itsnotes

A self-hosted Google Keep alternative. It sticks to the familiar masonry layout but overhauls how you actually navigate and organize a large amount of notes.

Instead of an endless wall of text, the feed is broken down by month markers. There are quick-search panels for colors and tags, a basic folder implementation, and a proper list view. It also handles data import natively, so moving off Keep or importing text files is straightforward.

Features:

• Better navigation: The timeline has month markers to break up the list. There are quick-access panels for colors, tags, saved searches, and a calendar.

• More ways to organize: Basic folders, internal note linking, and the ability to rename color labels to whatever makes sense to you.

• View modes: The standard masonry grid, a stacked view, and a proper dense list view.

• Customization: A heavy settings modal to tweak layouts, page backgrounds, and form behaviors.

• Easy imports: Drop in a Google Takeout .zip to import Keep data, or bulk upload .txt and .md files directly.

• Markdown mirror: Two-way sync between your notes and a folder of .md files. Every note is continuously written out with a metadata header (tags, color, reminders, pin/archive/trash state) and images/attachments alongside, and edits you make to the files in any editor (Obsidian, VS Code) are pulled back into your notes — automatically if you want. The database stays the source of truth: conflicting edits are kept safe in a conflicts/ folder and renames are tracked by note ID, never duplicated. Great for backups, grep, git, or living in Obsidian.

• Quality of life: Built-in note history for revisions, plus automatic metadata fetching for books and movies.

• Optional AI stuff: Hooks for auto-tagging and reminder parsing, plus a built-in MCP server so external AI clients can query your database.