Bref

Notes that open before you blink.

A fast, minimal note-taking app. Your notes are plain Markdown files in a folder you choose, styled as you type.

Download Bref View on GitHub Free and open source · Linux, macOS, Windows
Bref showing the same note in the light and dark themes
75msto put the window on screen
1msper keystroke, even in 5,000 lines
4msto open the palette, 5,000 notes
.mdplain files, nothing locked in

Everything to write. Nothing in the way.

One window, one palette, one folder of files. The rest stays out of sight until you need it.

Styled as you type

Headings grow, bold and links render, the markers stay visible but dimmed. The file is always plain Markdown.

## Heading

Plain files, your folder

One .md per note, plus your .csv and .tsv. Sync with git, Syncthing, iCloud or Dropbox. A folder of notes you already have works as is.

vault/trip.md

Keyboard first

One palette finds notes by name or text, creates, switches and runs every command. Menus, boards and buttons answer the keys too. No toolbar, no save button.

Ctrl + P

Links and graph

Links between notes, tags, backlinks to the open note, renames that rewrite your links, and a graph of it all.

[[Budget 2026]]

Tables with formulas

Paste a table from a web page or a spreadsheet. A cell that starts with = computes, the file keeps the formula.

=sum(above)

Diagrams

Mermaid, LaTeX, or shapes and arrows drawn on a canvas, UML included. Saved as SVG in your vault.

diagram.svg

Daily note and capture

One key opens today's note. One shortcut of your desktop captures a line from anywhere, and the window is gone.

Ctrl + J

Sync in one action

Commit, receive, merge and send a vault kept in git. A real conflict keeps both versions as two notes.

Ctrl + Shift + S

Yours to dress

Sheets on a warm ground, serif page titles, a dozen readable themes, light and dark, IBM Plex built in, English and French, following your system.

Dracula · Nord · Gruvbox

And also: slash commands, a formatting bar, short fades you can turn off, blocks you drag, templates, find and replace in a note or the whole vault, several cursors, comments, embedded sections, kanban boards, a folder or a tag shown as a table, split panes and tabs you drag where they belong, the panel's views stacked in a dock left or right of the notes, dragged by their title, or opened as a tab, CSV and TSV in a grid, a trash you can undo, and messages that say what went wrong, in words, and stay until read.

Install

On first run, one click creates your vault in Documents/Notes, or open any folder of Markdown notes. That is the only setup.

A prebuilt package ships with every release, no compiler needed. pacman then tracks it as bref.

curl -LO https://github.com/alarboulletmarin/bref/releases/latest/download/bref-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
sudo pacman -U ./bref-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

With make install, Bref adds the bref command, an application menu entry and its icon; sudo make uninstall removes them. Full steps for each system.

Bref tells you when a new version is out. On Windows, macOS and Arch, one click updates it.

Releases