Press. Type. Forget.
One key opens a box over whatever you are doing. Type the thought, press Ctrl+Enter, and you are back — the note is on your disk and the reminder is already set.
One email, on launch day. Nothing else, and no account.
Jot is not released yet. Capture, local storage and the installer have been walked on real Windows hardware; the AI features have only ever run against test doubles. The roadmap says exactly which is which.
100ms
Budget from keypress to a visible, typeable overlay.
Design budget. Not yet measured on Windows.
0 accounts
No sign-in, no email wall, no server to be down.
1 file
Every capture in one SQLite file you can copy anywhere.
The thought you have at 11:04, in a call you cannot leave.
You are four people into a Teams call and someone mentions the vendor contract. You need to call them tomorrow at two. Opening To Do means leaving the call, finding the window, picking a list, typing, setting a date, and coming back having missed a minute.
So you don't. You tell yourself you will remember, and you don't. The cost is never the note you lost; it is the twenty minutes at 4pm spent trying to reconstruct what the thought was.
With Jot you press one key. The box is there before you have finished thinking. You type it, press Ctrl+Enter, and you are back in the call — the overlay gone, focus where it was, nobody on the call any wiser. Tomorrow at two, Jot reminds you.
Four seconds, start to finish.
There is no window to arrange, no list to pick and nothing to file. The only decision you make is what to type.
01
Press, from inside anythingCtrl+Shift+J
A global shortcut, so it works from a Teams call, a spreadsheet, a game, a remote desktop. The overlay is built when Windows starts and then only ever shown, because building a window costs more milliseconds than the whole budget allows.
02
Type it the way you would say itTab
"Call the vendor tomorrow 2pm #work !" is a todo, due at two, tagged work, flagged. The date, the tag and the flag are read out of the line as you type it. Tab switches between a note and a todo.
03
Save, and you are already goneCtrl+Enter
The overlay hides, focus goes back to the window you took it from, and a small confirmation appears without stealing a keystroke. The write to disk happens after all of that, on another thread. Nothing you do waits on I/O.
04
It comes back when it is useful
A due time becomes a Windows notification. It appears once, at the time you set, without asking you to keep another app open.
The line is the interface.
Four tokens, read out of the sentence as you type it. Nothing else to learn, and no form to fill in afterwards.
tomorrow 2pmSets the due time, and the reminder with it.
Call the vendor tomorrow 2pm
#tagTags the capture. The first tag also picks the folder or list.
Renew the domain #admin
>listFiles it into a named list, overriding the tag.
Book the flights >Travel
!Marks it important. Needs whitespace around it, so "call now!" is safe.
Reply to the auditor !
Not a note app.
Jot is the thirty seconds between having a thought and losing it. What happens afterwards is yours to decide.
What it is
- A box that opens over anything, in one key
- A local SQLite file with everything you ever typed into it
- Separate views for notes, todos and what is coming up
What it will never be
- A document editor, or a place to write anything long
- A wiki, a graph, a second brain or a knowledge base
- A transcription or meeting-recording tool
- Somewhere your notes live behind somebody else's login
Every key.
The whole product, on one sheet. Nothing here needs a mouse, and the first row is rebindable if Windows or another app already owns it.
Anywhere in Windows
- Ctrl+Shift+J
- Open the capture overlay
- Esc
- Close it, keeping the draft for a day
In the overlay
- Enter
- Add this one and keep typing
- Ctrl+Enter
- Save everything and dismiss
- Shift+Enter
- New line
- Tab
- Switch between note and todo
In the app window
- Ctrl+K
- Search everything ever captured
- /
- Change a note block's type
- Esc
- Close the window
No account to create.
Jot opens, captures and reminds without asking for an email address or a password.
If you choose to use AI, the capture goes directly to the provider whose keyyou supplied. Jot has no AI service of its own.
The privacy policy, which is short, and how the secrets are stored, which is the part that matters.
Price.
Free
€0
The whole capture layer. No account, no limits, no expiry, no upsell in the overlay.
- Unlimited captures, notes and todos
- Global hotkey, rebindable, pausable
- Everything in one local SQLite file
- Dates, tags and lists parsed as you type
- Reminders as Windows notifications
- Inbox, triage and full-text search
- AI cleanup and splitting, with your own API key
- Daily local backups, kept for a week
- Markdown folder exportplanned
The capture layer has no trial, no expiry and no upsell in the overlay.
Reasonable questions.
- Do I need an account?
- No. Capture, parsing, reminders, search and the inbox never ask who you are.
- Where exactly do my captures live?
- In a SQLite database in your Windows app-data folder, plus a rotating daily copy of it kept for seven days. You can open it with any SQLite browser, copy it to another machine, or delete the folder and be certain nothing is left.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes. Capture, search and reminders do not depend on a connection.
- Is the AI reading my notes?
- Only when you press the button, and only to the provider whose key you typed in. Jot has no AI service of its own and no key of its own. Nothing is filed, rewritten or sent anywhere automatically — every suggestion is shown to you and applied only if you accept it.
- Why is it Windows only?
- Because the parts that matter are Windows parts: the global hotkey, reading which window had focus before ours took it, handing that focus back, keeping the overlay out of Alt-Tab, and encrypting stored secrets with DPAPI. A port is not a build target, it is a rewrite of the interesting half.
- How is this different from the Windows sticky-note or clipboard tools?
- Those give you a surface to write on and leave you to deal with it later. Jot's whole design goal is that you never deal with it: the capture is parsed into a due date and a destination as you type it, then stays ready when you need it.
- Can I see the source?
- Yes. The repository is public, including the roadmap, the design decisions and the written-but-never-run-on-Windows list. Jot is not open source in the licence sense; it is open in the sense that you can read what it does before you install it.
Work with fewer interruptions.
Practical guides to quick capture, Microsoft To Do and keeping a thought without losing the work already in front of you.