ANote

Write markdown the way you write in Notion, inside VS Code.

ANote opens a .md as a block editor — headings, tables, checklists, code blocks and images typed as they look, no preview pane to read them in. Save, and it is plain markdown on disk again.

Right-click any .md → Open as Note. VS Code's own markdown editor stays where it is; ANote never takes over every .md in a repo you cloned.

The .note format

For notes markdown can't hold: Excalidraw drawings edited in place, playable video and audio, resizable images, coloured text and table cells, toggle lists, tabs. Anything you drop is written to <note>.note.assets/ beside the note and referenced relatively, so a note and its files move, commit and get deleted as one thing.

Design docs are .note. The README stays .md. Both open in the same editor.

Reading it elsewhere

• Preview to the side — rendered in a webview, following your theme
• Preview in the browser — a copyable link; works over SSH, WSL, containers and Codespaces
• Studio — a notes folder as a full page, notes left and block editor right, in a browser tab
• MCP server — VS Code's agent can list, search, read, create, write, append and edit notes, section by section

The tree, rename, move, delete, tabs and saving are left to VS Code.

Getting started

Open a folder, right-click any .md → Open as Note. For a note of your own: right-click a folder → New Note.

/ opens the block menu. ⌘S / Ctrl+S saves, like any other file.

Commands

All under the ANote category.

Good to know about .md

Underline, toggle lists, tabs, colours and image resizing are removed from the menus over a .md rather than offered and then lost on save. Drawings, video and audio survive — they ride in an HTML comment other markdown readers ignore.

Before typing in someone else's markdown: ANote reads a practical subset, and the first keystroke rewrites the file in its own dialect — hard-wrapped paragraphs come back as one line, reference links are flattened. If a file's round trip is not the same file, ANote says so once, before anything is written. Nothing touches disk until you save.

Configuration

One optional anote.config.json per workspace folder. Every key is optional, and a bad value falls back to the default with a warning.

{
  "notesDir": ".", // where New Note writes, and what the MCP server reads
  "newNote": { "defaultName": "Untitled" },
  "assets": {
    "dir": "anote.assets", // the one folder every note's files go in, under notesDir
    "dirSuffix": ".assets", // legacy: the <note>.note.assets folders, still read
  },
  "preview": {
    "theme": "auto", // auto | light | dark
    "pollMs": 2000, // how often a browser tab asks if the note changed
    "port": 0, // 0 lets the OS pick; a number is a bookmarkable URL
  },
  "studio": { "enabled": true },
  "mcp": { "enabled": true },
}

The browser preview and the studio share one HTTP server bound to loopback only, with origin-checked reads and token-guarded, version-checked writes. Set studio.enabled to false and the writable half is never mounted. Details in docs/design.md.

Development

Requires VS Code 1.101 or later; everything else is bundled.

bun install
bun run build   # then F5, which opens sample/ as the workspace
bun run test

sample/ is a guided demo: start at Welcome.note, then the Tour/ notes. For the design rationale — file format, previews, studio, host↔webview bridge — see docs/design.md.

License

MIT