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Last month I posted HelixNotes here and some of you asked about mobile. Version 1.2.1 ships with an Android APK. Same codebase, Rust + Tauri 2.0, no separate app. Since last post: Android support, Ollama for local AI, graph view performance improvements, wiki-link navigation, and a bunch of mobile UX polish. Direct APK download from the site. IzzyOnDroid submission in progress. AGPL-3.0, source on Codeberg.

It’s a pretty polished notes app, though couldn’t see that it supports encryption.

Doesn’t look like it

Is it vibecoded?

Looks interesting. Any plans for an iOS version?

AI-assisted, yes.

Definitely, yes. I’m trying to tackle them one by one.

No, notes are plain .md files on your disk. Encryption was never the goal.

Impressive. Thank you. 👍

Assisted in what way?

Would like to see encryption, but I have to respect having a clear goal.

I think it makes sense to handle this at a lower level. After using other notes apps, the thing I want is for it to not have some arbitrary opaque file hierarchy that locks me into it. I want a plain dir of .md files, some resources they link to, and that’s it. If I want disk encryption, there are solutions for that. I can use something like LUKs to encrypt my whole drive, or even just the notes directory.

For android, afaik everything uses disk encryption by default.

The unix philosophy is do one thing really well. We don’t need a note taking app that also handles encryption.

In practice this app competes either StandardNotes and Notesnook. People using those might be interested in switching, but they’ll want encryption.

I’ve not heard of those, but to me this is a competitor to the much more ubiquitous Obsidian. Which works great, and has a whole community of support, but is not open source.

Personally, I don’t need my notes app not be responsible for syncing across devices either. I already have that for other file types (photos, media, etc).

I’m not against these features being added, but this app is young, afaik it’s one person writing it, so I’d rather see their time be spent making the note taking experience as good as it can be.

I also generally wouldn’t trust one person to properly audit the security of the networking and encryption features. If I wanted those features, I’d still give the community time to peruse the codebase.

In what way is this better than LogSeq?

Different tools. LogSeq is outliner tool with a database backend. HelixNotes is a markdown editor (with default WYSIWYG editor) with plain .md files on disk

Does it support LaTeX blocks for math formulas?

Yes, it supports LaTeX math blocks via KaTeX.