Open source
Kinetic Notes exists because Zachary Schneirov released Notational Velocity under a licence that let someone else pick it up fifteen years later. It ships under that same licence, for the same reason.
Licence
GPL v3, with one exception.
The source code
Free software under the GNU General Public License v3— the same licence as Notational Velocity. You can read it, build it, modify it, and distribute your changes under the same terms. The full text ships in the repository as COPYING.txt.
The application icon
Not covered by that licence. The icon files are © 2026 jptechco, all rights reserved. The code may be forked freely, but a fork must ship its own icon.
The original Notational Velocity icon by Taylor Carrigan is not used and is not part of the repository — its licence did not permit commercial use.
Credit where it is due
Notational Velocity came first.
Notational Velocity was created by Zachary Schneirov. Kinetic Notes exists only because of his work. The idea that searching and creating belong in the same field — the thing that makes this application worth using — is his.
Kinetic Notes forks Notational Velocity 2.0 β7. What has been added since is documented in full on the What's New page, so it is always clear which parts are inherited and which are new.
Third-party components
Retained from the original and credited in the repository's Acknowledgments.txt.
PTHotKeys
Global hotkey support · Quentin D. Carnicelli
RBSplitView
The resizable split between list and editor
ODBEditor
External editor support
Translations
Seven languages, contributed by people.
Kinetic Notes ships the interface translations contributed to Notational Velocity, and is grateful to the people who wrote them.
| Language | Translator |
|---|---|
| English | — |
| Spanish | Iago Ramos, OpenAI |
| French | David Bosman |
| Portuguese | Daniel R. Souza |
| German | Benedikt Hopmann |
| Chinese (Simplified) | Tunghsiao Liu |
| Italian | Paolo Tramannoni |
Interested in adding another translation? Post the details in issues.
Contributing
Building and contributing
One command, no package manager, no dependencies to fetch. Requires Xcode 15 or later.
git clone https://github.com/jptechco/kn.gitcd kn
xcodebuild -project Notation.xcodeproj \ -target Notation \ -configuration Deployment buildBug reports, translations, and patches are all welcome. Versions follow major.minor, and each build number is the pull request number that shipped it, so a version in the About box maps straight back to its change history.