Most notes did their job the second they were typed and are meant to evaporate. A few turn out to be the work. A notebook should be honest about both — and never make you file anything to find out which is which.
Notes apps are beautiful and inert. You capture, you tag, you build a folder structure, and the notebook slowly becomes a second job — a place with an unread count and a nagging sense of things unfiled.
Task apps go the other way: to write something down you must first know what it is. Is this a task? A project? Whose? Due when? Half the useful thoughts you have don't survive that interrogation, so they go in your head instead and stay there.
Capture has to be free. Deciding what it was can happen later, or never.
The Cockpit, a project, a call, $ from any screen, or your phone. Type # mid-sentence to send it to a project — don't, and it's a Scratchpad note.
Standard →Highlight a sentence — not just a whole line — and it becomes a task, a ticket, a document or a whole project. The text stays in the note.
Standard →62 characters of Lora, sentence-level focus, typewriter scrolling, three papers. No font picker, no live word count, no daily goal.
Standard →Every invoice line, task and ticket keeps a link home — and a dead end goes gray and stays clickable rather than vanishing.
Standard →That's the whole argument for a notebook that lives inside the work rather than beside it. No search. Not tags. A permanent, two-way thread from the invoice back to the room it came out of.
And it runs the other way too: a note you wrote first can be attached to a task that already exists.
Keep it. It's probably better at writing than this is, and I'm not asking you to migrate a decade of notes into my software — that's a weekend you'll resent.
What it can't do is turn a sentence into a billable line and remember the connection. So use this for the notes that touch the work — the call, the kickoff, the thing you promised — and keep the other one for everything else. Nothing here needs to be your only notebook to be useful.
No folders, no tags, no notebooks-within-notebooks. One pile, six lenses over it, and a search box that reaches everything including the archive.
No unread count, no “12 unfiled”, no weekly digest of loose notes, and old notes never fade or turn amber. A stream, never a queue.
One copy writes rich text and plain text at once, so a draft pastes into Outlook or Word as formatted text — carrying none of my styling, inheriting all of theirs.
Yes, by default and permanently until you say otherwise. Sharing one to a project's log is a single deliberate act, it's reversible, and unsharing tells nobody. Shared-by-default would quietly make you a worse writer.
After ninety quiet days a Scratchpad note leaves the default view and stays fully searchable. Never deleted, never prompted about. Pinned notes, project notes, meeting notes and anything that became something never age out at all.
Yes, and they render inline in the flow of the writing. The file lives in Files like any other, so the storage number stays honest — and a pasted screenshot can become a ticket in one action.
Yes, and it's the stored format — so your notes are plain text files with a future, and the export is exactly what you wrote. Headings, lists, checkboxes, links, code, quotes.
That's the test. If it's still findable in three weeks without you having organized anything, this notebook works the way I claim it does.
This is the short version of the site, cut down to what reads well on a small screen. The full thing — every instrument explained, the pricing configurator, the whole story — lives on the desktop site. So does the app: Cloudbase is meant to be worked from a real screen, at a desk, with your hands on it.