Local-first · Chrome new tab

Your notes, on every new tab.

Margin turns the new tab page into a calm board of your notes, grouped into sections and laid out as cards. Open a tab and the thought you jotted yesterday is sitting right there. No app to dig for, nothing to lose.

Download for Chrome How it works

Free & open source · No account · Works offline · Your data never leaves your device

The story

Why I built Margin

We used to write the important bits in the margins of our notebooks, right next to the work, where you could not miss them.

Here is the problem I kept running into. I spend a lot of my work day inside a browser, and every time a thought showed up, a task, a link to read later, something someone said on a call, I would open some separate notes app, jot it down, and then basically never see it again. The note would drift into a pile somewhere and get lost.

One day it reminded me of school. That habit of scribbling in the margins. That is the whole idea behind Margin. Your notes live on the one page you open all day long, your new tab. Open a tab and yesterday's thought is right there in front of you, grouped into sections and laid out as cards.

It runs fully on your device. No account, no sign in, no analytics, no servers. Nothing leaves your machine unless you export it yourself.

Features

Everything you need, nothing you don't

A focused little tool that does the notes part really well, and stays out of your way the rest of the time.

🗂️

A board of cards

Groups become sections, notes become cards. Drag to reorder inside a section, or drop a card onto another to move it.

✍️

Live-preview editor

Write in Markdown and watch it render as you type. Headings, bold, lists, quotes, and code, with no preview button to toggle.

☑️

Tappable checklists

Turn any list into checkboxes you can tick off right in the note. Progress shows on the card, like 2 of 5 done.

🖼️

Paste images inline

Paste a screenshot and it shows up right where your cursor is. Images are stored separately so notes stay light.

⚡

Quick capture

Press Alt+Shift+N from anywhere and a thought drops straight into your Inbox. Right-click selected text to save it too.

⌘

Command palette

Hit Ctrl+K or Cmd+K to jump to any note or run any action. Live search runs across everything as you type.

⏰

Reminders

Give a note a due time and get a browser notification that links straight back to it when it is time.

🔒

Private by default

Everything lives in your browser. No account, no analytics, no network calls. Optional end-to-end encrypted sync if you want it.

📤

Export anytime

Back up to JSON, or export to Markdown as a zip with a file per note. Your notes are always yours to take with you.

Private by design

Your notes stay on your machine

Margin is local-first and works fully offline. It was built so your thinking never has to live on someone else's server.

  • ✓No account, ever. Install it and start typing.
  • ✓No analytics or tracking and no network calls.
  • ✓No host permissions. It never injects scripts into the pages you browse.
  • ✓You hold the keys. Optional sync is end-to-end encrypted with your passphrase.
Install

Up and running in a minute

Margin loads as an unpacked extension. Works in Chrome and any Chromium browser like Edge, Brave, or Arc.

1

Download and unzip

Grab the zip below and unzip it into a folder you'll keep.

2

Open extensions

Go to chrome://extensions in your browser.

3

Turn on Developer mode

Flip the toggle in the top-right corner.

4

Load unpacked

Click Load unpacked and pick the unzipped folder.

5

Open a new tab

That's it. Margin is now your new tab. Open one and start writing.

6

To undo

Disable or remove the extension and your normal new tab comes back.

Download Margin (.zip) v1.0.0 · ~250 KB
Prefer to build from source? Clone the repository and run: 
npm install
npm run build   # builds the extension into dist/
Then load the dist/ folder with Load unpacked.