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Features

A notebook for people who think with a pen.

Handwriting, Markdown, papers and sync, built natively for iPhone, iPad and Mac. Squill is still in development: this page describes what it is being built to do, and the changelog records what has landed.

Ink

Handwriting that lives in the text.

Built on Apple’s PencilKit, so latency stays at the system floor. Ink has three homes: inline blocks in the flow of a note, full paper pages, and PDFs and images you annotate.

  • Inline ink blocks

    Start writing on a blank line. The block grows with your handwriting, snaps to plain, lined, grid or dot paper, and collapses into a clean embed.

  • Paper and PDFs

    Templates from Cornell to music staff, A4, Letter or infinite pages. Annotate PDFs and keep them editable or export them flattened.

  • A text shadow for every stroke

    Handwriting is recognized on the device and kept beside the ink, so it can be searched, linked and indexed in Spotlight without touching the strokes.

  • Circle to search

    Lasso a phrase you wrote to convert it in place (the original stays as provenance), link it, tag it, or find related notes.

  • Apple Pencil, fully

    Pressure, tilt, hover, double-tap, squeeze and barrel roll where the hardware supports them. Finger scrolls, Pencil draws, if you like.

  • An open stroke format

    Every drawing can be exported as documented JSON (points, pressure, tilt, timing), so other software can read your ink.

Margins

Marginalia that move with the paragraph.

Margin ink is anchored to the block it annotates, not to a position on a page. Rewrite the text above and your arrows, circles and notes follow it. If a paragraph is deleted, its marks wait as a ghost until you re-attach them.

  • Thinking replay

    Scrub a timeline to watch a note being written, text and ink interleaved, at any speed. Export it as a video.

  • Note branches

    Fork a note to try another argument or phrasing, then merge it back or let it go. Works on text and ink.

  • Authorship provenance

    Spans remember whether they were typed, handwritten, pasted, imported or inserted by an AI, and you can export a provenance report.

Vault

Plain Markdown, linked like a mind.

Notes are .md files in a folder: on iPhone and iPad in the Files app or a folder you pick, on the Mac anywhere. Text you didn’t edit is saved byte for byte.

Squill opens plain-Markdown vaults, including ones made with Obsidian. It is not affiliated with Obsidian.

  • Links that hold

    Wikilinks with autocomplete, aliases, heading and block links, backlinks, unlinked mentions, and transclusion. Renames update every link, previewed and undoable.

  • Search with operators

    Full-text search across typed and handwritten text, with path:, tag:, prop:, phrases and regex. Command palette and quick switcher on every device.

  • Graph, canvas, views

    A graph of your vault, JSON Canvas boards you can draw on, and table, board and gallery views over your properties.

Research

Read closely. Cite properly.

For people whose notes are full of papers. Metadata comes from arXiv, Crossref and OpenAlex, only when you turn lookups on, and is cached in your vault.

  • Paper library

    Paste an arXiv ID, URL or DOI, or import a PDF, to create a paper note with authors, venue, abstract and a BibTeX key.

  • Highlights to quotes

    Every highlight or circled passage can become a quote in the paper note with a link back to its page. Colors can mean claim, method or anything you choose.

  • Citations and math

    Pandoc-style [@key] citations, a BibTeX or CSL library inside the vault, bibliographies on export, and first-class LaTeX.

  • Claims and evidence

    Mark a claim as a hypothesis, supported, contested or refuted, link its evidence, and see it flagged when a cited paper gets a new version.

  • Experiment snapshots

    Charts and tables from CSV or JSONL in the vault, and experiment embeds that freeze metrics at the time you linked them.

  • Sealed notes

    Record a note's hash with an OpenTimestamps proof to show when an idea existed.

Sync

Every device, no conflicts, no server of ours.

Each note is a CRDT, so edits made offline on two devices merge instead of overwriting each other. Two devices drawing on the same page both keep every stroke. Edits made by other apps and git are merged too.

  • Sealed end to end

    Updates are encrypted on your device before they go to your private iCloud database or a folder you choose (Syncthing, iCloud Drive, Dropbox).

  • Version history

    Restore any earlier version of a note, read a conflict log, pause sync, pick folders, or re-upload everything from one device.

  • Native everywhere

    iPhone, iPad and Mac, with Shortcuts, widgets, Spotlight, a share extension, Handoff and Quick Look. In English and French.

AI, if you want it

Off until you turn it on.

Use Apple’s on-device models, a local model on the Mac, or your own OpenAI-compatible or Anthropic endpoint with your own key. Before anything goes to a remote model you see exactly what will be sent, and every request is logged on your device.

  • Related notes

    Semantic search and link suggestions from local embeddings, including your handwriting.

  • Agents write by proposal

    A local MCP server and a CLI on the Mac. Agents get read-only access to folders you grant; their edits arrive as diffs you accept or reject.

  • Note text is data

    Your notes are never treated as instructions. Per-folder allowlists and redaction keep private folders private.