Ctrl+N starts a new note; the first line you type becomes its title until you rename it (F2).

There is no Save button to forget. A save commits 2 seconds after you stop typing, plus immediately on note switch, on alt-tab away, and on close. Ctrl+S just means "commit now".

Every note also remembers its cursor and scroll position, so it reopens exactly where you left off.

F3 jumps to the sidebar search box. Every word you type is matched anywhere inside titles, note text, and tags - any fragment finds it, so 02 finds A/002/45 and pass wor finds "password working notes".

The sidebar filters live with every keystroke; Esc clears the search and puts the list back.

Ctrl+F opens a small card over the note with the match count, next and previous, and wrap at either end. Selected text seeds the box, so Ctrl+F on a word searches for it straight away.

Drag it by the grip on its left to put it wherever suits you and it opens there next time, staying inside the note whatever the window is doing. F3 and Shift+F3 step through matches while it is open, Enter and Shift+Enter do the same from the box itself, and Esc closes it.

Matches are drawn over the text rather than into it, so finding never touches the note, the undo stack or autosave. The sidebar box is unchanged and still searches across every note.

Ctrl+H opens the find card with a replace row under it. Enter in the replace box rewrites the current match and steps to the next one; Ctrl+Enter rewrites every match in the note at once.

Three toggles beside the search box govern finding and replacing together: match case, whole word, and regular expression. With regex on, the replacement understands group substitutions, so $1 puts the first captured group back. They are session state rather than settings - the card always reopens on plain matching.

A replace-all is a single undo step however many matches it rewrote, so Ctrl+Z puts the note back in one go.

The button beside the sidebar search box opens a replace row under it. Type what you are looking for in the search box, what it should become underneath, and Replace all rewrites it in every note that carries it - the notes stay closed, and you do not have to open them one at a time.

The term is matched literally and case-insensitively, exactly like the search box it sits under. The find card's regex and whole-word options belong to the note you have open and deliberately do not reach across every note. Before anything is written you get a confirmation naming each affected note with its match count.

The whole run is one database transaction and one undo step: Ctrl+Z after a forty-note replace puts all forty back.

Notes sort by creation time or title, in either direction, or by a drag-and-drop custom order. Ctrl+F10 cycles the modes; the toolbar buttons pick them directly.

Ctrl+D cycles three sidebar densities - full, compact, and minimal - to fit more notes on screen. The compact modes trim the group headers too.

Right-click a note for Title color (or press Ctrl+Shift+C) to color its title in the list, with a live preview while you pick. Colored titles stay colored even while the note is selected.

Alt+P, or Pin note on the right-click menu, keeps a note at the top of its group, or at the top of the loose notes when it is in none. A small pin marks the row. Pinned notes still follow the sort you chose among themselves, and Ctrl+Z unpins.

A template is an ordinary note in a group you mark: right-click any group header and tick Templates group. From then on every note in it appears under New note from template on the right-click menu, and Alt+T opens the same list beside the New note button. Moving a note into the group makes it a template; moving it out un-makes it.

A new note made from one copies the text, tags and title color. {date}, {time}, {datetime} and {weekday} anywhere in the template, its title included, are filled in on the way, so a template titled Standup {date} comes out dated.

Alt+D opens today's note, titled with today's date, and creates it when it does not exist yet. New day notes go in the group you tick as Daily notes group on a header's right-click menu, or in a Daily notes group made for you the first time.

Put a template titled Daily in your templates group and every new day note starts from it, placeholders filled in, so a standing agenda is already there when the day begins.

Earlier versions of every note are kept as you work: one each time you come back to a note after ten minutes away and change it, plus one before anything lossy such as a markdown conversion or a replace-all. The newest fifty stay.

Alt+H, or Version history on the right-click menu, lists them newest first with a preview of the selected one in your theme. Restore this version puts its text and title back, and the text it replaced becomes the newest version, so a restore can itself be undone from the same list.

Versions live inside the database, so they are encrypted with it and are not part of a shared .knote. Deleting a note permanently deletes its history too.

Delete moves the selected note to the Trash, a section at the bottom of the sidebar, after a confirm - and Ctrl+Z brings it straight back.

A trashed note opens read-only, so you can read what you threw away. Right-click it to Restore it or Delete permanently; right-click the Trash header to empty it. Anything left in the trash for thirty days is removed for good. Alt+Delete opens the trash on its first note.

Trashed notes are out of everything else: search never finds them, links to them read as unwritten, and the graph and the markdown export skip them, until they are restored.

Sidebar undo covers more than deletes: group moves, group colors, tag toggles, and note reorders all revert with Ctrl+Z. Inside the editor, Ctrl+Z stays normal text undo; the app picks the right one based on what you did last.

Ctrl+G makes a new group - if notes are selected, they are filed into it on the spot. Groups pin above the loose notes and travel inside shared .kndb files.

Ctrl+Shift+G creates a subgroup inside the selected note's group; right-clicking a header offers the same. Nesting has no depth limit.

Subgroups sit above the parent group's own notes by default. Right-click a header and toggle Subgroups on top to switch back to notes-first ordering - the check mark shows which way it is set.

Each group takes a color that runs as a connector line from its header down through its notes and children, so you can see at a glance what belongs where. The picker previews live; Reset color returns to the theme accent.

In custom sort, notes drag to reorder and group headers drag to reorder or re-nest whole groups. Drags need a deliberate pull before they start, so a twitchy mouse will not scramble the tree - and Ctrl+Z reverts a bad drop.

Click a header to collapse or expand its group; the colored line shrinks to a pill beside the header while it is closed.

Ctrl+T opens the tag manager: add, rename, and recolor the tags of the current database.

Right-click a note to toggle its tags, or press Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9 to flip the first nine on the open note.

Tag pills under each note row filter the list on click, and tag names are part of the full-text index, so typing a tag in search works too.

Ctrl+B / I / U bold, italic, underline; Ctrl+Shift+S strikethrough, Ctrl+Shift+M monospace, Ctrl+Shift+H highlight, Ctrl+Shift+R horizontal rule, Ctrl+Shift+L / N bulleted and numbered lists, Ctrl+Shift+> / < grow and shrink the selection. The format bar (F6) has all of it, plus full text and highlight color pickers with a desktop-wide eyedropper.

Alt+1, Alt+2 and Alt+3 make the current line, or every selected line, a heading of that level; Alt+0 puts it back to normal text; the H button on the format bar steps through all four. A heading is bold text at one of three fixed sizes, the same shape markdown import has always produced, so imported and typed headings are the same thing.

Alt+O, or the outline button on the sidebar rail, opens an outline beside the note listing its headings, indented by level. Click one to jump there. It updates as you type. In a markdown note the same keys write and read the # markers.

Headings now export to markdown as real headings rather than bold paragraphs, and come back in as headings.

Alt+C, or the checkbox button on the format bar, puts a box at the start of the current line or of every selected line, and takes it off again. Click the box to tick it. Enter at the end of a checkbox line starts the next one with an empty box, and Enter on an empty box ends the list.

The box is a character, not a control, so it is stored, searched and exported like any other text. In a markdown note the same keys write the - [ ] task-list marker, and the markdown export and import map the two forms onto each other.

Insert a real table from the format bar or Ctrl+Shift+T. Rows and columns are added and removed from the right-click menu, and tables pasted from Excel, Word, or a web page come in as tables, not text.

Select text and press Ctrl+K to link it; Ctrl+Click opens a link in your browser. Ctrl+K on an existing link edits it, and clearing the address removes the link. Typing a URL followed by a space links it automatically.

Links survive pasting - from browsers, Word, and other note apps - and the HTML export writes real anchors. Only web and mail addresses ever open, so a shared note can't launch anything else.

Paste a screenshot and it lands inline at the cursor; image files drop in the same way, and the format bar's picture button inserts one from a file. Click an image for resize handles, or double-click it to open it in the SketchPad and draw on it.

With word wrap on, an image cannot be stretched wider than the pane; turn wrap off (Ctrl+Shift+W) and wide images get a horizontal scrollbar instead.

Ctrl+Shift+P toggles spell check per note - keep it on for prose, off for config dumps.

Convert to list (Ctrl+Shift+J) turns selected lines - or the words of one sentence - into a comma-separated list, made for pasting into scripts and one-liners.

Ctrl+Shift+W toggles word wrap; with wrap off, wide content is reachable by horizontal scroll. Alt+L adds a line-number column, handy when a note is really a config file.

F11 fills the whole screen, taskbar included. Nothing is hidden - the title bar, the caption buttons and the footer all stay where they are, so there is no way to get stranded in it. F11 again or Esc comes back, to whatever the window was doing before.

With word wrap off, the tilt wheel pans wide tables and images left and right, and Shift+Wheel does the same on mice without a tilt wheel. Ctrl+Wheel stays text zoom.

Turn it on per note from the note's right-click menu, or with Ctrl+Shift+E. Code is detected paragraph by paragraph rather than for the whole note, so one runbook can mix plain prose with PowerShell, HTML, XAML, XML, Vue, JSON, YAML, Markdown, SQL, C#, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS and Bash - without you picking a language anywhere.

Prose keeps the normal note color, and the colors refresh as you edit. They are never written into the saved note: the highlighting is a view of the text, so a note stays exactly as you typed it when exported or shared.

Notes that look like markdown or HTML get a split-pane preview on F4. Markdown renders through Markdig; HTML is sanitized first - scripts and event handlers never run.

A note is either rich text or markdown. New markdown note in the notes right-click menu makes one, and the same menu converts an existing note in either direction, one note at a time.

A markdown note is plain text, so it holds text and nothing else. Images, tables, sketches and embedded recordings are refused with a line in the status bar rather than being swallowed at the next save, and the format bar hides itself. Dictation still prints its transcript, because a transcript is text.

Converting to markdown names what will not survive - tables, images, colored text - before it rewrites anything. Markdown back to rich text loses nothing. Either way Ctrl+Z restores the original bytes exactly rather than converting a second time, which would hand back something subtly different.

Type [[ in a note and a list of your note titles appears; keep typing to narrow it and press Enter to insert the link. Ctrl+Click a link to follow it.

A link can point at a note that does not exist yet, which is the point: write the link while the thought is there and make the note later. Following a dead link offers to create it, already titled.

Alt+Left and Alt+Right step back and forward through the notes you have visited, as do the thumb buttons on a mouse - so following a chain of links is not a one-way trip.

A strip tucked into the bottom right of the note lists everything pointing at it. Click one to go there.

It also lists notes that merely name this one without linking it. Click one of those and the link is made for you; Ctrl+Click just goes there instead. When there are more than fit, the rest collapse into an And X more... button. Alt+M hides the strip.

Ctrl+Shift+B opens a graph of every link in the notebook, or of just one group when a group header is selected. Each note is a dot, colored by its group and sized by how much links to it; a title that is linked but not written yet draws as an outline. Double-click a dot to open the note.

Five arrangements from the right-click menu: by connection, in a circle, in a grid, by group, and rings by distance from whichever note you right-clicked. Drag a dot, or a whole selection, and it stays where you drop it.

Pin all Notes (P) decides what happens to everything else while you drag: on, nothing moves but what you are holding; off, the notes it links to get out of the way. Lock in place (K, on a note's right-click menu) is stronger and per note - nothing moves a locked note, not an arrangement and not its neighbors, and the lock is remembered.

The graph reopens exactly as you left it. Save this arrangement... in the Arrange menu keeps a named layout you can come back to, and Forget arrangement drops one. Layouts live in the notebook they belong to, so they never follow you into another database.

Show only what links here (F) narrows the graph to one note and its neighbors; Esc shows everything again. Visualizer (V) leaves the graph drifting and slowly turning on its own, which is worth leaving on a second monitor.

F9 slides a themed calculator up under the notes list (and pops the sidebar open if it was collapsed). Type equations straight on the number keys; Enter or = computes.

Print Sum (Ctrl+Enter) drops the result into the open note at the cursor; Print Equation (Ctrl+Shift+Enter) drops the whole running equation instead - 12 + 5 = 17 × 3 = 51 - spelling out each step so the left-to-right math reads clearly. No more copying out of Windows Calculator.

Click the note to keep editing while the pad stays open; click the pad to give it the keys back. Esc closes it.

F7 or Ctrl+Shift+D opens the SketchPad, a modeless drawing window that stays open beside the note. It has a pen, straight line, arrow, rectangle, ellipse, polygon, paint bucket, text labels, and an eraser, with a color palette and custom picker, stroke width, fill, and full undo/redo - every tool on a single-key shortcut.

Print to note (Ctrl+Enter) flattens the drawing to an image stamped inline at the caret without closing the pad; Copy to clipboard puts that image on the clipboard for any other app. A printed sketch stays editable - double-click it, or any image in a note, to reopen the exact drawing, and Print replaces it in place.

Ctrl+M or the microphone on the sidebar rail opens the dictation pad, a modeless window that stays open beside the note. Hit Record, talk, hit Stop - the take is transcribed straight away rather than waiting to be asked.

Print to note drops the text in at the cursor, where it is ordinary editable text. Embed recording puts the audio itself in the note as a small player. You can do both.

Nothing is uploaded at any point. Recording, playback and transcription all happen on your machine - this is an encrypted notepad, and dictation is not the one feature that talks to a network.

Windows' built-in dictation is a command-and-control engine from the Windows 7 era, and on unfamiliar words it produces confident nonsense rather than admitting it is unsure. The first time it would be used, KillerNotes offers a better speech model instead.

Three sizes, with their real download sizes shown so nothing large arrives as a surprise: Fast (75 MB), Recommended (142 MB) and Most accurate (466 MB). They run entirely offline. Change or add one later by right-clicking the microphone on the rail.

Without a model, transcription still works - it just falls back to the Windows engine.

Right-click an embedded recording and choose Edit to reopen it in the pad. The waveform is the editing surface: right-click anywhere on it to slice, then copy, delete or paste segments, with one level of undo. Saving replaces the original in place rather than adding a second copy.

Click or drag along the waveform to scrub. The chip in the note is a small transport too - the waveform fills as it plays, the play arrow becomes pause, and the knob at its end is volume.

Recordings live in the database, not as loose files. Right-click one and use Share to save it as a file, or copy it as a file to paste straight into an email, a chat window or a folder.

They are stored as FLAC - lossless, and about half the size of WAV - so slicing and re-saving costs nothing in quality however many times you do it. Export converts to WAV or MP3 if the other end needs it.

Drag an image or a recording and it lifts out of the line of text, with the paragraph wrapping around wherever it lands. There is no setting and no menu item to find - dragging is the whole gesture.

It snaps to a twelve-column grid across the note, so two images on different lines line up without you aiming, and vertically it snaps to the text's own lines. Drop one onto a table cell and it becomes that cell's content, widening the column to fit.

A placed object is anchored to the paragraph it sits beside, so adding lines above it moves it down with the text - the same way a word processor behaves. Images keep their resize handles once placed.

The title-bar lock encrypts the whole database with SQLCipher (AES-256) - notes, images, search index, everything. Set, change, or remove the password at any time; there is no recovery back door, so a lost password means a locked file.

Keep separate notepads per client or per context: create, rename, switch, and relocate databases from Manage databases, including pointing the data folder next to the exe for a portable USB setup.

Manage databases has a Backups button: pick a folder, choose every 6 hours, 12 hours, daily or weekly, and how many copies to keep. While KillerNotes is running it checks at launch and every quarter hour, and takes a copy when the last one is older than the interval. Alt+B takes one right now.

A copy is the database as it is, so a password-protected database gives a copy that opens with the same password, and every copy is a .kndb that opens by double-click or imports like a shared file. Nothing is ever uploaded.

Restore as new database copies a backup into the data folder under a new name, never over the original, and selects it in the list for you to open.

Share one note as a .knote file or a whole notepad as .kndb, optionally with their own passwords; both open with a double-click on the other end. Dragging a note out of the sidebar drops it as a real file.

F8 exports the open note as .txt, .rtf, or a self-contained themed .html; Ctrl+O (or dropping files on the window) imports text, markdown, RTF, HTML, and images as new notes.

Export all notes as markdown in the notes right-click menu writes the whole notepad out as a folder of .md files. Groups become nested subfolders, and every file opens with YAML front matter carrying its title, tags, and created and modified times - so git, Obsidian, or any text editor reads the result.

Rich-text notes are converted on the way out, so what you get is the entire notepad rather than only the notes that happened to be markdown already. Nothing in the database is modified, and the files land in a subfolder named after the open database instead of loose in whatever folder you picked.

It is a one-way export you ask for, not a watched folder that syncs. A permanent plaintext mirror of an encrypted database sitting on disk would undo the reason it is encrypted, so you choose the moment that plaintext exists.

Ctrl+Wheel zooms the text of the current editor; Ctrl+0 snaps it back to 100%. Ctrl+Shift + / - scales the entire app - window, sidebar, everything - for accessibility, and Ctrl+Shift+0 resets that.

If your notes suddenly look tiny or huge and you do not know why, you probably hit one of these: try Ctrl+0 first, then Ctrl+Shift+0.

F5 collapses the sidebar to a thin rail of icons - Killculator, SketchPad, dictation, density, line numbers, shortcuts, language, and theme stay one click away. F9 reopens the sidebar automatically when the Killculator needs the room.

Ctrl+Shift+A opens the theme flyout: thirteen themes with accent colors, switched live. The interface speaks fifteen languages and falls back to English for anything untranslated.

Open the theme flyout (Ctrl+Shift+A) and hit Fonts... - three slots swap independently: Headers (group titles), Sidebar (note rows), and Note text (the editor). Pick any installed font, or drop a .ttf or .otf file straight onto the card to add your own.

Everything applies live, and rolling the mouse wheel over a dropdown steps through fonts one at a time so you can shop by eye. A readability guard keeps symbol fonts like Wingdings from wrecking the app.

The shipped defaults: typewriter headers, Segoe UI in the sidebar, and Bahnschrift for note text. One click resets all three.

Every Open and Save in the app uses KillerNotes' own picker rather than the Windows one, so it follows your theme instead of opening a bright Explorer window in the middle of a dark app. List, icon and detail views, sortable columns, and a hidden-files toggle.

The left column is bookmarks, not a folder tree: right-click any folder in the list and choose Bookmark place to pin it, right-click a bookmark to remove it. Picking an image also gets thumbnails in the list and a preview pane, so you are not choosing from filenames alone.

The exe runs from anywhere with no install. A PORTABLE badge in the status bar offers a per-user install (Start Menu, Add/Remove entry) if you want one; KillerNotes.exe /silent does a machine-wide install for RMM deployment.