Wattle Notes

Wattle Notes is a desktop Markdown notebook that started as a very personal itch: its maintainer wanted a specific combination of note-taking features — ordinary Markdown folders, wiki links, backlinks, split preview, and encrypted cloud sync — that he couldn't find together in any existing app. The answer was to build it himself, with AI assistance doing most of the implementation while the design decisions stayed human.

The app runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux as a native desktop build (Tauri 2, React, CodeMirror 6, Rust). Notes live as plain Markdown files in folders with YAML frontmatter tags, so nothing is locked into a proprietary format. Writing views include split preview, directly editable reading views, keyboard shortcuts, and five saved appearance themes; local full-text search, wiki links, and backlinks round out the note-taking core.

Where it gets ambitious is sync and safety. Wattle Notes can mirror notes to Google Drive with passphrase-protected encryption — local copies and revision history are encrypted before upload, and no note content ever goes to an AI service or telemetry backend. Optional Nextcloud/WebDAV encrypted backups with verified restore, three-way merging of non-overlapping edits, and a conflict screen for overlapping ones handle the messy realities of editing on multiple machines, with signed in-app alpha update checks arriving in the 0.1.2 builds.

It is public alpha software (v0.1.2-alpha.1 was cut the same day it was written about here), open source under GPL-3.0, and it carries its origin proudly: the README and release notes both describe it as mostly vibe coded with AI assistance — Joplin, Obsidian, and Zettlr informed the feature goals without contributing a line of code. The honest framing matches the product: a real tool for real note-taking, built the way its author wanted to build it.