Desk notes are local markdown files for quick operator memory, investigation scratchpads, and terminal-derived snippets.
A markdown note in the notes subsystem with autosave

A markdown note in the notes subsystem with autosave

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Storage

Notes live under a fixed home:
The directory is created automatically. Notes are ordinary markdown files — edit, back up, or sync them with any external tool.

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Note explorer

The notes subsystem reuses the editor’s explorer, pinned to the notes home (there is no root picker): create, rename, delete, folders, and drag-and-drop organization all work the same way. Open tabs and the active note persist across restarts. New notes name themselves: an untitled note is renamed on save from its first content line — markdown markers stripped, filesystem-hostile characters removed — with automatic -2, -3 deduplication.

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Editing

Notes open in one of three views, switchable from the toolbar every markdown tab shows at its top right, from the tab’s context menu, or with Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+E (editor ⇄ source): the read-only preview (GitHub-flavored tables, KaTeX math, Mermaid diagrams and highlighted code, tracking unsaved edits live), which is where a note opens by default; editor, a Notion-style WYSIWYG markdown editor with a slash menu, block handles, tables, task lists, code blocks and LaTeX; and source (Monaco). The same toolbar zooms the text in steps of ten percent, and Ctrl/Cmd + wheel over the source view moves the same number; the zoom sizes the markdown file it belongs to and leaves every other tab alone. It is remembered by the browser and shared with markdown files in the Files editor. The editor writes markdown back into the same buffer, so autosave, the mtime-guarded save and the conflict banner behave exactly as in source view. Every keystroke reaches the buffer immediately, so an external change to the file while you type raises the usual conflict banner instead of silently overwriting either side; while the note is clean, an external change reloads into the editor at once. The first edit re-serialises the note in the editor’s own style (_ inside words gets escaped, ordered lists are renumbered, tables are re-padded), so the diff after that first keystroke can be larger than the keystroke itself; list markers and rules are kept as -. Blank lines between blocks survive, but an empty paragraph by itself is not preserved on save, as in any markdown editor. The toggle in the notes sidebar header sets the default view for notes you open from then on, cycling preview → editor → source. The choice is remembered by the browser. Before the editor takes over, Desk checks that the note survives a round trip through it. Content the editor cannot represent (YAML front matter, raw HTML blocks) makes the tab fall back to source view with a message naming the note; nothing is rewritten. Ctrl+S / Cmd+S saves from the editor view as it does from Monaco. Git integration is deliberately disabled in the notes variant — notes are a capture surface, not a repository.

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Terminal context

Select text in an agent terminal and choose Create note from the right-click menu: Desk switches to notes, creates a note seeded with the selection, and auto-names it from the content. This keeps useful output, hypotheses, commands, and investigation trails attached to the operator’s workspace without pasting them into an external app.