Notes and a journal for GNOME and Android, kept in your Nextcloud.
Notav is a notes app for the GNOME desktop and Android, with an Obsidian-style journal. Your notes stay in your own Nextcloud as plain Markdown files, so the Nextcloud Notes app and Obsidian (through the Nextcloud desktop client) can open the same folder. Notav works from a local copy and syncs while it runs. It is the sibling of Todav, the tasks and calendar app.
Notav is at an early stage: notes, folders, search, sync, more than one account, notes on this device only, the journal, links between notes, favorites, the trash and versions work; tags and links to Todav's tasks are next (see the roadmap).
Notav is developed in my free time. If it keeps your notes in order, you can support its development:
- Notes as Markdown files in a folder of your Nextcloud Files:
Notes/by default, the Nextcloud Notes app's own, or any other; subfolders are folders in Notav too. - Works offline; changes go up when the server is reachable, and changes from other devices come in while the window is open.
- A note edited on two devices at once is never lost: the other version is kept next to it as a conflict copy.
- A Markdown editor that saves as you type; the title is the file name.
- Your folders and notes as a tree, as in Obsidian; search through titles and text, ignoring case and accents.
- Sign-in through GNOME Online Accounts, the browser, or a login name and app password; more than one account, or none: notes kept on this device only.
- Settings synced between your devices.
All of what Notav does, and what it will, is listed in FEATURES.md.
Notav needs GNOME 49 or newer. Download a package from the latest release:
# Flatpak, on any distribution (the GNOME runtime comes from Flathub)
flatpak install --user dev.aperte.Notav.flatpak
# Ubuntu 26.04 and newer
sudo apt install ./notav_<version>_amd64.deb
# Other distributions: the same files to unpack into /
sudo tar -xzf notav-<version>-x86_64.tar.gz -C /On Android (10 and newer), install notav-<version>.apk from the same release. With
Obtainium it updates itself from the releases.
Or build and install Notav from source. Then open Notav, sign in to your Nextcloud and pick the folder your notes are in, or keep your notes on this device only.
Notav speaks English and Polish, and follows your GNOME language. Missing your language? Ask for it in an issue, or translate it yourself (see CONTRIBUTING.md).
Dependencies: Rust (stable), GTK 4.14+, libadwaita 1.8+, GtkSourceView 5, WebKitGTK 6.0,
libsecret, SQLite, blueprint-compiler, glib-compile-resources (GLib) and gettext's msgfmt.
# The app: binary, desktop file and icons in ~/.local
make -C notav/linux installA Flatpak manifest is included too: make -C notav/linux flatpak (needs flatpak-builder). For
Fedora, notav/linux/rpm/notav.spec builds an RPM; COPR builds it with .copr/Makefile, which
also works locally:
make -f .copr/Makefile srpm outdir=$PWD/target/rpm spec=$PWD/notav/linux/rpm/notav.specThe notav command-line tool (cargo run -p notav-cli) syncs and edits notes for debugging.
Every push is checked and packaged by CI; releases are made by the manual Release workflow and listed in the changelog.