Your notes. On your machine. Actually yours.
A local-first notebook for students — notes, drawings, mind maps, flashcards and PDFs, stored as ordinary files in folders you control. No account needed, and it works offline.
Version 0.1.1 · 28.8 MB · release notes
Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Free, and free of ads.
macOS and Linux aren’t available yet. Tell us if you need one — it moves them up the list.
Built for the way studying actually goes
Four kinds of note
Just files, in your folders
Works offline
Syncs when you want
If you stop using Terrace, you keep everything
Your notes are not rows in someone else's database. They are files on your disk, in folders you chose, readable without us. Deleting the app leaves your work exactly where it was.
- Open a folder you already filled with PDFs and notes — it reads them in place
- Removing a notebook only unregisters it; your files stay put
- Deletes go to the Recycle Bin, never straight to gone
The notebook does some of the work
Terrace understands what is in your notes, so it can turn them into something you can actually revise from rather than something you merely wrote down once.
- Turn a page into flashcards and a spaced-review queue
- Draw and annotate directly on PDFs and lecture slides
- Add your textbooks and search inside them, by meaning rather than keyword
- Ask about your own notes when you are signed in
Windows will warn you. Here’s why.
We would rather explain this than have you click through it and wonder.
The first time you run the installer, Windows shows “Windows protected your PC”. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
Windows shows that message for any installer not signed with a paid code-signing certificate, and Terrace isn’t signed yet. It is a statement about a certificate we haven’t bought — not about the file. If that isn’t good enough for you, that is a completely reasonable place to stop; we would rather say so plainly than talk you past a security warning.
Updates are a different story. Terrace verifies every update against a cryptographic key built into the app and refuses anything that doesn’t match — so keeping it current never depends on trusting this page.
It installs for your user account only, so it will not ask for administrator permission.