tour. Tap or click one to see it full size.

FineNotes notebook upright: the Pages sidebar with its Pages, Contents and Files tabs and page thumbnails named Cover, Lecture 3, Diagrams and Exercises, beside the Cell biology lecture page and the Electron transport chain page.
Biology notebookThumbnails with page names
The Cover section of FineNotes' New notebook dialog: No cover, Soft gradient, Orb, Duotone split, Contour lines and Glass label designs, with Big type cut off where the row scrolls, and 16 cover colours.
New notebookCovers and colours
FineNotes notebook search for "mito", open over the Cell biology lecture page, with sample results: a text match on page 2 and a handwriting match on page 7.
SearchFinds handwriting
FineNotes notebook page with a cell sketch and the audio player bar of a 48:12 recording: "Tap your writing to hear what was said as you wrote it."
Audio notesTap a word, hear the lecture
The Shapes page of FineNotes' welcome tour: a line, an arrow, a filled rectangle, a circle, a dotted ellipse, a filled triangle, a dashed diamond, a star, a cloud and a dashed rounded rectangle, above a table with Day, Topic and Done columns, with the page's Shapes tab on the notebook's edge.
Shapes and tablesFills, dashes, rounded corners

Install. Then write.

Four steps from a fresh tablet to your first page. You need Obsidian 1.13 or later, and no account.

Get FineNotes

  1. Get Obsidian

    Install Obsidian, the free notes app, and create a vault (any name will do). In its Settings, turn on Community plugins, then tap Browse.

    Download Obsidian

  2. Install

    Search for FineNotes, then tap Install and Enable.

    Open in ObsidianPlugin page

  3. New notebook

    Pick a cover, a paper and a size, or import a notebook from another app.

    Try it here first

  4. Write

    There is no save button: every stroke goes into a plain file in your Obsidian vault as you write.

    Watch it in action

Try FineNotes.

This is the real FineNotes, running in your browser on its welcome notebook. Write with a pen, mouse or finger, hold a shape still to snap it, scribble to erase, and open the pages on the left. Nothing leaves your browser.

Open full screenAI, audio recording and PDF import need Obsidian, so they only work in the plugin.

Switching from Goodnotes.

What people wrote on FineNotes' GitHub, in their own words. Tap a quote to read it there.

1,149downloads and counting

Join them.

Free in Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins → search “FineNotes”.

Get FineNotes

Questions, answered.

Something else? Ask in GitHub Discussions.

Yes. FineNotes is free and open source under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later, with no account and no ads. Only the optional cloud AI features need an API key from an AI provider, which may charge for it.

Apple Pencil on the iPad, Android tablets with a pen such as the S Pen, and pen tablets or pen screens on Windows, macOS and Linux. A mouse, trackpad or finger works too, and it runs on a phone. It is tested most on the iPad; Android and Linux have had less testing so far.

Most handwriting plugins for Obsidian give you an endless canvas. FineNotes gives you pages with a fixed size, as Goodnotes does, so your ink stays exactly where you wrote it on an iPad, a phone and a laptop, whatever the width of the window.

In your Obsidian vault, as plain files you own. Sync them with Obsidian Sync, iCloud, Syncthing or anything else that syncs a folder. Each notebook is a Markdown file with its ink in a compressed block; without FineNotes its text still opens, but the ink needs the plugin.

Yes, in beta. The importer reads Goodnotes, Notability, Noteful, Xournal++, Saber, reMarkable, Supernote and FreeNotes exports (Supernote handwriting comes over as a picture of each page), and any app's PDF, whose ink and highlight annotations become ink you can edit. The files you import from are not changed; check the notebook afterwards.

No. Grape, FineNotes' own handwriting model (in beta), reads your writing on your device, with no account; what you write is not sent anywhere. Cloud AI is optional and only runs with an API key you add yourself.

Say hello.

Questions, ideas or a bug? Open a discussion or an issue on GitHub; bug reports and ideas are welcome.