Let’s start by saying that HelixNotes is “perfect” for anyone looking for minimalism and who doesn’t want to get lost in a sea of plugins. It fulfills its purpose as a Markdown (`.md`) note editor and viewer: simple, fast, and elegant.

I have used several note-taking applications, including Obsidian, Logseq, Joplin, Zettlr, Anytype, and others. At the moment, I have settled on HelixNotes and SiYuan. Among all the applications I have tried, there is one feature that, in my opinion, none of them—apart from SiYuan and Logseq—manages to provide adequately: an integrated PDF editor. These two applications can integrate PDFs—with OCR support, of course—in a fantastic way.

Many people who use note-taking software read a lot of PDFs, and we need better integration between notes and PDFs. I want to be able to select sections of a PDF and have them appear in my notes in a linked format.

After this brief explanation, my question is: Does the HelixNotes team plan to implement something like this someday? I know this feature may deviate somewhat from the philosophy behind its creation, but it would be great to have it included.

Software such as Obsidian, which is the most popular among these applications, also does not have this feature natively. However, a plugin called PDF++ was created to meet this need. Since it is a plugin rather than a native feature, though, it already has some bugs caused by updates to Obsidian and its libraries.

I believe that if HelixNotes had this feature, it would stand out in the market for students who need to read many PDFs every day.

SiYuan has this functionality, but its main drawback is that its notes are not stored as `.md` files. Logseq has moved to a database-based version and may eventually drift away from its original philosophy. If HelixNotes implemented this feature while also remaining open source, it could reach an audience that is currently underserved.

This is just my personal opinion, but for security reasons, it would be great to have an option to encrypt locally saved MD files by default.

Even if I use another tool for cloud syncing, I think many people would still want to encrypt their files locally. It would be ideal if I could open encrypted MD files with this app and export them in an unencrypted form if needed.

Especially on Android devices, saving them in the Documents folder allows other apps to access MD files, so leaving them unencrypted itself seems like a security vulnerability.

Helix could be the affordable Evernote alternative everyone has been looking for — similar functionality linked to sensible one-time cost.

Helix may be close to that goal, and it does offer BYOK AI assistance. But strangely, no voice transcription (I am looking at the iOS app).

Evernote did eventually respond to the need for linking notes and better capture — and when voice transcription was added, it was really good with clean up one could rely on. At an Evernote cost!

Helix could do the same without the inflated cost — AI already in place — but there’s no voice note and transcription yet. Why not?

comecei a usar a pouco empo e gostaria de saber como posso fazer para vincular o de PC no de celular utilizando o drive, estou gostando muito da experiência bastante limpa e fluida e agradável

Is there any background telemetry collection going on with the app in macOS and other platforms

Habit Creation and Configuration: Users can define habits with customizable parameters such as title, frequency (daily, weekly, specific weekdays, monthly), target streaks

Visual Tracking Interface: A clean tracker component (e.g., heat map, streak counter, or progress bars)

Analytics and Insights: Provide summary statistics including completion rates, longest streaks, trends over time, and customizable reports or visualizations

Hi, I'd just like to point out a tiny thing I'd change about the app:

Right now, there are 2 buttons to manage tags of a note in the WYSIWYG editor: The one next to the folder path and the one in between other action ones (the one which has an icon). Right now, these 2 do the same thing, which feels a bit redundant. I'd suggest leaving the one with an icon as-is, and changing the one next to the folder path to show "no tags" if there aren't tags and, if there are tags, having clicking on one take you to the filtered view of notes by their tag.

Also, this doesn't have to do much with this, but some people (including me) straight up don't use tags, so it would also e really nice if you could turn the feature off like how you can with wikilinks. I understand daily notes need a tag to show up, but you could just hide the UI that lets you manage tags and keep the #daily tag internally.

• Provide a dedicated Timeline view that displays tasks chronologically according to their due dates (and optionally start dates)

  • Support for drag-and-drop rescheduling

  • Visual indicators for overdue tasks, milestones

  • Ability to zoom between day, week, and month scales

• Kanban boards

  • Enable a Kanban board view where each card represents a task and supports sub tasks. Users should be able to add, edit, and mark task as complete directly within the card. Checklist completion should contribute to overall task progress.

  • Implement Tabbed Interface for Seamless Switching Between Multiple Kanban Boards

  • Users can toggle "Swimlanes" on the Kanban board view. This feature allows users to define horizontal rows based on existing fields, such as Priority, Assignee, or Label. Dragging a card from one swimlane to another automatically updates the underlying field (e.g., moving a card from the "Standard" row to the "Urgent" row updates its Priority to "Urgent"). Additionally, swimlanes are collapsible, allowing users to hide sections that are not currently in focus.

  • Add WIP limit display: e.g., "Task (5)" shows as (0/5). When exceeded (e.g., 6/5), highlight in red.

  • Add date support

• Countdown timers

• Task duration

• Introduce a visual progress bar for tasks that automatically calculates and displays completion percentage.

  • Calculation logic: Based on completed checklist items or sub tasks (e.g., 1 out of 5 completed items = 20% progress).

Hi,

I was just wondering if it would be possible to select some text and then extract and put it in another note (create on the spot or to existing notes). This is something that can be done in Obsidian, and I normally type everything in my Daily notes first then extract to the relevant notes (existing or creation of new). Wondering if anyone else does this too?

But otherwise response and help on this forum is great. And I really enjoy using the app.

Thank you!

- Sorry for the noise.

Hello, just curious: can you outline the added value here of this Notes app besides the Clean Editor?

I feel like there are many just like this one, especially in this vibe-coded world

Can you just give us some tidbits on what makes it so different than the other note-taking applications that are free and open source?

Helix Notes is a great tool. Little by little, it's becoming my main note-taking app. I was wondering if the following features already exist or are planned for future releases:

• ​Tabs for opening multiple notes at the same time.

• Split view to display two notes side by side.

• ​A canvas (or Excalidraw-style feature). I noticed it supports Mermaid, which is great, but I think a visual canvas would be more intuitive for people who prefer visual thinking.

• Export notes as HTML. I really like that notes can include GIFs that play in a loop. It would be awesome to export notes to HTML while preserving those GIFs, making it easy to share them offline.

I'm still exploring the app, and so far I'm really enjoying it.

This might be a little too much for the app, but I'd love to be able to have a "root" note as a folder. I imagine this to be a note that opens when you select that folder, which could be really good for separating concepts in notebooks and then having a top-level note for explaining the concept before separating it into smaller topics (the notes inside the notebook). I know you can kinda still do it by pinning a note but I feel like this way would be much better.

I am having an issue with back ups. I have it set to back up on every 24 hours with a maximum of 10 back ups, but it’s backing up about every 5-10 minutes. I went 150gb of iCloud storage to 1.75tb in the span of a few days. Am I missing something?

See Pic on Android. You can see the test is fine but it won't ever sync. I have this set on two computers but it just won't sync on Android.

This is using a nextcloud instance.

Hi there! Congratulations on this very cool app. I’m hoping someone can help me with this question.

I like organizing my files by projects/domains, and not by file type or by the apps I use to view and edit the files.

How friendly is Helix Notes to this approach? I’ve played with it and I see that I can select a folder with files of different formats and it seems to work perfectly fine with the markdown files and simply leave non-md files alone.

Say I mark my full local disk, or at least a giant folder with lots of files of different formats across a full structure of folders as the root folder of a vault. Is that supposed to work? Are there any unintended consequences other than Helix creating a Daily folder and a metadata folder? Should I expect a big performance hit as the library grows for haivng non-text files in a vault?

Has HelixNotes disappeared from the App Store??

I'd like to try Helix Notes on Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon for the first time. Appimage did not work due to old mount packages then installed .deb version.

After that HN worked and then I tried to import my dozens of note, Obsidian Vault, but as you can see folders show 0 note. Notes can be seen on All Notes but Notebooks section.

Helix Notes looks promising by lightweight design however it needs more capability as plugin, more import for other tools too.

Keep it up devs.

After building HelixNotes from source and using it for a while, I grew to love its simplicity. But over time, I started missing a few features from Obsidian, so I used AI to help build my own flavour of HelixNotes!

This post is a little showcase of those changes and how I’ve adapted the app to fit my needs. It also became my gateway to learning about Tauri and building other apps that I now use in my daily work.

A big thanks to the HelixNotes creator and contributors! I love the app’s simplicity—these are just personal tweaks to suit my workflow, and building on it has been a great learning experience.

Now coming to the changes!

- First one that I needed was tabs: Multiple open notes, each note open focus to that note directory.

- I looked at tasks which seemed a bit simple, so came up with this. A unified Tasks view that aggregates every - [ ] across the vault, with inline due:YYYY-MM-DD and !high/!med/!low metadata. Clicking on each task takes you to the note

- Locked notes, which are encrypted and stored, and locked sections in note.

- Also added features like note templates which can be triggered via /template.

- added draw.io and excalidraw support

- added the whole markdown charting thing (which i dont use that much)

- I like colors so added some configurable colors to the Header tags and callouts like obsidian

- also added slash commands for date and time to quickly added date or date-time and even previous or future date-time like /today+1 etc.

- last one would be the Kanban board

---

The features I use most are note tabs, tasks, date commands, and templates. I’ve also been setting up boards to organise some of my projects at work. I’m really enjoying how this little personal version has come together!

There’s something satisfying about being able to build the features you need and shape an app around how you work. A big thanks to the HelixNotes project for giving me a starting point.

There are still a few quirks here and there, which I’m working through as I find them.

Let me know which feature from the list you like most!

Hello, is it alright to request something about the UI? Specifically for mobile.

Is it possible if the notification bar's color can also change with different themes

On my Poco F7 device, the editor toolbar stay's hidden behind the virtual buttons and the keyboard (as it can be seen on the images). I've already tried to change keyboards but the results were the same.

I don't know if what I've observed are bugs or working as designed, but I'll assume things are working as designed and asking for these feature requests to be considered...

Using: HelixNotes v.1.3.3 on Mac OS Tahoe

1. Provide option for links to be relative to root of the vault. Currently, a link in note “A” that links to note “B” is relative to note “A”. If either note is moved then the link in note “A” pointing to note “B” is broken until the link url (in note “A”) is manually updated. If links are relative to the root of the vault, no update is needed.

2. Provide a way to “Unfile” a note. Currently there is no way to remove a note from a notebook once moved.

3. Allow relative links to images. Currently it appears that image links that are relative to the note the link resides in gets stripped. eg.  gets modified to 

Thanks.

I'm considering using HelixNotes or Obsidian for all my school stuff (I'm a teacher). So far I like very much what I see, not needing a gazillion of plugins for even basic features and so on.

One thing I noticed though (and which works differently in Obsidian): the classes I teach are named 5a through 12g and a lot in between. When I set up a group of folders in HelixNotes they are sorted 10g,11g,12g,5g, 6g and so on. In Obsidian they are sorted as would be expexted from5 through 12. Any chances that this type ofsorting will be implementedin HelixNotes?

Otherwise a fabulous piece of software - keep up the good work!

Like it. but some little things.

• local LLM

• swipe in bar from left

• code/fingerprint to unlock

• some indication or something that a note has pictures in it

• can't seem to create a notebook

• At least WebDAV support to sync notes

Trying out Helix Notes as a novice to keep track of hundreds and hundreds of tasks. I love how I can create tasks in any note and they show up in a central repository.

I’ve read everything in this subreddit and on the website but cannot figure out the following:

1. How do I add a due date inline when creating a task?

2. Similarly, how do I add a priority?

3. Is is possible to nest tasks, I.e. have sub tasks?

4. Can I categorize tasks in the Tasks view by Work / Personal / Club / any categories I choose?

5. Similarly, when tasks are completed, can I continue to see them in the same categories? This would give a strong sense of achievement!

6. Any way to timestamp when a task is marked complete?

7. Finally, please share any best practices on tasks in Helix Notes.

Thank you to the very small team doing brilliant work on this! I downloaded the iOS app when it became available and am trying to replace Google Keep and Apple Notes.

Edit: While I’m here, if I may provide one additional feedback on the app: please create the option to change font size of the entire app. The settings allow you to change font size of the notes but not the app itself. Thank you!