Online Notepad: Private Notes That Autosave in Your Browser

Rich-text notes saved in your browser, with search, Markdown export, and optional GitHub backup.

Notepad keeps a set of rich-text notes inside your browser's own IndexedDB, formatted with a real editor rather than a plain textarea, and autosaves every note eight-tenths of a second after you stop typing. There is a bold/italic/underline/list/checklist toolbar, a live word count, a Markdown export button, and an entirely optional GitHub backup — the only feature in this tool that talks to a network.

How to take notes in this online notepad

  1. Open the page: your notes list sits on the left, and a first visit in a fresh browser adds a short Welcome note to show how checklists work.
  2. Click New note, give it a title (or leave the title blank and one is taken from the first heading or sentence), and start writing with the formatting toolbar.
  3. Pause for 0.8 seconds and the note is written to this browser; the status label switches to Saved in this browser once that write has landed.
  4. Find an older note with the Search notes box, which matches both titles and body text.
  5. Keep a copy outside the browser with Export Markdown, Export plain text, Export Word (.docx) or the Print / PDF button.

What this online notepad does

Where a note actually lives

Every note is a row in a database called bt-notepad, created and read through Dexie, a wrapper over IndexedDB, the first time the page opens in a given browser. The row stores the note's title, its editor document as structured JSON, a plain-text copy used for search and word counts, and two timestamps.

Because IndexedDB is scoped to the browser profile that created it, notes written in one browser on one device do not appear in a different browser, a private window, or the same browser on another computer. Clearing that profile's site data removes them the same way it would remove any other site's local storage — there is no server-side copy to recover unless GitHub backup was turned on first.

Typing is not the same moment as saving

Every keystroke updates the editor immediately and marks the current note dirty; the actual write to IndexedDB is scheduled 800 milliseconds later and restarts the timer if you keep typing, so a fast typist does not hammer the database on every character. A status label above the toolbar tracks this honestly — pending, saving, saved, or an explicit error state if the browser refuses the write, in which case the note stays open and the draft is not discarded.

Switching notes, creating a new one, or deleting one first flushes any pending save and blocks the interface until that write finishes, so a half-second delay never lets you navigate away from an edit that has not actually reached storage yet.

What the Markdown export keeps, and how

The export button does not run your document through a converter library; it walks the document tree node by node, turning headings into hash-mark runs, task list items into checkbox lines, code blocks into fenced blocks, and bold, italic, and strikethrough into their usual Markdown markers. Nested lists get two-space indents per depth level, and the title becomes a top-level heading at the start of the file.

The export runs entirely against the document already open in the editor, so nothing is asked of the network to produce a file — it downloads straight from a Blob URL, the same technique used for the other local downloads in this catalog.

GitHub backup is the one thing that leaves your device

Turning on backup asks for a fine-grained personal access token scoped to a single repository's contents, plus the repo name and branch — the settings panel deliberately does not suggest a classic account-wide token. Every request goes straight from your browser to GitHub's API; there is no intermediary server operated by this site sitting in between.

When backup is enabled, each successful local save also commits the note as a Markdown file under a notepad folder in that repository, reading the file's current version first so the commit updates it rather than overwriting blind. A failed GitHub commit never rolls back or blocks the local save — you will see a dismissible sync error instead, and your note stays safe in IndexedDB regardless. A disconnect control removes the saved credential entirely.

The free tier stores 50 notes in this browser; Pro stores as many as you want.

Repairing text that arrived as one flattened line

Copying from a PDF viewer, a rendered web table, or a chat transcript often hands the browser a single unbroken line: the breaks you saw were soft wrapping, never real newline characters. The Fix formatting button detects that shape offline and rebuilds the line breaks, splitting bullet glyphs, dash-delimited items, numbered markers, and label-and-value field headers back onto their own rows.

Every detection rule demands at least two evenly repeated markers on the same line before it acts. One hyphen inside a sentence is ordinary punctuation, and shredding that into fake bullet points would be worse than leaving it alone, so a single marker is always ignored. Exactly two spaced hyphens are read as a matched parenthetical pair and become em dashes; three or more are read as a flattened list and become separate rows.

The same pass repairs pipe tables that lost their header separator row, pads ragged table rows out to the widest column count, and tops up short comma-separated rows to the block's majority field count. Fenced code, inline backtick spans, and anything that looks like a web address are masked before any of this runs and restored afterwards, so a code sample is never rewritten. Pictures and tables in the document are skipped entirely rather than round-tripped.

Searching, replacing, and moving documents in and out

The find bar opens with Control-F or its toolbar button and highlights every hit at once, dimming all but the current one. The counter is not maintained by the bar itself: each jump asks the highlighter which hit it actually landed on and displays that answer, which is what stops the number drifting away from the highlight after a replace changes how many hits exist.

Replace all rewrites from the last hit backwards, so positions earlier in the document stay valid while the text around them changes length. Escape closes the bar and hands focus back to the writing area.

Word documents can be brought in as well as sent out. Picking a file never acts on its own: a dialog asks whether to drop it in at the cursor, replace what is open, or start a separate note, because silently doing any one of those to someone who expected another is the whole problem. The Word export walks the live document into real Word paragraphs, headings, lists, and tables rather than dumping plain text into a renamed file. Pictures can be pasted or dropped straight into the writing area, capped at two megabytes each because every note shares one storage bucket with all the others.

Private notes with no account or login

There is no sign-up screen because there is nothing to sign in to: each note is stored in this browser profile, and BrakeTools has no server-side copy it could show anyone. A note is never published at a public address, and nobody else can open it unless they are using the same browser profile on the same device.

Nothing leaves the device unless you switch on GitHub backup, and even then the destination is a repository you own, reached with a token you created. Leave backup off and the page makes no network request carrying note content.

Where Notepad stops being the right tool

Questions people ask about Notepad

Is this online notepad free, and do I need an account?
It is free and there is no account, login or email step. The free tier keeps up to 50 saved notes in this browser; Pro removes that cap. Formatting, exports, import, find and replace and GitHub backup all work on the free tier.
Are my notes private?
Yes. Notes live in this browser's IndexedDB storage, and BrakeTools never receives them, so there is no account database or public page that could expose them. The one exception is GitHub backup, which you configure yourself and which writes only to your own repository.
Can I download my notes as PDF, Word or plain text?
Yes, one note at a time. Export Word (.docx), Export plain text and Export Markdown each download the open note, and the Print / PDF button opens the print dialog, where choosing Save as PDF produces a PDF that also includes any pasted pictures.
Can I share a note with someone?
There is no share link, because notes are never stored on a server. Export the note as Word, Markdown or plain text and send the file; the other person can read it anywhere or bring it into their own copy of the notepad with the import button.
Will clearing my browser's cache or history delete my notes?
Cache clearing alone usually does not touch IndexedDB, but clearing site data or cookies and site data for this page does, and that is the same storage bucket notes live in. If GitHub backup was on, the Markdown copies in your repository survive; otherwise export anything important first.
Does it work on my phone, and can I see the same notes on my laptop?
The notepad is an ordinary web page with no app to install, so it opens in a phone browser as well. Storage is per browser, though: a phone and a laptop each keep their own separate set of notes. Turning on GitHub backup gives every note a Markdown copy in a repository you control, which you can read from any device.
Does the Markdown export keep my checklists?
Yes — checked items export with a filled checkbox marker and unchecked ones with an empty one, matching standard task-list Markdown syntax, so the file renders correctly wherever Markdown checklists are supported, including most code-hosting sites and note apps.
What happens to my note if the GitHub commit fails?
Nothing to your note itself — the local IndexedDB save already completed before the GitHub request was even sent, so a failed commit only shows a dismissible sync error. Your draft is never rolled back or lost because a network request to GitHub did not go through.
Does the Fix formatting button send my text anywhere to be cleaned up?
No. Every rule it applies is a plain pattern match running in this tab, with no model call and no request of any kind. That is also why it refuses to guess: a rule that fires on weak evidence would corrupt text, and there is no remote service standing by to second-guess it.
Why did Fix formatting stay greyed out on my note?
The button is only enabled when at least one paragraph or heading would actually change. Text that is already properly broken into lines, has no ragged tables, and contains no repeated dash markers gives it nothing to do, so it stays disabled rather than pretending to work.
Where do the titles come from on notes I never named?
A note saved with an empty or untouched title takes one from its own content: the first heading if the document opens with one, otherwise the first sentence of the first paragraph, trimmed to sixty characters at a word boundary. The moment you type in the title field it becomes yours and is never overwritten.
What happens when I open a file while I already have a note on screen?
A dialog appears first and nothing changes until you answer it. You can drop the file in at the cursor, replace the open note with it, or put it in a separate note, and cancelling leaves everything exactly as it was.

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Content reviewed 2026-09-27.