FuryNotes
A notepad without the "where do I even save this?" question.
// About
A notepad for Windows with no "where do I save this?" question. A note becomes a real file on disk the moment you create it, and writes itself from then on. There is no "save changes?" dialog in the program — and no format of its own, no account and no cloud either: your notes sit as ordinary text files in a folder you chose.
There is nothing to save
The file exists before the first letter does. After that the text reaches it half a second after you stop typing, and again when you leave the window, when you close the program, and when Windows shuts down. There is no Save button and there will not be one: there is nothing to save, it is already saved.
Notes are just files
Ordinary .md and .txt in ordinary folders. Explorer shows them; Notepad, Obsidian, GitHub and your phone open them. Move the folder to another disk or another computer and everything moves with it. Uninstall the program and the notes stay, because they never belonged to it in the first place.
The formatting shows, the marks do not
Markdown, written into the text of the note itself — the same dialect Windows 11 Notepad writes. But the stars and hashes are hidden: bold looks bold, a heading looks like a heading, and a link shows only its words. What stays in the file is plain text, byte for byte what you see on screen. Bold, italic, strikethrough, quote, monospace, six heading levels, numbered and bulleted lists, and today's date on one shortcut.
Links, including to your own disk
A link goes to a web page or to a file or folder on your own computer, and Ctrl+click opens it. Rest the pointer on one and a tooltip says where it points and how to follow it. A file inside your notes folder is remembered by a relative path, so a note and its files travel together. Before running a program — an .exe, .bat or .lnk — FuryNotes asks first, and that prompt can be switched off.
A tree where things are findable
Folders, a pin that lifts a note to the top of its own folder, a Favourites list at the very top, and hand-made order by dragging rows. A row can be given one of eight colours, and a note one of 51 icons with a neon colour of its own: in a column of similar names the eye finds a shape faster than it reads words. Renaming is a double click, right there in the row.
One search across every note
A single box searches the text of every note and their names at once, answering as you type. Matches on a name come first, on a row of their own. Enter opens the note with the word already highlighted, so you never have to find it a second time by eye.
Version history, the last line of defence
Saving itself takes away the "did I save that?" question, and with it the version you could have gone back to. So the program puts copies of the text aside: before you start changing a note, then at most one every ten minutes, and always the moment a note is deleted. Twenty copies per note are kept, as ordinary text files beside your notes. Right-click any row in the tree, choose History, and every copy is there to read and to restore — copies of deleted notes included. Restoring destroys nothing: what the note says now is kept as another copy first.
A theme built from two colours
You pick a background and an accent; the program works out the rest — panels, borders, hover, selection and the three grades of text. A background lighter than mid-grey turns the whole theme light, with no separate switch. Colours and the font apply to the live window while the settings dialog is still open.
What it does not do
It does not sync and it keeps nothing of yours: no account, no cloud, no network — the program never goes online at all, apart from a "check for a newer version" button that simply opens a page in your browser. It does not encrypt notes or put a password on them. It does not show several notes at once: there are no tabs, one note to a window. It does not watch your files — edit a note in another editor while it is open here and the program will not notice, which is why only one copy of it runs at a time. It has no underline and no hidden text: Markdown has neither, and inventing a mark for them would produce a file only this program could read. It runs on Windows only.
At a glance
- A note is a file on disk from the first second, saved half a second after you stop typing
- Ordinary .md and .txt in ordinary folders — no format of its own, no database
- Markdown in the text with the marks hidden: bold, italic, strikethrough, quote, monospace, six heading levels, lists
- Links to web pages and to files on disk, Ctrl+click, with a prompt before running a program
- Tree: folders, pins, favourites, hand-made order, 8 row colours, 51 icons and 10 neon colours for them
- Search across the text and the names of every note at once, landing on the word found
- Version history: a copy before editing, one every ten minutes, one at deletion — 20 per note, with a restore window
- Deleting goes to the Windows Recycle Bin, not past it
- A theme from two colours, the light one derived; English and Russian interface
- Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit), no installer, no network, no administrator rights
- A 47 Mb archive — unzip and run
// Specs
// Download & versions
Free for personal and commercial use. No registration, no limits, no ads. Every release stays available, so you can always go back to an older build.
Everything since 1.3.0, the last version on this page: 1.3.1, 1.3.2, 1.4.0, 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 were built one after another and arrive here together.
A numbered list keeps its own count.
You have a list of five and want one more after the second. Enter used to give you a second "3.", and every number below it had to be fixed by hand. Now the new item is 3, and the old 3, 4 and 5 become 4, 5 and 6 by themselves.
Taking an item out works the same way. Delete it, backspace it away, cut it with Ctrl+X or clear several lines at once, and the numbers below close up.
A list that starts at 5 still starts at 5. A nested list keeps its own count, and a blank line or plain text ends the list. One Ctrl+Z takes back the new line and the renumbering together. Only the digits change, so the cursor stays where it was.
For now this happens from the keyboard. Pasting or cutting through the right-click menu and dragging text with the mouse leave the numbers alone.
The manual opens from the program: F1.
F1, or the book button on the toolbar between Settings and About, opens the user manual in your browser, in the language of the interface. It is now two pages, English and Russian, built from pictures of the program itself. The numbers on each picture point at the parts, and the list under it says what they do. There is a search box too. The manual sits in the "manual" folder next to FuryNotes.exe, so you can open it or send it on without the program.
A note opens where you left it.
Leave a note half-read, look at another one, come back, and you are on the same line instead of at the end. Anything you had selected is still selected. FuryNotes remembers the place for every note you open while it is running.
Folders from elsewhere, right in the tree.
Documents that live in someone else's folder, such as a project's papers or a shared drive, can now go on the tree without being copied in. Right-click the tree, choose "Connect an external folder…", give it a name, and its .md and .txt files appear as one list you can read and edit in place. FuryNotes writes nothing into that folder.
"What to show from this folder…" lists everything in it with a tick box, so you can clear them all and tick the few you need. A single unwanted file is quicker to drop from the tree with "Hide from this folder". Anything that lands in the folder later shows up by itself. Ctrl+F finds these documents too, and earlier copies of their text are kept in your own notes folder.
Read the folder again: F5.
Drop a .md or .txt file into the notes folder from Explorer, from a download or from another program, and the ring button at the end of the top row (or F5) brings it into the tree. It also re-reads the open note if its text was changed from outside. Whenever you switch back to FuryNotes from another program, the tree is re-read by itself.
The date comes with the time, and with a button.
Ctrl+Shift+D now writes the date and the time, to the second: 2026-09-27 14:05:31. Two entries made on the same day no longer look like one. The calendar button at the end of the second toolbar row does the same thing with the mouse.
Nearly all of this release grew out of one message. Someone built a note full of links to files on their own disk, ran into a few rough edges, and wrote in about them. Here is what came of it.
The program keeps earlier versions of your text.
A note here saves itself, so there is never a "did I save that?". For the same reason there was never an unsaved version to fall back on either: delete a paragraph, look away for a second, and it is gone from the file; close the program and the undo stack goes with it. FuryNotes now quietly puts copies of the text aside.
When a copy is taken: — before you start changing a note. The first keystroke after you open it is the last moment the old text exists anywhere, so that is when the copy is made. Merely opening a note and reading it copies nothing — otherwise one pass through the library would leave a copy of everything you had glanced at; — while you write — at most one copy every ten minutes; — the moment a note is deleted, whatever the clock says. Delete a folder and every note inside it is copied.
Getting one back: right-click any note or folder in the tree → "History…". On the left is every note that has copies kept, deleted ones included — they are marked, and they come back exactly the same way. On the right are its copies by date and the text of whichever you pick, so you can be sure you are taking the right one. "Restore this copy" writes it back into the note.
Restoring destroys nothing. What the note says right now is kept as another copy first, so a restore can itself be undone. A note that is gone altogether is written back where it used to live.
The copies are ordinary text files — no database, no format of our own. They sit in a ".furynotes-history" folder beside your notes and mirror them: "Work\ideas.md" has its copies in ".furynotes-history\Work\ideas.md\", one file per copy, named by the date and time. Explorer and Notepad open them; FuryNotes is not needed to read them. Same rule as the notes themselves being plain .md files: a lifebelt only one program can open is a poor lifebelt.
Twenty copies of each note are kept, and older ones drop off as new ones arrive. A copy identical to the previous one is never written — change nothing and nothing is put aside. A renamed or moved note takes its copies with it.
This does not replace the Recycle Bin. Deleting still sends the file itself to the Windows Recycle Bin, and that is the first place to look. The copies are for the day the Bin has been emptied.
All of it can be switched off: settings → "Keep earlier copies of the text". It is on as the program ships, because a safety net nobody switched on is not a safety net.
Search finds a note by its name, not only by its text.
Ctrl+F now matches what a note is called as well. Those matches come first, on a row of their own: the name itself is highlighted, and a line of the note is shown underneath for context. Enter opens it at the top and highlights nothing — what matched was not a word inside the note but what the note is called.
There is nothing to switch: names and text are always searched together. A note still on its date-stamped filename is called by its first line, in the tree and in the search alike, so looking for that finds it either way.
A disagreement was fixed on the way. The search used to label a result with the note's first line even when the note had been given a name — a note called "Shopping" read as "Shopping" in the tree and as its first line in the search. Both lists now call it the same thing.
Renaming, with a double click.
Double-click a note and its name opens for editing right there in the row. Enter keeps the new name, Esc leaves it as it was. F2 and right-click → "Rename" do the same thing, for a folder as well: a folder was already edited in its row while a note needed a separate little window, which made the commoner of the two the slower one.
Double-clicking a folder still opens and closes it — that gesture is taken there and stays as it was. Rename a folder with F2 or the menu.
A rename still carries the pin, favourite, colour and icon over to the new name — and now the kept copies of the text as well.
A link says how to open it.
A link opens on Ctrl+click. It always did, but there was nowhere to learn that: the address is hidden, so on screen a link is just a coloured word. The person who built a page of local links concluded they simply did not work.
Now: rest the pointer on a link and a tooltip shows where it points and reminds you about Ctrl+click. Or right-click it — "Open link" is the first thing on the menu, above Cut.
Fixed: stars inside a link.
Ctrl+B on a word inside a link wrote two pairs of stars, and they stayed there in the middle of the line — the word never came out bold. And if you started removing them by hand it was easy to catch the closing bracket, at which point the link stopped being a link and its address showed up in plain sight.
The cause was that a link swallowed its own label whole, so formatting inside it was not recognised at all. It is now: Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I and Ctrl+Shift+X work on a link's words like anywhere else, and the stars hide themselves as usual. The address is still protected — underscores and stars inside a path do not format anything.
Smaller things.
Renaming a folder no longer breaks Favourites for the notes inside it. Before, those shortcuts pointed at nothing afterwards and quietly dropped off the list.
The manual (docs\manual) has been updated: a new "Note history" section, additions to "Links", "Search" and "Renaming", and a 1.3.0 card in "What's new".
Icons for notes.
A note can be given a picture, and it stands in front of its name in the tree. Fifty-odd to choose from: an aeroplane, books, a guitar, a lightbulb, a rocket, a heart, smileys, music notes, a calculator and so on. The point is simple — in a column of similar names the eye finds a shape faster than it reads words. Right-click a note → "Icon", then the grid; one click and it is there. "No icon" in the same menu takes it off. The icon belongs to the note: rename it or move it to another folder and the icon goes along, the way a colour and a pin already do. It also travels to another computer — only the icon's name is kept beside the note, and the picture itself is inside the program at both ends.
A colour of its own for each icon.
Under the grid are ten neon colours. The one you pick paints that icon, not all of them, so you can tell things apart: work in blue, home in green, urgent in red. "Default colour" puts it back. The colour knows about the theme. What is stored is really the hue, and how light to draw it is worked out again for the background in use. That is why the same note looks right on the dark theme and on the light one — a vivid yellow-green that glows on black would otherwise simply vanish on white.
Neon and a glow, if you want them.
Two tick-boxes in the settings. "Neon note icons" paints every icon that has no colour of its own in your accent colour. "with a glow" lights a halo around them — the neon outline itself. Both are off as the program ships: this is a taste, not the way the program has to look. The glow is drawn into the empty margins around the icon, so not one name in the tree moves by a single pixel.
Back and forward, like a browser.
Two arrows on the toolbar, and Alt+← / Alt+→, walk the notes you have already opened. The side buttons on your mouse do the same. The trail follows the notes rather than the files: a note that has since been deleted is not a dead end — that step is skipped and the next one taken — and a renamed note keeps its place in the chain. An arrow with nowhere to go is drawn faded, so you can see at a glance whether there is anything behind you.
You can see which note is open.
A caret now stands in front of its row and its name is a shade brighter than the rest. Before this, coming back to the program meant working out where you had left off. A pinned note keeps its bookmark at the same time — the marks no longer push each other out.
Two gestures on a folder instead of one.
The folder's icon opens and closes it, the name only selects it, and a double click on the name opens it. Before, a click anywhere on the row toggled the folder, so it could not be chosen as the place for a new note without flapping open on the way. Two vertical stripes down a selected row went at the same time: one was ours, the other was Windows painting its own accent colour, which answered to nothing in the theme.
A new manual, one for everything.
Instead of a stack of per-version documents there is now a single page: docs/manual. English and Russian switch with a button, and it has contents down the side and a search across the text. A "What's new" section carries a card per version, so a minute is enough to see what has appeared since you last updated. And the formatting section opens with a cheat sheet: one picture showing every kind of formatting at once, where each line names the keys that made it.
Smaller fixes.
Toolbar buttons that cannot be used now look switched off — before this, a "Back" with nowhere to go was as bright as a working one.
Row colours in the note tree. Drag rows: the order is yours. Formats now stack on one word. A star is just a star. Smaller fixes.
Pin mode bugfix
Pin, minor fix, update button
turn any word into a shortcut to a local file, Making web links is simpler too, launching one copy app.
base stable