note.md

note.md earns its 'academic IDE' label: it's the rare tool that treats reading, note-taking, citing, and writing as one workflow in one window. The core pitch holds up—your PDFs, highlights, notes, and citations all live together locally as markdown, so the link between what you read and what you wrote never breaks. If you're on a Mac and currently maintain Zotero plus Obsidian plus a PDF reader, this removes a real chunk of friction. The free tier is not a hobbled trial; it's the full writing workspace, which makes adoption cheap. The premium AI is the differentiator, but keep your expectations grounded. Semantic search, automatic indexing, Matrix extraction, and Evidence Scan are designed to surface and organize what you've read—they don't summarize or write for you. That's a privacy win (everything runs on-device), but it won't replace the analytical heavy lifting. If you wanted a cloud LLM to draft your related-work section, this isn't that tool. Where it bites: macOS is the only platform. No Windows, no Linux, no web version. Real-time collaboration is absent—you can share files, but concurrent editing isn't in scope. Students get a discount, but it's still an additional cost on top of an already expensive Mac. The app is younger than Zotero, so the plugin ecosystem and citation-style depth aren't yet comparable. Comparing to the stack: Zotero + Obsidian offers cross-platform flexibility and a massive plugin library, but you're managing four tools and custom wiring. note.md consolidates that into one app with deep integration—the /cite command anchors to exact highlights, and the graph view builds itself as you write. If you need Word integration this week or work across operating systems, stick with the stack. If you're a solo Mac researcher who wants privacy