NENO is a powerful note-taking app that helps you manage your personal knowledge garden. With NENO, your data belongs to you and you decide where it is stored: NENO is a macOS desktop app that keeps your notes as plain-text files in a folder you choose — on your device, or in a synced folder of your choice.
NENO Editor view in dark mode
NENO Editor view in light mode
- Full data ownership: You pick the folder, NENO writes plain
.subtextfiles into it — no database, no lock-in. - File imports and previews: Paste video, audio, PDF documents, images and code, or any arbitrary file into your note. NENO will show a preview or player where possible.
- Simple modeless markup with Subtext
- Programmable notes: Embed
runblocks of JavaScript directly in any note to query, transform, or aggregate your graph; share helpers between notes via reusablemodmodules - Versioning: NENO automatically manages a Git repository of your notes, so you can go back to any point in time
- Interoperability: NENO works with human-readable plain-text files and implemenents the free and open Subtext Graph Specification
- Powerful full-text search
- Tap-to-link: One click is enough to link one note to another
Download the latest NENO-<version>.dmg from the
releases page, open it and
drag NENO to your Applications folder. Then read the
user manual.
NENO requires macOS on Apple Silicon — the release is an arm64 build,
so it will not run on an Intel Mac. Applications is only a convention: if
you have no admin rights on the machine, keep the app anywhere you like,
such as ~/Desktop, and adjust the paths below to match.
The build is not code-signed, so the first launch needs a detour around Gatekeeper: right-click (or Control-click) the app in Finder and choose Open, then confirm.
If macOS instead claims the app "is damaged and can't be opened", the download picked up a quarantine attribute. Right-click → Open does not get past that one — clear the attribute instead:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/NENO.appNo sudo and no admin rights are needed: the app is yours, wherever you
put it. Every launch after the first one works normally.
NENO is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
The bundled fonts — IBM Plex Mono (© 2017 IBM Corp.) and Mona Sans
(© 2022 The Mona Sans Project Authors) — are third-party Font Software
licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, not under Apache-2.0. See
NOTICE.md for the full third-party notices.