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Kinetic Notes

Documentation

Editing

Writing in a note: automatic saving, optional line numbers, and a count of the note's words, characters, lines or paragraphs.

Once a note is open, the editor gets out of the way. It has no toolbar and nothing to save — and the two things it can add, line numbers and a word count, stay hidden until you ask for them.

Nothing to save

Changes are written to disk as you make them. There is no Command S, no unsaved-changes dialog, and no moment where what is on screen differs from what is on disk. When you are done with a note, go back to the search field with Command L and move on.

Line numbers

Turn on Show line numbers in Settings → Editing to number the lines of a note in a gutter beside the text.

  • The numbers are muted, and the line holding the cursor is drawn brighter on a faint band. With a selection, every line it touches is highlighted.
  • A line that wraps is numbered once. The numbers count lines as you wrote them, not rows on the screen, so widening the window never renumbers anything.
  • The numbers are drawn beside the text, not added to it. They are never copied, printed or exported.

Word count

Turn on Show word count in Settings → Editing for a bar along the bottom of the window. It counts the note you are looking at and keeps up as you type.

Click the count, or the ^ caret beside it, to choose what it counts:

OptionCounts
Characters (with spaces)Every character except line breaks
Characters (no spaces)Characters, leaving out spaces, line breaks and other spacing
WordsWords — including in languages written without spaces
LinesLines, exactly as the line-number gutter numbers them
ParagraphsRuns of text between line breaks that are not blank

Kinetic Notes remembers your choice. An emoji or an accented letter counts as one character, the way you would count it yourself.