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From the Mac App Store and the iPhone App Store. Search for "Kanso Notes" or use the download links on the home page.
"Kanso" alone was already taken on the App Store. The display name on your device is just "Kanso".
Press .N on Mac, or tap the + button on iPhone. New notes default to plain markdown; pick a different type from the rail to start a Current note, Idea, Grocery list, Recipe, Journal entry, or Sketch.
They're hidden until your caret is on or near the line. Click into a heading and you'll see the #; move away and it goes back to formatted text. The underlying file always contains the markdown - what changes is what's drawn.
Spell check fires on word boundaries. Hit space, return, or punctuation and Kanso applies the system's standard correction quietly. Right-click any underlined word for alternates.
In a Grocery note, checked items move to a "Done" group automatically and can be cleared with one menu item. In a regular note, drag the line yourself.
As plain .md files in iCloud Drive / Kanso /. You can open the folder in Finder and edit those files in any other text editor - Kanso will pick the changes up.
Notes stay on your device, in the app's local container. If you turn iCloud on later, Kanso moves them up.
Yes. The app reads and writes local files; iCloud handles propagation in the background. You can edit on a plane and conflicts will resolve when you reconnect.
That's iCloud's conflict marker. It happens when the same note was edited on two devices before either had a chance to sync. Open both, copy the text you want to keep into one, and delete the other.
Settings > Appearance. Five themes ship: Paper (default), Retro, Graphite, Sage, and Terminal.
Green text on a black background is the point. Terminal looks the same in light, dark, and system modes.
FSNotes, nvAlt, Obsidian, Bear, Apple Notes, Simplenote, Evernote, Google Keep, and any plain Markdown folder.
Yes. Kanso checkpoints your notes folder before writing imported notes. Settings > Imports has a "Revert last import" option.
CommonMark plus GitHub-style task lists (- [ ]) and YAML frontmatter for per-note metadata (type, tags, due date, recipe servings, etc.).
Yes. They're plain markdown files. The frontmatter is human-readable and most other markdown editors will display the body just fine, ignoring the parts they don't understand.
Nothing. There's no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no telemetry of any kind. Read the full privacy policy.
Only when you trigger one: dropping a recipe URL fetches that page, and bring-your-own-key AI features call the provider you configured. iCloud sync goes through Apple, not us.
One is in development so Model Context Protocol clients like Claude Desktop can read and edit your notes locally. It isn't part of the App Store release yet.
Only for Kanso's optional in-app AI features. Everything else works without one.
Coming soon. The iPhone build runs on iPad in compatibility mode in the meantime, but the layout is not yet optimized for it.
Check Trash in the rail. Deleted notes stay there for 30 days before being purged.
Force a sync by pulling down on the note list (iPhone) or running Settings > Sync now (Mac). If that doesn't work, check iCloud Drive is enabled for Kanso in System Settings.
Email terranvigil@gmail.com or open an issue on GitHub.
Yes. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no upsells. If a Pro tier ever ships, the core editor and sync stay free.
Kanso is built and maintained by one person as a side project. The marginal cost of a download on the App Store is zero, and there's no server to keep running.
