Capture is solved. Retrieval isn’t.
Every notes app nailed getting things in. Almost none solved getting the right thing back out months later. Penman is built for the part everyone skipped.
Notes from the ridge, March
Wrote this once and forgot where. Found it in a keystroke, eight months later.
From scattered capture to a findable body of work.
Finds it for you
Search runs in Postgres against a real index — titles weighted above bodies — not over whatever your browser happened to load.
Nothing to set up
No databases, no properties, no linked records to design first. Open it and write. There is no configuration step to put off.
Everything, one keystroke away
⌘K reaches every note and every action from anywhere in the app, without leaving what you were writing.
Yours to leave with
Every note exports as clean Markdown that survives the trip out. No proprietary shapes, nothing held hostage.
The gaps all show up after capture.
Search you don't have to remember to run
Structure is easy and capture is easy. Finding the one paragraph you wrote in March is the part that actually decides whether a knowledge base was worth keeping.
No database administration tax
Tools that pay off only after two weeks of schema design charge you in time before they give anything back. Time spent filing is time not spent using.
An exit that actually works
Export fidelity is where most tools quietly fail — relations and structure don't survive the trip out. Plain Markdown leaves the way it arrived.
Write it down once. Find it forever.
No databases to design, no schema to maintain, no lock-in. Start writing in about four seconds.