Frequently asked
questions.

Yes. Download it, create notes as local files, and use every editor feature without an account. Signing in adds sync, workspaces, and shared notes.

NoteX does not resell AI. On desktop, add-ons like Claude Code and Codex use your own accounts with those providers. On web, the NoteX AI sidebar is part of the workspace plans.

On desktop they are files on your disk, so nothing happens: they stay yours. From the web workspace you can export everything as Markdown, HTML, or PDF at any time.

Enterprise plans can point the desktop app at a self-hosted, Supabase-compatible server so notes sync inside your infrastructure. See workspaces and servers.

Per workspace and per seat, depending on size and needs. Talk to us and we will put a concrete number on it quickly.

The desktop app deliberately ships none: you install add-ons (Claude Code, Codex, Continue) and bring your own provider account, so your data relationship is with your chosen provider. The web workspace includes NoteX AI with a picker across leading models, including Claude.

No. On web, the sidebar returns proposals with diff previews; you apply or dismiss each one. On desktop, agentic add-ons like Claude Code show their changes as file edits you review, the same way developers review code changes.

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that lets AI assistants use tools. NoteX ships an MCP server with ten tools (search, read, create, update, append, trash), so Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP client can work your knowledge base with a scoped key.

No. NoteX never trains AI on your notes. Desktop add-ons talk directly to your provider under your account and their terms; the web AI processes only what you point it at.

Web features: personas shape how NoteX AI responds (tone, role, expertise), and the prompt library stores reusable prompts with variables that your whole workspace can share.

Both have a role: the desktop app for agentic work on files (Claude Code), the web for collaborative drafting with the sidebar, and the API/MCP for automation. The AI teams use case walks through a full setup.

Deliberately close: pages and blocks as resources, rich-text annotations, cursor pagination, and similar error objects. Where the data models differ, NoteX documents the deviation instead of hiding it.

In the workspace's API Access settings: name it, choose read-only or read/write, optionally scope it to specific pages and set an expiry. The key is shown once and stored hashed.

Only the pages you selected and everything nested under them. Requests outside the scope return a restricted-resource error, and everything is logged.

Any client that speaks the Model Context Protocol: Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and the growing ecosystem. The server is a small Node process configured with your API URL and key.

Only with a read/write key, and page deletion is a soft trash (restorable), not a hard delete. Give agents read-only keys unless writing is the point.

Common patterns: CI writing release notes into the wiki, a research agent reading specs, dashboards pulling structured content, and bots filing meeting summaries. The AI teams page shows full setups.

Text, six heading levels, bulleted and numbered lists, nested to-dos, quotes, callouts (5 colors, custom icons), toggles, code with syntax highlighting, resizable tables with merging, images with resize and captions, video and audio embeds, file attachments, bookmarks, LaTeX equations, table of contents, multi-column layouts, page links, footnotes, emoji, and nine kinds of Mermaid diagrams including mind maps.

Block-level shortcuts do: # for headings, - for bullets, 1. for numbered lists, [] for to-dos, > for quotes, --- for dividers, and triple backticks for code blocks.

Direction is set per block from its first strong character. Arabic blocks flow right-to-left, English blocks left-to-right, in the same note, with no manual switches. Lists, punctuation, and alignment follow the block's direction.

Yes. Equation blocks take LaTeX and render it with a fast math engine, on both surfaces.

Nine Mermaid kinds from the slash menu: flowchart, sequence, Gantt, pie, class, state, entity-relationship, mind map, and generic Mermaid for anything else the language supports. You write text; NoteX renders the picture.

Real-time co-editing with live cursors is the web surface. The desktop app syncs the same workspace and its sidebar updates live across devices, so the two surfaces stay coherent; simultaneous same-block editing is where the web shines.

Yes. Public share links open without an account, at the permission you set (view, comment, or edit), with an optional expiry date. Presence and live updates work on shared pages as well.

Select text, comment, and the thread anchors to that highlighted selection. Threads support replies and resolve, and resolved history is kept rather than deleted.

Version history keeps snapshots you can restore. Combined with trash-and-restore for whole pages, shared editing stays low-stakes.

Yes. A synced block has one source; every page that embeds it shows the current content. Edit once, updated everywhere, on the web surface.

Databases are a web-surface feature today. Pages sync across both surfaces, and desktop users open the web workspace when they need boards and tables.

Table, board (kanban), calendar (month and week), timeline, gallery, and list. Each view saves its own filters, sorts, grouping, and hidden properties.

Relations link rows across databases, like tasks to a project. Rollups then aggregate over the linked rows: count the open tasks, sum the hours, find the latest date. Formulas compute values from other properties.

Yes: filter groups with and/or logic, more than twenty operators, multi-level sorts, and grouping. If you know Notion databases, you already know how this works.

Yes. A database can be a block inside any note, so boards and indexes sit right where the surrounding context is.

No. It is a deep fork: the custom .notex editor replaces the text editor as the main surface, the notes explorer replaces the file tree, IDE chrome is hidden by default, and note-specific systems (icons, sync, templates, Notion import) are built in. The engine underneath is what we keep, because it is excellent.

NoteX installs extensions from Open VSX through a curated, security-first allow-list. The catalog focuses on what makes sense in a notes app: AI assistants like Claude Code and Codex, plus built-ins like the PDF toolbox. Enterprises can approve their own list.

No. NoteX opens into your notes and stays there. The engine's power shows up as speed and reliability, not as complexity you have to manage.

If you want them, the classic File Explorer, Search, and Source Control views can be switched on, which makes NoteX a genuinely great home for engineers who keep notes next to repositories. They are off by default.

Automatically, from Lisan's own update infrastructure, the same protocol VS Code uses. You keep writing; the update installs in the background.

The curated catalog focuses on AI: Claude Code (Anthropic), Codex (OpenAI), and Continue. Built-ins include the PDFX toolbox, Mermaid diagrams, and eight themes. The allow-list grows as add-ons are vetted.

Technically the engine could run most of them, but NoteX ships deny-by-default: only allow-listed extensions install. That is deliberate; a notes app holds sensitive content, and its extension surface should be curated. Organizations can approve additional extensions for their teams.

The open, vendor-neutral marketplace for VS Code-compatible extensions, operated by the Eclipse Foundation. NoteX uses it instead of the proprietary Microsoft marketplace.

No, the extension system is a desktop capability. The web workspace has its own built-in integrations, including NoteX AI and the public API.

No. They install free; you bring your own account with the AI provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, or others). NoteX does not resell or mark up AI.

Yes, that is the point. They render in Windows Explorer, on the desktop, and in open and save dialogs, anywhere Windows draws file icons, on any machine with NoteX installed.

The file opens like any other file and shows a standard icon. The icon data is still inside the note, so it reappears the moment the file meets a machine with NoteX.

It is engineered not to: reads are capped to a small slice of the file, rendering is cached until the note changes, and the extension is hardened so a bad file can never take Explorer down.

Windows today. macOS support (Finder icons and Quick Look) is in the works, built on the same icon-in-the-file format, so notes will carry the same identity across platforms.

Yes. The mechanism, a file that carries its own visual identity and a shell layer that renders it live, is the subject of a patent application by Lisan.

The .notex format is readable JSON: metadata (title, icon, cover, dates) plus content as structured blocks. NoteX also edits .md and .mdx Markdown files natively, so plain-text purists lose nothing.

No. The desktop app is fully functional with local files and no account. Signing in adds sync, multiple workspaces, and shared team notes.

Beside your notes in companion folders, so they ride along with backups and moves rather than hiding in an app database.

Yes, and it works well: notes are small text files that diff meaningfully. Engineers keep wikis next to code this way. See the engineering use case.

Nothing happens to your notes. They are files in your Documents folder; uninstalling the app does not touch them, and Markdown exports open anywhere.

Through Notion's standard OAuth flow (sign in with your browser), or by pasting an integration token if your workspace prefers explicit integrations. NoteX sees only the pages you share with it.

Yes. Pages import with their nesting, sub-pages, and icons preserved, so a six-level wiki lands as a six-level wiki, not a flat pile.

On the web surface, yes: rows, properties, and views arrive as NoteX databases. Desktop imports pages and their content; open the web workspace for database-heavy imports.

Desktop import is one-way (Notion into NoteX), with re-import updating in place. The linked pull-and-push loop with conflict flags is the web surface.

Notion-side sharing permissions and comment threads stay in Notion; they are platform features rather than page content. Everything in the page body converts.

No. PDFX ships inside NoteX Desktop as a built-in extension. Open a PDF and it is there.

No. Every tool runs locally on your machine. That is a deliberate security choice: sensitive documents should not visit a random converter website to get merged.

Yes. Draw, highlight, comment, fill form fields, and place a drawn signature, then save the result as a standard PDF that any reader opens.

The web workspace previews PDF attachments in notes. The full PDFX toolbox with its 40+ tools is part of the desktop app.

There is a repair tool that rebuilds damaged document structures, and a sanitize tool that strips hidden data before you share a file. They handle the common cases; severely corrupted files may still resist.

We avoid competitor benchmark claims. What we can say: in our internal benchmarks NoteX cold-starts to an editable note in under a second on a typical laptop, and local-file operations do not depend on a network at all.

A .notex file is structured text (JSON), like Markdown with metadata. There is no embedded binary container, no revision soup, no megabyte header. Images and attachments are stored beside notes, not inside them.

AI reads documents as tokens, and PDFs and Word files carry heavy formatting overhead plus OCR noise. The same content as a structured note can use up to 50x fewer tokens in our internal benchmarks, which means faster, cheaper, more complete AI answers.

Sync is incremental (unchanged notes never re-download), search indexes locally on desktop, and the editor loads blocks lazily. Thousands of notes stay comfortable.

The web workspace uses optimistic updates and realtime sync so edits feel immediate. The desktop app is still the champion for raw open-and-type latency because there is no network in the loop.

A compatible (Supabase-based) backend your team hosts. Point the desktop app's server setting at it and sign in; notes then sync entirely inside your infrastructure. Enterprise plans include setup guidance.

You keep several servers saved and switch between them; each server has its own account and workspaces. Company and personal notes stay on separate infrastructure this way.

Private notes sync to the server but are visible only to you. Local notes never touch any server at all: they exist on the device, full stop.

Workspace notes belong to the workspace, so the team keeps them. The person's Private and Local notes were never visible to the team in the first place.

The web workspace runs on the Lisan platform. Server choice is the desktop app's capability, which is also where self-hosting matters most: the files and the sync both stay inside your network.

Any MCP client: Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, and your own agents. The MCP server exposes 10 tools (search, read, create, update, append, trash and more). Anything else can use the Notion-style REST API directly with an nx_ key.

Scope its key. nx_ keys are read-only or read/write, can be limited to a single page tree, and can expire. A research agent gets read-only on the workspace; a support bot gets read/write on its own tree and nothing else. Usage logging shows exactly what each key did. See API and MCP.

Structure and size. A .notex or Markdown file is clean, ordered text, and in our internal benchmarks the same content can be up to ~50x smaller than a PDF. Smaller context means the agent reads more of your knowledge per task. Try the context calculator.

No. On web, the AI sidebar proposes edits with a diff preview and you apply them with one click. Agents working over the API write only where their key allows, and every write is logged. On desktop, add-ons like Claude Code show you proposed changes before they land.

NoteX web has an AI sidebar with streaming chat, one-shot actions (summarize, translate, fix grammar, extract action items), autocomplete ghost text, and a shared prompt library with personas, across leading models including Claude. See AI integration.

Yes, on desktop. Notes are plain .notex or Markdown files in real folders, and the note tree can mirror on-disk folders. Keep a docs folder in the repo, edit it in NoteX, and commit it with your normal git flow; the optional Source Control view even brings git into the app.

Yes, on the desktop editor: nine kinds of Mermaid diagrams including flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and mind maps, plus LaTeX math rendered with KaTeX. Both are first-class blocks in the slash menu. See the block editor.

Claude Code installs on desktop as a native add-on from the curated Open VSX catalog and works on your notes as files. It can read the runbook, propose edits, and update pages, with a dedicated agent sessions window for longer jobs. See AI integration.

Yes, through the Notion-style REST API on the NoteX web platform. Create a scoped nx_ key (read/write, limited to one page tree, with expiry if you want) and have the pipeline post release notes or deploy records. Usage is logged per key. See API and MCP.

Yes. NoteX opens as a calm, Notion-style editor; the developer views (File Explorer, Search, Source Control) are off by default. Engineers switch them on, everyone else never sees them.

Each note is Workspace (visible to the team) or Private (only you). Both live in the same sidebar, so drafting privately and publishing to the team is a one-step move, not a copy-paste between tools.

Yes, on NoteX web: live cursors, presence avatars, and instant block sync, plus threaded comments with resolve on pages, blocks, and text selections. See collaboration.

Not very. Connect your Notion account and import pages or the whole workspace, hierarchy and databases included. On web, pages can stay linked with two-way sync during the transition, so the team is never split between tools. See Notion import and sync.

It leaves with you. On desktop, notes are open .notex or Markdown files on your own disk, and bulk export to Markdown is one command. Web content exports as Markdown, HTML, or PDF. See files you own.

Yes, natively. Text direction is set per block, automatically, so Arabic and English mix in one page without manual switches. This matters for bilingual organizations, and it is home ground for Lisan: more than 24 government entities work with Lisan.

In a real folder on your disk (by default ~/Ultra/NoteX), as open JSON .notex files or plain Markdown. You can browse them in Windows Explorer, back them up, or put them in git. See files you own.

Six starters: Meeting Notes, Journal, Project Plan, Weekly Planner, Reading Notes, and Blank. More templates are on the way.

Completely. The Local workspace never syncs anywhere, and the app does not need a connection to open, edit, search, or export. Offline is the default state, not a fallback.

The editor deliberately speaks the same language: blocks, slash commands, databases with views on web. The architecture is the opposite of a clone. Notion is a hosted cloud workspace; NoteX stores notes as open files on your disk, runs a desktop app on the VS Code engine fully offline, takes extensions, and lets you pick your own server.

Yes. Connect your Notion account (OAuth or token), browse your Notion pages inside NoteX, and import single pages or the whole workspace with hierarchy preserved. Desktop import is one-way; on web you can also import databases and re-import updates. See Notion import and sync.

On NoteX web, yes. Imported pages can stay linked two-way: pull updates from Notion, push your NoteX edits back, and get conflict flags when both sides change. That makes a gradual migration realistic instead of a weekend cliff.

On NoteX web, yes: table, board, calendar, timeline, gallery, and list views with 16 property types including relations, rollups, and formulas. The desktop app focuses on notes as files and does not include database views today. Notion databases remain excellent, and we say so plainly. See databases.

NoteX exposes a Notion-style REST API on purpose: if you know Notion's API, you already know NoteX's. Integrations still need their own scoped NoteX keys and a small endpoint switch, but the concepts and shapes will feel familiar. There is also an MCP server for AI agents. See API and MCP.

They share the foundation: your notes are files on your disk, in open formats, usable offline without an account. They diverge above it. Obsidian is Markdown-first, single-player first, and infinitely pluggable. NoteX renders structured blocks, adds team workspaces with real-time web collaboration, curates its extension catalog, and treats AI as a native capability.

NoteX edits .md and .mdx files natively, so the Markdown notes in a vault open and edit directly, and you can also import Markdown into .notex notes. Obsidian-specific plugin syntax will not carry its plugin behavior over. See files you own.

No, and we will not pretend a backlinks panel is the same thing. NoteX offers page links, subpages, cross-note search, and a backlinks panel on web. If the visual graph is central to how you think, that is a genuine reason to pick Obsidian.

Different bargain for different users. Open ecosystems maximize choice and ask each user to judge what to trust. NoteX ships a deny-by-default allow-list with a one-click catalog of vetted add-ons from Open VSX, and teams can extend the list. Less freedom to install anything, more confidence in what is installed. See extensions.

Yes. The desktop app is free, works fully offline with no account, and keeps a Local workspace that never syncs. You get the block editor, templates, per-note Explorer icons, and the PDF toolbox even as a purely personal tool. See NoteX for personal use.

Yes, NoteX is free to start on both surfaces. The desktop app is free to download and works with local files without an account; the web workspace is free to start, and teams with advanced needs can talk to us. Price is not the axis this comparison turns on.

There is no direct OneNote importer today. The practical route is exporting or converting your OneNote content to Markdown or HTML, both of which NoteX imports; typed notes carry over well, while ink and free-floating canvas layouts do not translate to any structured editor cleanly.

No. NoteX is a typed, structured block editor by design. If stylus notes are central to your workflow, OneNote or another ink-first tool is the honest recommendation, and you can keep NoteX for the knowledge you type and keep.

OneNote stores pages inside proprietary notebook containers synced through Microsoft's cloud. NoteX stores every note as its own open file (JSON .notex or plain Markdown) in real folders on your disk, syncing only when and where you choose, including any self-hosted Supabase-compatible server. See files you own and workspaces and servers.

Yes, alongside rather than instead. NoteX exports Markdown and HTML that paste cleanly into Office tools, the desktop app runs on Windows today, and the REST API and MCP server let internal tooling and AI agents work with your notes. See API and MCP.

No. Word is the right tool for documents you ship: contracts, formal letters, print-bound reports. NoteX replaces Word only where Word was the wrong container all along: wikis, specs, journals, meeting notes, and runbooks that live and evolve instead of shipping once.

Yes, via open formats. Export any note as Markdown or self-contained HTML (or bulk-export everything as Markdown), both of which Word and its converters handle cleanly. The note stays the living source of truth; the .docx becomes the shipped copy. See files you own.

Not in the Word sense, and we will not oversell what exists. NoteX web offers version history with page snapshots, threaded comments with resolve, and AI-proposed edits you approve with a diff preview. For formal accept-and-reject redlining on a contract, Word remains the honest recommendation.

AI reads documents as tokens, and a .docx carries heavy container and formatting overhead before the actual words start. In our internal benchmarks, the same content as a structured .notex or Markdown file can use a fraction of the context, up to about 50x smaller than heavyweight formats, which means agents read more of your knowledge, answer faster, and cost less.

No, and that is a real difference in daily life. Word documents usually reach for a template gallery to look finished; NoteX notes are born structured, with headings, callouts, toggles, and tables that look clean by default. Six starter templates exist for common shapes, with more on the way. See the block editor.

They are illustrative, based on our internal benchmarks of typical documents (roughly 4 characters per token for text, with per-page overhead factors for each format). Real counts vary with content, tokenizer, and OCR quality, but the relative gap between formats is robust.

A scanned page is an image. Reading it means OCR output plus layout noise, or vision-model processing, both of which multiply tokens. The same paragraph as plain structured text is an order of magnitude smaller.

Markdown, .notex files, and similar text-first formats where the structure is lightweight markup rather than a binary container. This is the format NoteX stores everything in.

No. Everything runs in your browser with a character-based estimate. For exact counts, run your provider's tokenizer on the final text.

No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser using the HTML your clipboard already carries. Nothing you paste leaves the page.

Headings (H1 to H6), bold, italic, strikethrough, links, images with URLs, bulleted and numbered lists, checklists, tables, block quotes, horizontal rules, inline code, and fenced code blocks with language hints.

Word wraps content in heavy markup, and the converter strips the noise down to structure. If a paste looks wrong, try pasting into the box again (the tool reads the rich flavor of the clipboard, not the plain one).

A rough guide (characters divided by 4) to what the text costs an AI model to read. Markdown is one of the cheapest formats for AI context, which is part of why NoteX is built around text-first files.

Block commands, markdown shortcuts, and formatting keys work on both surfaces. The Editor & app section lists desktop keys; the web workspace has its own equivalents in its command menu.

Press Ctrl+/ in NoteX Desktop for the built-in keyboard shortcuts panel, which always matches your installed version.

Yes, use the print button above (or Ctrl+P) and save as PDF or paper. The filter box is ignored in print.

Within one business day for demo requests and support. Enterprise scoping calls are usually booked within the same week.

Yes, that is our favorite kind of demo. Bring a Notion workspace or a folder of Markdown, and we will import it live and explore it together.

Yes. More than 24 government entities work with Lisan, and NoteX supports self-hosted servers for environments where data location matters.

Lisan (LISAN AI - FZE) is headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and works across the region.

A block is a unit of content the software understands as one thing: a paragraph, heading, to-do, table, code block, or diagram. Pages are built as lists of blocks rather than one continuous text stream, so any block can be moved, nested, or converted to another type without breaking the page.

No. The slash menu covers everything: type / and search for any block type. Markdown shortcuts are an optional accelerator for people who already know the conventions; typing # for a heading or - for a bullet simply inserts the same blocks faster.

A simple table is fine for static comparisons that fit on one screen. When rows keep accumulating over time, or you want to sort, filter, or view the same data as a board or calendar, you have outgrown the table block and want a database with typed properties.

Shallow and hub-based: a home hub linking to one curated hub per area, with actual content pages at most two or three levels deep. Hubs are editorial pages with context, not directory listings. The test is whether a new teammate can reach any critical page from the home hub in under thirty seconds.

Give every important page a named owner and make review visible: a small table or saved database view of critical pages with last-reviewed dates, checked quarterly. Pair it with the meeting-notes flow, where decisions made in meetings get copied into the standing pages they change, so updates happen as a side effect of normal work.

No. Drafts and personal scratchpads belong in private space, and a page should be promoted to the shared wiki only when others can rely on it. In NoteX each note is explicitly Private or Workspace, which makes that promotion a deliberate act rather than an accident.

Local-first software treats the copy on your device as the primary copy: everything works offline, and the network is used for optional sync and collaboration rather than being required for basic function. If the vendor disappears, your notes remain fully usable on your machine.

For prose, lists, and links, yes, and its universality is unmatched. Markdown does not naturally capture databases, typed properties, or per-block metadata, which is why structured tools pair it with a documented JSON format. NoteX uses open JSON .notex files and edits Markdown natively alongside them.

Run the exit audit: bulk-export a test workspace, open the export without the app, and check what survived (hierarchy, links, images, database properties). Then check whether an API exists for continuous programmatic backup, and ask where the authoritative copy lives if your account closes.

Text and basic structure survive well; images usually survive if the export bundles them; databases export their rows but views, formulas, and relations typically need rebuilding; internal links partially break; and permissions, comments, and version history almost never transfer. Paste any decision buried in comments into the page body before migrating.

Use an export format that encodes parent-child structure and an importer that reads it, and verify both with a small pilot branch before committing. Direct API-based imports preserve hierarchy more reliably than file exports; NoteX imports from Notion through Notion's API with hierarchy preserved.

Yes, and for team migrations you usually should, area by area rather than in one weekend. Keep one tool the source of truth per area, freeze migrated areas at the source, and use a live bridge where available: NoteX Web's two-way Notion sync keeps imported pages linked, pulling Notion updates and pushing NoteX edits back with conflict flags.

A token is the chunk of text AI models actually read, roughly three-quarters of an English word. Models have a fixed context window measured in tokens, and most AI services bill by the token, so bloated formats mean the model sees less of your knowledge and you pay more for the privilege.

PDF is a print format: it stores positioned text and layout, not structure. Extracting text back out scrambles tables, interleaves columns, and repeats headers, so the model gets many more tokens carrying much less meaning. In our internal benchmarks, the same content as a .notex or Markdown file uses up to around 50x less AI context than a PDF. Keep PDFs for final, signed artifacts and keep living documents as structured text.

An API is a general door for software: programs request pages, search, or create content through it. MCP is an open standard specifically for AI assistants: an MCP server presents tools (search, read a page, append blocks) that any MCP-capable assistant can discover and call itself, mid-conversation. NoteX provides both, with scoped nx_ keys controlling what each integration can touch.

No. Every block detects its own direction from its first strongly-directional character, as you type. Arabic blocks lay out right-to-left, English blocks left-to-right, in the same note, with no toggle to press.

The paragraph stays RTL because its first strong character is Arabic, and the English fragment renders left-to-right inside it, as the Unicode bidi algorithm intends. The reverse holds too: an Arabic quote inside an English paragraph does not flip the paragraph.

Deliberately not. Code blocks always render left-to-right regardless of their content, because code is an LTR notation even when its comments or strings contain Arabic.

Plain, open JSON: the note's content plus its metadata, including the icon, cover, and timestamps, all inside the one file. It opens in any text editor, parses in any language, and stays whole when copied or shared outside NoteX.

The file on disk is the source of truth on desktop. Signing in adds two-way incremental sync across devices and shared workspaces, against Lisan's cloud or any self-hosted Supabase-compatible server you point the app at. A Local workspace that never syncs is always available.

Yes, and it works well: notes are small structured text files, so diffs are readable and history is meaningful. Many engineering teams keep specs and runbooks in the same repository as their code.

A deep fork of Code - OSS, the open-source project VS Code is built from. The block editor replaces the code editor as the main surface, a notes explorer replaces the file tree, and the IDE chrome is hidden by default. The engine underneath is what we keep.

We considered it, and the web version of NoteX proves the editor works in a plain browser shell. The desktop app forked the full engine to inherit its startup speed, process-isolated extension host, update pipeline, and window management, which would have taken years to rebuild well.

It is a real ongoing cost: upstream ships roughly monthly and we merge continuously. In exchange, every merge delivers performance and security work from one of the most active open-source codebases, which we would otherwise have to write ourselves.

A PDF often has to be processed as images or OCR output, and it drags layout artifacts, headers, and page furniture into the context window. Structured text is just the content. In our internal benchmarks the same content as a .notex or Markdown file uses up to roughly 50x less context than a PDF.

With its own scoped credential, never a shared human login. NoteX issues per-agent API keys that can be read-only or read/write, scoped to specific pages, set to expire, and revoked individually, with usage logged per key.

A standard plug. The REST API is for code you write; MCP is how off-the-shelf AI clients such as Claude or Cursor connect without custom integration work. NoteX ships both: a Notion-style REST API and an MCP server with ten tools for searching, reading, and editing your workspace.

Yes. The desktop app is local-first: notes are files on your disk and every editor feature works offline. Sync, shared workspaces, and AI add-ons need a connection when you use them.

The desktop app updates itself automatically from Lisan's own update infrastructure (updates.lisan.org), the same way VS Code updates work. You can keep working while updates download.

Not yet. Windows is first, macOS is in the works, and the web app covers every platform in the meantime.

About 140 MB, which includes the full editor engine, the PDF toolbox, and 8 themes. Notes themselves are tiny: kilobytes each.

Yes, the installer supports standard silent flags for managed rollouts. Contact us for the enterprise deployment guide.

NoteX is a knowledge platform with two surfaces: a Windows desktop app built on the VS Code engine (the open-source core of Visual Studio Code) rebuilt for Notion-style notes, and a real-time web workspace at lisan.org/notex. One brand, one account, your choice of surface.

Yes. On desktop, every note is a file on your disk in an open JSON format (or plain Markdown), organized in real folders. You can export everything as Markdown in one command, sync to a server you choose, or keep notes local-only. See files you own.

Three ways: AI add-ons like Claude Code and Codex run natively inside the desktop app; the web app has an AI sidebar that searches your workspace and proposes edits you approve; and the Notion-style REST API plus MCP server let any AI agent read and write your notes with scoped keys. See AI integration.

On desktop, yes. Point NoteX at Lisan Cloud or any self-hosted Supabase-compatible server, save several servers, and switch between them. A Local workspace that never syncs is always available. See workspaces and servers.

Yes. The desktop app is free to download and works with local files without an account. The web workspace is free to start. Teams and enterprises can talk to us about advanced needs.

Yes. Connect your Notion account, browse your pages inside NoteX, and import single pages or the whole workspace with hierarchy preserved. On web, imported pages can stay linked with two-way sync. See Notion import and sync.

The web app runs in any modern browser. The desktop app is Windows today, with macOS in the works. Desktop updates arrive automatically from Lisan's own update infrastructure.

Both. Stops 1 to 5, 7, and 8 center on the desktop app; databases, real-time collaboration, and two-way Notion sync are web-surface features, and the API serves both. Each stop links to a page that spells out the details.

No, they are recreations of the product's surfaces with illustrative sample data (the fictional Atlas Labs workspace), kept faithful to how the real app is laid out.

Download the desktop app free and write a note, or open the web workspace in your browser. Both paths are on the download page.