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Fern

Fern logo; A black square with rounded edges with a ">_" shown in white text in the upper left corner and a green fern leaf occupying the majority of the remaining area"

Fern is a Terminal first UI, notebook and journalling app. Create and manage notes, record daily journals, and templates in a local vault with full-text search, wikilinks support, and a keyboard-driven interface for the keyboard ninjas. All without leaving your shell!

Your data stays private on your machine. No cloud, no account required.

What Fern can do for you

  • Notes, journals, and templates - daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly journal entries; templates to keep new notes consistent
  • Wiki and markdown link support - Links are automatically rewritten whenever your notes are renamed, so you never end up with dead links
  • Full-text search - regex-compatible search across your entire vault
  • Vim-like editing - Normal, Insert, Replace, and Visual modes
  • Command palette - fuzzy-searchable palette for quick access to all commands
  • Tabs and split panes - open multiple notes side-by-side or in tabs
  • Sidebar - collapsible tree over Notes, Journals, and Templates
  • Bookmarks - save and quickly re-open important notes
  • Themes - built-in dark and light themes, pride-flag themes, and support for custom JSON themes
  • Configurable keybindings - remap any shortcut in the user config file
  • Multiple vaults - create and switch between vaults on the fly
  • Small footprint - With a 30MB binary size and taking ~40MB of memory on start, it runs well on resource-constrained systems (esp. when compared to heavier GUIs & Electon-based notetaking software!)

Where to start

New to Fern? Work through the sections below in order. Otherwise feel free to jump around to the section that you need and/or use the Search bar.

  1. Get Started - install Fern, create your first vault, write your first note, and try out the demo vault
  2. Learn the Basics - a deeper walkthrough of core concepts: vaults, notes, templates, and links
  3. Journalling - daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly journal entries; opening by date reference; periodic reviews
  4. Personalizing Fern - tailor Fern to your workflow with configuration options and themes