Org Note (orgnote) is a GPL-3.0 Zettelkasten note-taking environment for people who keep linked notes in Emacs org-mode and org-roam and want those same notes available in the cloud and through Android, desktop and PWA clients.

What it is

Org Note is a note-taking application built on the Zettelkasten approach, which its README describes as a system of notes that borrows a great deal from Emacs and org-roam, letting a person store notes in the cloud and work with them seamlessly in Emacs. It is not shipped as one artefact but spread across several repositories: orgnote-client holds the official application, orgnote-backend the server side, orgnote-publisher is a CLI NPM binary package for note syncing, orgnote.el is the Emacs package for synchronization, orgnote-extensions lists extensions and themes, orgnote-api is the interface for writing your own plugin, and org-mode-ast provides a TypeScript abstract syntax tree for org mode. The registry records Shell as the language, GPL-3.0 as the licence, and topics covering android, electron, pwa, cross-platform, org-mode, org-roam, pkm, second-brain and zettelkasten, with the official website at org-note.com.

The concrete problem is set out in the introduction. After trying note-taking in Evernote, Notion, Obsidian and similar applications, the author found that most of them "soon enough came to a state of littering", to the point of giving up taking notes of any kind. Org-roam, discovered through Emacs, showed that notes could be taken comfortably and easily without much trouble over structure, but that workflow lived inside the editor. Org Note carries the org-roam model of linked notes out of Emacs and into a synchronized, cross-platform environment, standing in for the general-purpose note applications named above.

Key capabilities

• A Zettelkasten note structure modelled on Emacs org-roam, with notes stored in the cloud rather than only in a local org directory.
• orgnote.el, a dedicated Emacs package for note synchronization, so an existing org-mode setup can exchange notes with the environment.
• orgnote-publisher, a CLI NPM binary package that performs note syncing from the command line.
• An official application distributed from the orgnote-client releases page, with registry topics covering Android, Electron and PWA delivery.
• A plugin and theming layer: extensions and themes are collected in orgnote-extensions, and new plugins are written against the OrgNote API in orgnote-api.
• org-mode-ast, a TypeScript abstract syntax tree for org mode, published as supporting infrastructure for the tooling.

Who uses it and how

• Emacs users who already keep an org-roam Zettelkasten and want the same notes on an Android device or in a browser, synchronizing through orgnote.el.
• Note-takers who abandoned Evernote, Notion or Obsidian because their notes degraded into littering, and who want the lighter linked-note structure the README describes.
• People who prefer a terminal-driven workflow, using the orgnote-publisher CLI binary for syncing.
• Plugin and theme authors who build against the OrgNote API and publish through the extensions list.
• Contributors working on the project itself, who are asked to read the style guide in the wiki first and to bump versions with ./update-version.sh.

Getting started

Download the official application from the orgnote-client releases, or install the orgnote-publisher NPM CLI binary or the orgnote.el Emacs package for synchronization; org-note.com is the hosted entry point, and the wiki carries the details the README leaves out.

How it compares

The facts do not frame Org Note as a replacement for a named list of paid products; the tools it measures itself against in its own introduction are Emacs and org-roam, from which it borrows its ideas, and Evernote, Notion and Obsidian, which it treats as the applications that failed to keep notes structured. Its distinguishing position among them rests on licence and data location: it is GPL-3.0, and notes are described as living in the cloud while staying synchronized with Emacs through the project's own client, backend, CLI package and Emacs package.

When to use it — and when not to

Choose it if org-mode and org-roam are already familiar ground and the missing piece is getting those notes onto a phone or into a browser. Expect to assemble a setup rather than install a single binary, since the client, backend, CLI package and Emacs package are separate repositories, and note that the facts say nothing about the database, storage or mail infrastructure anyone running the backend would have to operate. The README is deliberately spare and defers to the wiki and Discord, so anyone who wants a self-contained graphical note app with no org-mode habit, or who needs documented operating requirements before adopting a backend, should look elsewhere.