Getting started with OriginText

OriginText is a local-first markdown workspace. Everything you write is stored on your own device first, encrypted at rest, and works without an account or an internet connection. This guide walks you through the basics so you can be productive in a few minutes.

Create your first note

Open OriginText and create a new note from the explorer on the left. Notes are plain markdown, so you can use headings, lists, code blocks, and tables — anything the markdown spec supports. The editor saves continuously to on-device storage as you type, so there is no save button to remember and nothing is uploaded anywhere by default.

Link ideas with wikilinks

Type [[ anywhere in a note to link to another note by name. Wikilinks are how you turn a pile of separate notes into a connected web of ideas. If the target note does not exist yet, following the link creates it for you. Every link is also tracked in reverse, so each note shows its backlinks — the other notes that point to it — which makes it easy to rediscover related thinking.

See the graph

As you add wikilinks, OriginText builds a live knowledge graph from them. Each note is a node and each link is an edge, so you can step back and see the shape of your work, spot clusters of related notes, and find orphans that nothing links to yet. The graph updates as you write — it is a view of your real links, not a separate thing to maintain.

Work offline

OriginText is an installable progressive web app, so it keeps working with no connection — on a plane, on the subway, or anywhere the network drops. When you want your notes on more than one device, you can turn on optional end-to-end encrypted sync: your encryption keys are derived on your device and never leave it, so the sync servers only ever see ciphertext. Local-first by default, private always.