Online Notepad

A notepad that saves as you type

Open the page and start writing. Less than half a second after you stop typing, the note is saved to your browser's own storage, and the line under the text says so. Close the tab, restart the computer, come back next week in the same browser: the note is where you left it. There is no account to make and nothing to install, and the text is never sent to this site.

What it does

• Several notes. Each has a title and shows when it was last edited. New notes go to the top of the list; a blank note you never typed in is dropped instead of cluttering it.
• Dictation. Press Dictate, pick one of 35 languages and speak: the words are inserted where the cursor is, and the phrase still being recognised appears in grey under the text.
• Counts. Words and characters for the open note, updated as you type.
• Copy, download, print. Copy the text, save it as a .txt file named after the note, print just the note without the website around it, or download every note in one file.
• Two tabs at once. Before every save the page re-reads what is stored and replaces only the note you are editing, so a note written in another tab is not overwritten.
• Offline. Once the page has loaded, writing and saving work without a connection. Dictation is the exception: Chrome's speech recognition runs on Google's servers and needs internet.

Keyboard: Ctrl+S (Cmd+S on a Mac) saves immediately, though you never need it; Enter in the title jumps to the text.

Where are browser notes stored, and when do they disappear?

They are kept in the browser's localStorage for this site, on this device only, which most browsers cap at about 5 MB per site — a few million characters of plain text, far more than notes usually need. The page warns you when your notes pass 4 MB. That storage is private to you but also fragile, and the table below says exactly when the notes survive.

The last row is WebKit's rule: since Safari 13.1, announced on the WebKit blog in March 2020, script-written storage of a site is removed after seven days of Safari use without interacting with that site. So treat this notepad as a scratch pad and download anything you want to keep.

Honest limits

This is plain text: no formatting, images or sharing. Deleting a note asks for confirmation and cannot be undone. Dictation needs Chrome, Edge or Safari; Firefox has no speech recognition, so the Dictate button stays off there. If the browser blocks storage altogether — some private modes do — the page says so at once instead of pretending to save.