Notes, the Notebook and Search

Updated September 2026

🎯 Purpose

Find, organise and write notes: categories, projects, private notes, search, pasting things in, images, and which note you land on when you open AIOS.

📌 Prerequisites

• The Notebook panel (its own page on a phone).

🗂️ Categories

• Daily — one per day, created for you. Where the day's work happens.
• Notes — anything else: drafts, intake forms, and any note a conversation with AIOS started.
• Articles — drafts written up for a reader, and the ones you have submitted.
• SOPs — procedures, including this library, your Core SOP and your settings.
• Private — see below.

Every note is a conversation surface, not only the plain ones. Ask AIOS anything with a note open and the exchange is appended to that note under 💬 Working with AIOS — see Talking to AIOS.

If you have used AIOS for a while you may still see an Interactions category under All. That is where chat logs used to go before every note could hold one. Nothing new is written there, the notes in it are ordinary notes, and they are yours to keep, move or delete.

📑 Two lists, two orders

All Notes and the category tabs are ordered by what you worked on last. The note you edited most recently is at the top, whatever it is called and whatever day it is from. That is the question this list answers: where was I.

A project is ordered differently on purpose. It opens with that project's Master Context note — the project's front door — and then runs newest-created first, so it reads as a history backwards from today.

📁 Projects

Group notes under a project from the project selector. Every project keeps a Master Context note that AIOS regenerates as the project changes — but only its Auto Overview section. Anything you write above that is yours and is never touched. Delete the section and it stays deleted.

Because AIOS rewrites that note every time anything in the project changes, it is deliberately not treated as something you worked on: in All Notes it sits by when the project was created, not by when AIOS last regenerated it. Edit it yourself and it rises like any other note.

🧭 The Vision, per project

The Vision panel is yours to write. It is one short statement — what you are working toward — and it follows whichever project you are looking at.

• With no project selected you see your default vision. Press EDIT to change it.
• Select a project and the panel shows that project's vision. If it has not got one it shows the default and says so, and the button reads WRITE ONE.
• Once a project has its own, USE DEFAULT puts it back to following the default. Saving it blank is different: that leaves the panel empty for that project, which is a choice you can make deliberately.
• Delete a project and its vision goes with it.

On a phone the Vision sits under the Find box in your note list, not on the More page — so when you pick a project, the line saying what that project is for is right there above its notes, and it stays put while the list scrolls.

🔒 Private notes

• Never listed by default, never read by AIOS, never sent to a model.
• With a private note open, the AI input is disabled — that is the guard.
• To see them, filter the notebook to Private. That is the only opt-in and it shows private notes only.
• They are encrypted on the disk, with a key worked out from your password when you sign in and kept only for that session. Nobody reading the server's files — including whoever runs it — can read them.

IF A PRIVATE NOTE SAYS IT IS LOCKED, SIGN OUT AND BACK IN. That is the whole fix, and it means exactly one thing: this browser session was started before the encryption existed, so it never got the key. AIOS will not write a private note without it — it refuses rather than saving one in the clear, which is the point of the feature — and it will not guess: the key comes from your password, and the server only ever sees that when you sign in.

Nothing is lost while a note is locked. It still appears in the list, marked, and it comes back the moment you sign in again.

🔎 Search

Ctrl+F in the notebook searches your notes. It obeys the same rule: private is excluded unless you are explicitly in the Private filter, and then it searches private only. While a find is active the list stays put rather than refreshing underneath your results.

📋 Pasting

A note is plain text, and pasting into one gives you plain text. Copy a heading out of a web page or a document and what lands is the words, not the font, the colour or the size. That is deliberate: the note file has nowhere to keep formatting, so anything that looked bold on screen would vanish the next time you opened the note — the screen and the file would be saying different things. Line breaks are kept.

📋 Pasting things in

Paste keeps the formatting. Copy from a web page, a document, an email or a spreadsheet and what lands in your note is the same shape you copied: headings stay headings, bold stays bold, lists stay lists, tables stay tables, links stay links.

What it keeps it as is markdown, which is what a note is made of. A heading arrives as ## Heading, bold as bold, a link as the words. The editor then draws all of it — a heading looks like a heading, bold looks bold, code sits in a little box, and the markers themselves are dimmed so you can still see and delete them.

That is the whole trade, and it is deliberate: your note is a plain text file, so anything it keeps has to be something the file can hold. Nothing is hidden from you and nothing is rewritten behind your back — what is on the screen is exactly what is in the file, character for character.

Handled: headings, bold, italic, ~~strikethrough~~, code, code blocks, bulleted and numbered lists (including nested ones), quotes, tables, horizontal rules and links.

Paste a picture and it uploads itself. A screenshot, an image copied from a web page, or a picture dragged in from your desktop — it goes into your media library and appears in the note straight away. There is no need to press 🖼️ IMAGE first; that button is still there for picking a file the normal way.

Dragging works too. Drop an image or some formatted text anywhere in the note and it lands where you dropped it.

One thing it cannot do: a picture that lives on somebody else's website stays a reference rather than becoming a copy. If you copy an image from a web page your browser usually hands over the picture itself as well, and then you get the real thing; if it only hands over the address, you get !alt in your note and no picture. Nothing is lost either way — the address is still there.

Plain text pastes exactly as it always has.

🖼️ Images

Paste, drag or upload an image and it is stored in your vault as a ![[media/…]] token. In the USER view that token renders as the picture, in place, while still being editable text — and it appears as soon as you save, without having to switch notes.

Hover an image — or tap it on a phone — and its controls appear. A handle at the bottom-right resizes it (drag diagonally; the proportions are kept for you, you are only ever setting the width), and two buttons at the top-right read its text and remove it. Tapping somewhere else puts them away, so only one image ever wears them.

✕ removes the picture from the note, not from your library. It takes out the ![[media/…]] line and nothing else — the file stays where it was uploaded, so pasting the token back brings the image straight back. Backspacing next to an image does nothing, which is why the button is there: the picture is not text, so there is nothing beside it for the key to delete.

The size is stored in your note, as ![[media/…|420]], so it travels with the file and looks the same on every device. An image you never resize keeps its plain ![[media/…]] token exactly as it was.

If the image cannot load you get a placeholder that still carries the token, so a broken image can never delete its own reference.

🔗 Turning text into a link

Highlight the words you want to be the link, press 🔗 LINK in the note toolbar, and either type a web address or pick a note from the list.

The list starts with the notes you already have in AI context, because those are the ones you have picked out. Type in the search box under it to reach anything else in your vault.

What gets written into your note is ordinary markdown — the words for a web link, the words for a note. (That one is live — press it and you are in the index.) Nothing hidden and nothing invented: open the vault in any other markdown editor and the links still work.

In the note the link is underlined and clickable. A web link opens in a new tab; a note link opens that note in the notebook. Editing still works normally around it — the link is one object to the cursor, so arrow keys step over it rather than into it, and deleting it deletes the whole thing.

If you press LINK with nothing highlighted, the address is inserted at the cursor as its own link.

A link that does not start with http:// or https:// is refused when you type it, and if one somehow gets into the note it stays as plain text rather than becoming clickable. That is deliberate: a link in your own note is something you would click without thinking about it.

📷 Reading the text out of a picture

Upload a photo of a receipt, a whiteboard, a printed page or a label the normal way (🖼️ IMAGE), then press ⌘ on the picture. AIOS reads any text in it and adds it to the note underneath the image, under a line that says where it came from, and scrolls you to it.

It is asked for, never automatic. Most pictures are pictures; scanning every one would spend the work on images nobody wanted words from, and would announce a failure on every upload if this deployment has no scanner. So it waits to be asked, and if the scanner is not there the button is simply not offered.

Check the numbers. Optical character recognition gets digits wrong often enough that this is worth saying twice — it is a starting point that saves you typing, not a transcript you should trust with a total. That is why the text arrives under a visible header rather than blending into the note.

It is ordinary text once it is there. Edit it, delete the header line, move it into a section — it is your note.

No AI request is spent on this. It is a local scan, so it costs nothing, works with no network on the server's side, and gives the same answer for the same picture every time.

If your AIOS is on a server without the scanner installed, the ⌘ button is not drawn — a control that can only refuse is worse than no control. Pictures work exactly as they always did.

⭐ The cover note

SET AS COVER pins the note AIOS opens with.

• Pin today's Daily Note and the cover follows the date — tomorrow it opens tomorrow. The button shows dashed, because the target moves.
• Pin a past-dated note and it stays on that file.

🔍 How to verify

1. Create a note, put it in a project, and confirm the project's Master Context note lists it.
2. Make a private note. Confirm it is absent from the default list, and that the AI input greys out while it is open.
3. Press Ctrl+F and search for a word you know is in a note.
4. Press SET AS COVER on today's note; the button reads ★ COVER dashed.
5. Highlight a word, press 🔗 LINK, paste an address: the word becomes underlined and opens in a new tab.
6. Upload a photo with words in it: the text appears under the picture a moment later.
7. Copy a few paragraphs from a web page — something with a heading, a bold word and a list — and paste them in. The heading is drawn large, the bold word is bold, the bullets are bullets.
8. Take a screenshot and paste it. It uploads and appears without you pressing 🖼️ IMAGE.

🚨 When it does not work

📰 The News section

The public Developer's Notebook has a News section. It is where the emailed newsletters are archived — the same text that went out, minus the personal unsubscribe link, as a page anyone can read or link to.

You do not have to be subscribed to read it, and reading it does not subscribe you. It is there so an issue you missed is still findable, and so somebody who has never heard of the list can see what it is before joining.

📖 Related

What AIOS Can See, Writing SOPs and Articles, AIOS Basics: The Daily Note

See what AIOS is All guides