Blackboard Text

A quiet, local-first place to think.

Write, sketch and keep pages of notes in your own browser. No account, no analytics, no sync. Nothing leaves the browser unless you create a short link, which uploads only the copy you share.

Open the app · Install · Releases · Privacy

Features

• Write. Plain, comfortable text with autosave, word count and Tab indentation. Choose the font (Inter Tight, Inter, Board Grotesk or a system font), size, line height, letter spacing and width, one of nine themes or your own colours. The interface is in English or Russian.
• Draw. Pen (with optional pressure), marker, eraser and select, right on top of the text. Strokes stay where you drew them when the window resizes, and can be attached to words so they follow your edits.
• Pages. Emoji tabs with optional names that you can reorder, pin and preview on hover. Search names and text with Ctrl/⌘ K. Export a page as TXT, Markdown, PNG or PDF.
• Share. Send a read-only copy of one page as a full link (nothing uploaded) or a short link (stored online, can be disabled). See Sharing.
• Your data. Everything lives in this browser. Portable backups, recovery snapshots and per-page history protect against mistakes. See Backups.

 

Get started

Web app (recommended)

1. Open https://piwqust.github.io/blackboard/ in Chrome or Edge.
2. To install it, choose Install in the address bar or the browser menu.
3. After the first visit it works offline. When a new version is deployed, a small Reload prompt appears; your latest change is saved before the page reloads.

Personal browser extension

The extension is the same app with its own storage, opened from the toolbar. It does not update itself.

1. Download blackboard-text-extension-<version>.zip from Releases (attached from 2.4.2 on) and unzip it, or build it yourself (see Development) and use dist/edge-extension/.
2. Open chrome://extensions or edge://extensions, turn on Developer mode, choose Load unpacked and select the folder.
3. To update, replace the folder's contents and press Reload on the extensions page.

Release zips are built with short links connected. A local build without SHORT_LINKS_API_URL offers full links only.

Moving notes between them

The web app and the extension never share storage. Export a backup in one (Settings → Your data → Export backup) and import it in the other, choosing whether to replace the workspace or add the pages.

Sharing

Open Settings → Page actions → Share a copy… (or Share a copy… in a page's settings). Anyone with the link can read the copy, and later edits to your page do not change it.

	Full link	Short link
Where the copy lives	Inside the link, after the #. Browsers never send that part to a server.	Uploaded to the short-link service (a Cloudflare Worker with D1). The service operator can read it.
Length	Grows with the page; the dialog shows it. Under about 4 KB works anywhere.	About 60 characters, whatever the page size.
Revocable	No. There is no copy anywhere to delete.	Yes, from Shared links from this browser. Copies recipients already saved cannot be recalled.
Opens offline	Yes, once the app has been opened in that browser.	No, it needs the service.

Both open in the read-only reader, which shows the page as written, adds a Readable text mode and zoom, and strips scripts and remote resources.

The keys that disable short links stay in the browser that created them and are not in workspace backups. Settings → Your data → Link management backup… exports them as a passphrase-encrypted file; import it in another browser to manage your links from there.

Backups, recovery snapshots and page history

All three are in Settings:

• Export backup / Import backup (Your data) write and read a portable .blackboard.json file with every page, drawing and setting. Import checks the file first and saves a recovery snapshot before changing anything.
• Recovery snapshots (Your data) are taken automatically before an import, a page delete, clearing drawings or a restore. The seven most recent are kept; restore the latest or browse them and recover single pages.
• Page history (Page actions) keeps up to 25 earlier versions of each page, 100 in total and 10 MB, captured at most every 30 seconds. Recovering a version creates a new page. Page history is not part of a backup.

Clearing site data, uninstalling the extension or deleting the browser profile removes your notes. Export a backup first.

Privacy

Pages, drawings, settings, snapshots and page history are stored in IndexedDB for this browser profile. There are no accounts, analytics or automatic sync; the web app fetches only its own files from GitHub Pages. A full link never reaches a server. A short link uploads that one copy to the short-link service, which keeps it until you disable it; Cloudflare processes IP addresses for rate limiting, and the app does not store them.

Details: docs/privacy.md and the in-app privacy page.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl/⌘ K	Find a page
Alt Shift N	New page
Ctrl/⌘ Z	Undo text, or the last drawing change while drawing
Ctrl/⌘ Shift Z, Ctrl/⌘ Y	Redo text, or drawing while drawing
Tab / Shift Tab	Indent / outdent in the note
B / E	Pen / eraser, when the cursor is not in text
Alt Shift B / E	Pen / eraser, also while typing
Hold Shift while drawing	Straight line
Hold Alt while drawing	Temporary eraser
Delete / Backspace	Delete the selected stroke (select tool)
Shift + mouse wheel over the note	Text size
↑ ↓ ← →, Home, End on page tabs	Move between tabs; Alt + arrow reorders
Esc	Close a dialog, panel or picker; otherwise leave drawing mode

Browser support and limits

• Built for Chrome and Edge on desktop. Automated tests run Chromium at desktop and phone widths for both the web app and the extension.
• Editing needs Web Locks (Chrome or Edge over HTTPS or on localhost). A second tab with the same workspace, or a browser without Web Locks, opens read-only: you can switch pages, export a backup and share, but not edit.
• PDF export is an image of the board, so its text cannot be selected or searched; use TXT or Markdown for that. PNG export is capped at 8 million pixels and 8192 px per side; tall pages become a multipage PDF.
• Short links hold copies up to 900,000 encoded characters; larger pages can use a full link or a file export. Backups up to 50 MB can be imported.
• Physical pens and touch devices, and screen readers such as VoiceOver, have not been verified by hand.

Upgrading from the 1.x unpacked extension

Extension storage belongs to the extension's ID, so keep the same folder:

1. Replace the files in your original unpacked folder with a 2.x extension build and press Reload on the extensions page.
2. Open Blackboard Text. It copies the old workspace into the new storage and leaves the original records in place.
3. Export a backup from Settings → Your data if you want to move the notes to the web app.

A newly loaded extension from a different folder cannot see the old data.

What's new

See CHANGELOG.md and Releases.

Development

Requires Node 22.13 or later.

npm ci
npm run verify                    # lint, version check, unit tests, build, check dist/
npx playwright install chromium   # once
npm run test:browser              # Playwright against dist/pwa and dist/edge-extension
npm run test:shares               # short-link API and browser tests on a local Worker and D1

editor.html/.js/.css   the editor
read.html, s/          reader for shared copies and the short-link route
src/core/              storage, schema, backups, sharing and drawing logic
src/ui/                interface modules
backend/short-links/   Cloudflare Worker and D1 migrations
scripts/               build, checks, test server, screenshots
tests/                 unit tests; tests/browser holds the Playwright suite
index.html, landing/   the website's landing page (PWA build only)
dist/                  generated: pwa/ (GitHub Pages) and edge-extension/

• SHORT_LINKS_API_URL is the public address of the short-link service, read at build time. Without it, the share dialog offers full links only. CI uses the repository variable of the same name. For a local Worker, run npm run shares:dev and build with SHORT_LINKS_API_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8787.
• New files under src/ are picked up by the build automatically; add a new top-level page to staticFiles in scripts/build.mjs. The offline file list in pwa-sw.js is generated, and scripts/verify-dist.mjs fails if anything is missing from it.
• The website's landing page (index.html) and its screenshots in landing/ ship in the PWA build only, never in the extension. An installed window, or index.html?app, goes straight to the editor. Landing screenshots are not precached.
• Set TEST_PORT (default 4190) to run the browser tests beside another checkout's test server.
• Refresh the README screenshots with npm run build && node scripts/readme-screenshots.mjs.

Releasing

One-time setup: set Pages to deploy from GitHub Actions and add the SHORT_LINKS_API_URL repository variable.

1. Bump the version in package.json, manifest.json and APP_VERSION in editor.js. npm run lint fails if they differ.
2. Add a ## [x.y.z] - YYYY-MM-DD section to CHANGELOG.md. It becomes the release notes, and the release fails without it.
3. If the published note format changed, deploy the Worker first (npm run shares:deploy) and check it with node scripts/verify-live-short-link.mjs. The Worker validates that format.
4. Commit and push, then tag: git tag vx.y.z && git push origin vx.y.z.

The Release PWA workflow checks that the tag matches package.json, runs the full verification, browser and short-link tests, builds with SHORT_LINKS_API_URL and deploys dist/pwa to GitHub Pages. It then creates the GitHub Release with blackboard-text-extension-x.y.z.zip, its .sha256 checksum and the changelog section, marked Latest only for the highest version.

Self-hosting short links

Short links are optional. To run your own service, follow docs/short-links/README.md.

License and fonts

The code is available under the MIT License. Inter and Inter Tight are bundled under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (fonts/Inter-OFL.txt). BoardGrotesque Sans, shown in the app as Board Grotesk, is a proprietary asset of the project owner, supplied with permission; it is not covered by the MIT or OFL licenses.