Note kinds

Most notes in Smritsavant are free-form rich documents. But a note can also be a kind — a structure with its own view and behavior. Twelve ship today:

Rich	The default. A written document.
Board	Columns and cards, for anything with stages.
Tracker	Numbers you log, and what they do over time.
Journal	The day’s writing, and a morning brief.
Feed	Sources you subscribed to, newest first.
Album	Photos together, with captions you can search.
Calendar	Your days, months and year at a glance.
World clock	Here and up to three other places, side by side.
Weather	A place’s forecast, at a glance.
Topic	Follow a subject, not a publisher.
Spending	Money in, money out, and where it went.
Markets	Prices you watch, from sources you chose.

A kind changes how the note renders and what it does; it’s still a note underneath — searchable, linkable, exportable like everything else. Make one from the + in the top bar, or by right-clicking empty canvas.

A note’s kind is set when you create it and doesn’t change afterwards. If you want a board inside something you’re writing, insert one — see below.

Boards

A board note renders as columns and cards. Drag cards between columns, and the structure is the note — no plugin, no separate app. Cards can carry a due date, and a board that has something overdue says so from the dock without being opened.

A board can also live inside a written note: type /board in any document to drop one between your paragraphs. That’s a different thing from a board note — it travels with the text around it — and it’s usually what you want when the board is part of a project rather than the whole of it.

Trackers

A tracker note is for things you log: entries accumulate through logging widgets into a history you can scan and search. Entries are typed in by you — the tracker does not read health data from your phone or watch.

Daily notes

The first time you open a canvas each calendar day, a dated daily note is created for you from the Daily template. You can also create a note dated to any period by double-clicking an empty column in the Chronicle — real back-dating for journaling after the fact.

A journal note is the day’s writing and a morning brief. It used to gather the weather and your agenda as well; those are their own kinds now, so you can have a forecast without keeping a journal, and a journal that isn’t competing with an agenda for the same space.

Subscribed feeds

A feed note follows the sources you give it — one, several, or all of them — and renders their items as a living list: RSS/Atom feeds, GitHub activity, Hacker News, Reddit, YouTube channels, sports scores, and the two social networks with open APIs, Bluesky and Mastodon. Refresh is pull-based on your schedule — the app polls at an interval you control; there is no Smritsavant server in the middle. An AI digest can summarize what’s new since you last looked, using the same local-first chat engine as everything else.

On iPhone and Android, feeds also refresh in the background through the OS scheduler — though on Android that scheduler has a fifteen-minute floor and makes no promise about exact timing, so treat mobile background refresh as “eventually” rather than “on the dot”.

Privacy: how external data gets in

Note kinds are the one place notes contain content you didn’t type, so the privacy architecture treats them strictly:

• Every source is opt-in, per source — nothing subscribes itself.
• Every fetch goes through the same audited, allowlisted network gate as chat and capture, and shows up in the in-app Network Audit.
• A master “Pause all external feeds” switch in Settings drains the schedule in one tap; data already pulled stays readable.

Templates

Eight built-ins — Meeting, Book, Project, Decision, Daily, Recipe, Research, and 1:1 — insertable via /template or the command palette. Save any note as a template with ⌘⇧T. (On Windows and Linux, read ⌘ as Ctrl.)

Mode suggestions

When a note’s content looks like it wants structure — a growing checklist, a recurring log — Smritsavant may passively suggest a kind for it. Suggestions never apply themselves; nothing changes unless you click Apply.