Notes that keep up. A searchable, organized replacement for the 80-tab Notepad workflow: rich notes with inline images and tables, instant full-text search, scheduled backups with safe restore, and optional password protection for the whole database.

Target: .NET Framework 4.8, x64, WPF. Builds on Windows (MSBuild/Visual Studio).

See the help page for workflows and shortcuts, and the technical page for storage, rendering, and security details.

Features

• Rich text with images, tables, lists, checkboxes, spell check, custom fonts, title colors, and optional line numbers
• Search titles, text, and tags as you type, with filters (tag:, group:, title:, after:, before:, created:, in:trash, "phrases") and saved searches; find and replace within a note or across notes
• Nested groups, colored tags, pinned notes, drag-and-drop ordering, templates, and daily notes
• Incoming and outgoing wikilinks, including links to notes that do not exist yet, plus a graph and heading outline
• Paragraph-level code highlighting and language-aware fenced Markdown code blocks
• Native Markdown and HTML preview with Source, Rendered, and adjustable Split views, following the active theme without a browser engine
• Autosave, saved cursor positions, version history, a 30-day trash, and scheduled backups that are checked before they count, warn while failing or overdue, and can be test-restored
• Lock now (Ctrl+Shift+U) closes a password notepad without quitting, and it locks itself when Windows locks or sleeps, or after an idle time you choose
• Quick note: a small capture box from the tray icon, the taskbar jump list or Win+Alt+N, saving to Inbox or today's note
• Import a folder of notes from a KillerNotes export, an Obsidian vault or another Markdown export, with a preview first; KillerNotes also appears under Open with for .md and .txt
• Export all notes as Markdown into a dated folder with pictures, sketches and recordings beside each note and a report of anything not carried
• Multiple SQLite databases with optional SQLCipher AES-256 encryption; password-protected note (.knote) and database (.kndb) sharing
• Offline dictation (Ctrl+M): the speech engine and model download on first use, in the build for your processor, and transcription never leaves the machine; waveform editing, inline audio, and WAV or MP3 export
• Editable inline drawings with SketchPad (F7), floating images and recordings, and the Killculator (F9)
• Keyboard access throughout, contextual menu hints, an F1 keyboard map, and whole-app accessibility scaling
• CLI support for search, editing, sharing, export, templates, groups, tags, recovery, and backups; run KillerNotes --cli --help for commands
• Twenty languages and thirteen themes; eight accents on Dark, Light, Black, and 98SE give 41 looks

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11 (x64)
• No runtime install. Everything needed is inside the EXE (targets .NET Framework 4.8, which ships with every supported Windows release).

Download

WinGet:

winget install killernotes

Chocolatey:

choco install killernotes

• Prebuilt binary: https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerNotes/releases/latest/download/KillerNotes.exe
• Source (GPL3 corresponding source for this release): https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerNotes/releases/latest

Screenshots

A quarterly client review with rich text, a system status table, and nested client groups.

A rack diagram, recording waveform, and offline speech model chooser open together.

Dependencies

Package	Why
Microsoft.Data.Sqlite.Core	ADO.NET SQLite wrapper (managed)
SQLitePCLRaw.provider.e_sqlcipher	Managed P/Invoke shim to the SQLCipher native (static provider - the bundle's dynamic loader breaks under Costura)
SQLCipher + LibTomCrypt (vendored)	The encryption native itself, built from upstream source in third_party/sqlcipher/ after the NuGet lib package line was deprecated
Markdig	Parses Markdown for native preview and rich text conversion (managed, MIT)
PolySharp	net48 polyfills for modern C# syntax (compile-time only)
libFLAC	Lossless storage for embedded recordings (native, BSD-3-Clause)
libmp3lame	MP3 export only, never storage (native, LGPL-2.1 - source shipped with every release)
whisper.cpp (+ ggml)	Offline speech recognition for dictation (native, MIT; downloaded on first use, not bundled)

The three audio natives are cross-compiled from their upstream release tarballs rather than taken from a mirror; the tarballs, hashes and exact build commands are in third_party/audio/README.md. Speech models are downloaded on demand from whisper.cpp's model repository on Hugging Face, and the whisper.cpp engine from this repository's speech-engine-1.9.5 release (hash-pinned in Services/SpeechEngine.cs); neither is bundled. All of it is optional at build time - with third_party/audio/ empty the app still builds and runs, storing recordings as WAV and transcribing with the Windows engine.

Run dotnet list package --vulnerable --include-transitive as part of every release checklist. Single-exe packaging: Costura.Fody embeds every managed dependency and a self-extracting bootstrap carries the native e_sqlcipher.dll, so the release ships as one signed exe.