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AboutA notepad that stays out of the way
Inkpad is a single-purpose tool: a plain-text editor that runs in your browser and remembers what you typed without ever asking you to press save.
How it started
It began as a personal scratchpad. Ideas for blog posts arrived at inconvenient moments, and the process of opening a full word processor — then deciding on a file name, then a location on disk — was enough friction to lose the idea entirely. What was needed was a text box that saved itself.
Other people wanted the same thing, so it grew into a public tool. The original goal has not changed: open a page, type, and trust that the words will still be there tomorrow.
Design principles
- Plain text only. No markup, no hidden formatting, no vendor lock-in. What you copy out is exactly what you typed.
- Mobile first. The editor is built for a phone screen first and expanded for larger displays — panels become bottom sheets, the toolbar scrolls sideways, and nothing depends on hover.
- Local by default. There is no backend. Your text is written to your own browser's storage and never transmitted anywhere.
- Few, complete features. Every capability is finished rather than half-built: find & replace works with regular expressions, the character map covers more than one alphabet, autosave survives crashes.
- No accounts, ever. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to upsell, and no analytics watching what you write.
What it is not
Inkpad deliberately avoids syntax highlighting, Markdown preview, collaboration and cloud sync. Those are all reasonable features — they just belong to a different tool. Keeping them out is what allows this one to load instantly and behave predictably.
Storage and limits
Documents live in localStorage, which most browsers cap somewhere around five
megabytes per origin. For ordinary notes that is far more than enough, but it is not an
archive. If a note matters, use Save to download a .txt copy
to your computer.
Free to use anywhere. Personal projects, company documents, school work or government offices — all fine, at no cost, with no registration.
Browser support
Anything reasonably modern works: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Edge, iOS Safari, Samsung Internet and even Internet Explorer 11. JavaScript must be enabled.