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Heynote is a free, open-source dedicated scratchpad for developers built on Electron, CodeMirror and Math.js. One persistent buffer, language-aware blocks, and a built-in calculator make it the polished replacement for stray scratch.txt files.
Heynote is a free, open-source scratchpad app from Swedish developer Jonatan Heyman that turns one persistent text buffer into a block-based playground for code snippets, JSON responses, half-written Slack messages and napkin math. We rate it 86/100 — the best dedicated scratchpad on the market for developers who want zero ceremony and have outgrown ~/scratch.txt, with the caveat that there is no mobile app and no built-in sync.
Heynote was created by Jonatan Heyman — the Stockholm-based engineer behind the popular load-testing framework Locust — and the first commit landed on . He launched it on Hacker News just before Christmas 2023, the post hit 1,000+ upvotes, and the project has steadily grown to 5,200+ GitHub stars and 267 forks while staying a single-maintainer side project. The latest stable release is 2.8.2 (), with a 2.9.0-beta available for early testers.
The core idea is brutally simple: instead of opening a new Notion page, a fresh tab in VS Code, or another untitled.txt every time you want to think for a moment, Heynote gives you one always-open buffer divided into colored blocks. Each block has its own language — JSON, Markdown, JavaScript, Python, SQL, YAML — with proper CodeMirror syntax highlighting and one-keystroke auto-format. It is closer to a long-running whiteboard than a notes app.
23 * 60 + 45 minutes to hours, define variables, run unit conversions and even live currency conversions. Easily the most-loved feature for engineers who keep a calculator open all day.
Sentiment is unusually warm for a category as crowded as note-taking. The original Show HN thread hit 1,000+ points and the most-quoted comments call out the math/calculator block as “the killer feature I didn’t know I needed” and praise the explicit refusal to add bloat. Reddit threads in r/programming and r/webdev consistently describe Heynote as a permanent replacement for half-deleted scratch.txt files, Apple Notes, and Sticky Notes on Windows.
The honest criticism is consistent and worth knowing before you switch. There is no mobile app — and the maintainer has explicitly closed mobile feature requests as out of scope. There is no built-in sync; you have to point a third-party sync tool at the buffer folder. There is no real-time collaboration, so it is a single-user tool by design. And while the Electron shell is fast enough on modern hardware, users on older laptops occasionally complain about the 200–300 MB memory footprint that comes with Chromium.
Heynote is 100% free and open source. There is no paid tier, no subscription, no “Pro” upsell and no telemetry. The license is a permissive custom license that allows personal and internal commercial use; the code lives on GitHub.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Heynote | $0 forever | Every feature, all platforms, no limits, no account required |
Best for: Working developers, SREs, data engineers, and technical PMs who want a single always-open scratch buffer with code-aware highlighting, fast launching, and a built-in calculator. Particularly valuable if you currently juggle a TextEdit window, a calculator app, and an “untitled-1” tab in VS Code.
Not ideal for: Teams that need real-time collaboration (use Notion or AFFiNE), users who need a mobile companion (use Obsidian or Capacities), or anyone storing client-confidential notes — there is no encryption layer beyond your filesystem.
Pros:
Cons:
The closest alternatives in the “developer scratchpad” niche are Edna (a web-based fork-style alternative with cloud sync), Boop (macOS-only, transformation-focused), and Notable (a more traditional Markdown notes app). On the heavier end, Obsidian and Capacities are full PKM systems that overlap with Heynote but trade simplicity for power.
Yes — if you are a developer or technical user who already keeps a stray text file open all day, Heynote is the polished version of that habit and it costs nothing. The math block, the language-aware blocks and the global hotkey will earn back their five-minute setup within a day. Subtract points only if you genuinely need mobile, sync, or collaboration — in which case look at Obsidian, Capacities, or a hosted note app instead. We rate Heynote 86/100.
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