A field journal for everything in your head

The notebook
that files itself.

Jot the thought and close the window. Press reads every note, titles it, tidies it, files it where it belongs — and draws your whole notebook as a living map, so you can see what you know.

Download for Linux See how it works

Free while in beta · Your notes stay on your disk · Bring your own Anthropic key

The Press Atlas — a notebook of 500 notes drawn as a hand-inked archipelago of twelve islands, one per topic
Plate I. A working notebook of five hundred notes — every island a topic, grown from the notes themselves.

Every notes app starts as a fresh page and ends as a junk drawer. Folders you stopped sorting in 2021. Seventy notes named “Untitled”. The thing you know you wrote down, somewhere. The tools remember everything and organize nothing — because organizing was always your job.

Press makes it the notebook’s job.

How it works

Three moves, none of them yours

I

Jot

Hit the capture shortcut anywhere — over a call, mid-job, half a thought. Type it raw and hit enter. No folder to choose, no title to invent, no app to tab into. Paste five things at once and Press splits them into five notes.

The Press quick-capture window floating over the Atlas with a raw, unpunctuated job note typed in
Plate II. Capture, as fast as the thought.
II

Pressed

A clerk works through the queue behind you: it reads the note, gives it a real title, files it into the right place in your structure, straightens the formatting into clean Markdown, fixes typos — cautiously, never your nouns — pulls out the tasks and due dates, and indexes the meaning, not just the words.

It’s a durable queue, not a prayer: quit mid-batch, go offline, come back tomorrow — it picks up where it left off.

A finished note in Press — titled, structured into sections and bullets, with related notes listed at the bottom
Plate III. The same scribble, five seconds later.
III

Charted

Every filed note lands somewhere you can see. Your notebook isn’t a list — it’s an archipelago. Topics become islands; islands grow mountains as they fill; sub-themes gather into coves; new notes wait in the Inbox harbor. You stop searching for where things went, because you watched them arrive.

A focused island in the Press Atlas, with named coves for its sub-themes and the territory's note list open
Plate IV. One territory, focused — its coves are sub-themes the AI found.

The Atlas

Your notebook is a place now

Hierarchies hide; maps show. The Atlas is Press’s home screen — drawn from your real folder tree, repainted as you write. After a week you navigate it the way you navigate your own town: without thinking.

The full Press Atlas at close range — a dozen pastel islands with snow-capped peaks, forests, beaches and inked currents between them
Plate V. The whole notebook in one view.

The rest of the desk

Everything a working notebook owes you

Tasks surface themselves

“Renews 30 June — DO NOT MISS” buried in Tuesday’s note becomes a real task with a real due date, ticked from the panel or the note — they stay in sync.

The Tasks panel listing open tasks extracted from notes, with due dates and an upcoming list

A calendar you didn’t fill in

Every dated thing in your notes lands on a real month view. Export the lot to your phone as .ics in one click.

The Press calendar for June 2026 with extracted deadlines pinned to their dates

Search that understands

Keyword-instant, meaning-aware. Local embeddings mean “heating playing up” finds the boiler notes — even when no words match.

Press search results for 'boiler' showing matched notes with highlighted excerpts

Ask your notebook

The agent searches and reads your actual notes to answer — “when is the van MOT booked?” — and cites where it looked.

The Press agent answering 'When is the van MOT booked?' by citing the exact note and folder it found the answer in

Bring twenty years of mess

Bulk-import OneNote exports, Markdown, plain text. Duplicates are detected, the pipeline is rate-limited and resumable, and every imported note gets the full treatment.

Works offline

Capture, search, tasks, the Atlas — all local, all instant. Cloud steps queue politely and catch up when you’re back.

Trust

An assistant you can audit

An AI that moves your notes around had better keep receipts. Press keeps all of them.

Every action is ledgered

Each AI move is written to an append-only decision log — what moved, where, why, and how confident it was.

Everything undoes

One click reverses any filing decision. Undo a whole cluster run. Conflicts are detected, not steamrolled.

You set the leash

Three autonomy levels — act silently, act and tell you, or propose and wait. Per kind of action, changeable any time.

Corrections teach it

Move a note back and Press learns the preference — your filing rules, injected into every future decision. It never trains on its own guesses.

Your files

Plain files. Your disk. Your key.

Press is local-first the boring, verifiable way: open the folder and there’s your notebook.

Notes
Plain Markdown files with YAML front-matter, in a vault folder you can open, copy, sync, or grep. The files are the truth; the database is just an index.
Writes
Atomic — temp-file, fsync, rename. A crash mid-save costs you nothing.
Deletes
Soft, into a vault-local trash with retention. Migrations back up the database first.
AI
Your own Anthropic API key, stored in the OS keychain, sent only to Anthropic. No middleman server, no account with us — there is no “us” in the data path.
Search
Semantic embeddings computed on your machine. Your notes aren’t uploaded to be understood.
Telemetry
None. Press doesn’t phone home, count you, or watch you write.

If Press disappeared tomorrow, you’d still have a tidy folder of Markdown. That’s the deal.

Pricing

Free notebook. Optional clerk.

The Linux beta is free today — every plan below opens with it.

Free

$0

The local notebook, forever. Capture, search, tasks, calendar, and the Atlas — all on-device. Notes wait in the harbor until a clerk arrives.

Founder price at launch

Press Plus

$8/mo

The AI clerk with zero setup — no API account, no top-ups, no keys. Subscribe, paste the license from your receipt, and the filing starts. Fair-use included usage that's more than you'll write; if you ever hit it, notes simply wait — never a surprise bill.

Get Press Plus — 7 days free

Founder subscribers lock $5/mo for life with code FOUNDER.

Your own key

Free

Bring an Anthropic API key and pay them directly — your notes travel straight to Anthropic with no middleman, ever. For the crowd that read the spec table above and smiled.

Plus requests pass through our metering relay, which counts tokens and stores nothing else — your note content is never logged or retained. Bring-your-own-key mode has no relay at all.

Questions

Asked & answered

What does it cost?

The notebook is free, and the Linux beta is fully free today. When Press Plus opens (next beta release), the AI clerk is $8/month with zero setup — founder subscribers lock $5/month for life. Prefer no subscription? Bring your own Anthropic API key instead, free forever, billed by Anthropic at cost (a typical note costs a fraction of a cent).

Which platforms?

Linux today (.deb and AppImage). macOS and Windows builds are planned — the app is built on a cross-platform stack, and they’ll arrive during the beta.

Do I need an Anthropic API key?

For the AI clerk, yes — it takes about two minutes to create one at console.anthropic.com, and Press walks you through it on first run. Without a key, Press still works as a fast local notebook: capture, search, tasks, and the Atlas all run on-device; notes simply wait in the harbor until a key arrives.

Where exactly are my notes?

In a vault folder on your disk, as plain Markdown files organized into the same folders you see in the app. Back up, sync, or leave with them whenever you like — there is no export step because there was never an import into anything proprietary.

What does the AI see, and is it trained on my notes?

Note content is sent only to the Anthropic API, under your key and their data policy — API inputs aren’t used to train models by default. Nothing is sent anywhere else, and search embeddings are computed locally.

What if the AI files something wrong?

Drag it back — or undo it from the decision log, where every AI action sits with a one-click reverse. Corrections become standing preferences, so the same mistake doesn’t happen twice.

How is this different from Obsidian or Notion?

They’re excellent filing cabinets that still expect you to do the filing. Press starts from the opposite premise: organizing is the product’s job. You write; the notebook stays tidy and shows you its shape.

Take the map with you

Linux beta, free. Five minutes from download to your first filed note.

Download for Linux

.deb for Debian & Ubuntu · AppImage for everything else

macOS & Windows: on the way. Watch releases to hear first.