We built the tool we wished existed while writing our own work.
The shape of academic research hasn’t really changed in twenty years. You read PDFs in one app, take notes in a second, manage citations in a third, write in a fourth, and re-derive the same context every time you switch.
The last few years added a wrinkle — a wave of cloud-based AI that summarises, drafts and re-words on your behalf. The new tools are fast, but they trade something away: the slow, deliberate part of research where the actual thinking happens, and the privacy of the unfinished thoughts you needed to put somewhere safe to think them through.
note.md was built as the opposite trade. One window for reading, annotating, citing and writing. AI that runs entirely on your Mac, helping you search and organise what you’veread — not generating prose for you. A tool that takes the friction out of the mechanical work and leaves the thinking where it belongs.
Four principles, kept short on purpose.
Local-first, by default
Your notes, your sources, your indexes, and every AI feature live on your machine. Nothing about your work needs to leave it.
AI as a librarian, not a ghostwriter
Surfacing the passage you read three months ago is useful. Writing the sentence for you isn’t. We draw the line on purpose.
Plain markdown, no lock-in
Everything is stored as markdown files you fully own. If you decide to leave, your data leaves with you in a format that opens in any editor.
Built deliberately
Small team, fewer features, more care per feature. We’d rather ship five things that work the way you expected than fifty that don’t.
Andre Aigner.
Founder & Managing Director
Andre builds note.md and runs ARSoftware from Ergolding, Germany. note.md is the company’s first product — the first of a small set of focused tools for people doing serious knowledge work on a Mac.
Questions, ideas, or feedback? contact@arsoftware.tech
ARSoftware UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
Founded 2025 in Ergolding, Germany. We make focused, local-first software for people who care about the craft of their work.
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