Notes, files, the web and AI belong together — in the one place your Mac should have had all along. ViPKM (Visual PKM) is that place: an outliner with tags and tasks, built-in readers for PDFs, web pages and videos, voice notes with on-device transcripts, Claude to ask about your notes, and AI flashcards that bring back what matters just before you would forget it.
Offline-first — iCloud sync and Claude only when you turn them on · macOS 13 Ventura or later, Apple silicon · 11 languages · 14-day free trial · Windows, iPhone & iPad planned
Your own folders, browsed as galleries — with notes on every folder and file.
Most note apps only know what you put inside them. The documents your work actually depends on stay in folders the notes can't see, or have to be imported and copied.
ViPKM brings your own folder into the outline as it is. Every file gets a card and a page for notes, tags, tasks and links, and its quotes and figures become notes too. Scanning only reads your folder. The one change is one you ask for: PDF highlights are also written into the PDF, so other apps see them too.
Reading, capturing, citing, thinking and remembering usually happen in separate tools that don't know about each other. Here they are one system: every capture is a node, linked to its exact source and to everything else you know.
Bring in a PDF, save a web page, open a video or record a voice note.
Quote text, clip a figure, grab a video frame at its timestamp. Each becomes a note.
Every note keeps a link back to the exact page or moment, under a resource with full citation details.
Tag it, link it, put it on a board or mind map beside other sources, and see it in the graph.
Turn what matters into flashcards and review it just before you would forget.
A quote you clip from page 42 is not a copy pasted into a document: it is a node that knows its paper, its page and its tags. Put it on a board next to a frame from a lecture video and a note from your daily page, and every piece still opens its source with one click.
No more switching between a PDF viewer, a browser, a video player and a recorder. Each one is built in, and everything you mark becomes a note linked to the exact page, place or second it came from.
Shown: a public-domain thesis (Naval Postgraduate School, 2011), the Wikipedia article “Iron Gates” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and a lecture clip and voice note made for this demo from public-domain images.
Inside the app with your own Anthropic API key (kept in the macOS Keychain, billed by Anthropic to you), or from Claude Desktop and Claude Code through MCP, with no key at all. Both are optional; everything else works offline.
“What did I work on this week?” “Which tasks are open, and what for?” Claude searches and reads your pages, daily notes, tags and the text of your files, shows each step, and links what it mentions. It can add to a page only with your approval — it never edits or deletes.
Claude writes questions from any block of notes, including its images, for spaced review. It can also identify a document when DOI and ISBN lookups find nothing, and pick “On this day” events for your daily note — always showing the cost first.
Connect once and ask about your notes from the Claude app, with no API key. Claude can also write: new notes tagged #ai, in today's daily note or under a page you name — and “save this chat” copies a whole conversation word for word, your questions highlighted and Claude's drawings and web pictures kept as images. ViPKM picks up the new notes by itself.
Mark a block of notes and Claude writes a few questions and answers from it — including from its images. You review them in a short daily session and rate each one: Again, Hard, Good or Easy.
Scheduling uses FSRS, a modern open-source spaced-repetition algorithm that is also used by other study tools. It estimates how stable your memory of each card is and how hard the card is, and brings the card back when your predicted chance of recalling it falls to the target you choose.
It rests on two well-established findings from memory research: practice spread over time is remembered better than the same practice in one sitting, and trying to recall is remembered better than reading again. That is why each card asks first and shows the answer after.
Open the graph beside any page and keep writing. Pages are dots and links are lines; the page you are on sits in the middle with its links lit. Turn on pictures and every dot shows the page's cover, the file's thumbnail or its first image — papers, maps and photos you recognise at a glance.
Images in the graph: public-domain USGS and NASA material.
Callouts are ordinary # types under #notes › #annotation: #quote, #highlight, #capture and #callout. Quotes from PDFs and web pages, and lines that start with >, are #quote; highlighted or coloured text makes a line #highlight; pasted images and PDF or web clips are #capture, with their caption under the picture.
Type tags say what a node is — a #task, a #book, a #meeting — and give it fields such as dates, status or authors. Reference tags say what it is about. Tags form trees and inherit fields, so a new kind of thing is one line away.
Every day has its own page with its schedule at the top. Write without deciding where things belong — tag them, and they appear in the right places. Tasks and events are ordinary rows, shown in month, week and day views.
14:00 Call or 10:00-11:30 Meeting to schedule
An infinite canvas for text, LaTeX formulas, images, shapes and your materials, connected with arrows. The same blocks also read as a single document, one below the other.
Bring a folder from your drive into the app: each file gets a card, a cover and a page for notes. Books and papers become resources with proper citation fields, linked to their files.
ViPKM doesn't wall your work off from the rest of the Mac. Jump from a note to the file in Finder and back again, link to any page from other apps, and gather files to send without moving the originals.
From any file's page, “Show in folder” opens it in Finder. The other way round, right-click a file or folder in Finder → Services → “Open in ViPKM” jumps straight to its page.
“Copy page link” in the page menu gives a vipkm://x-callback-url/open?node=… address. Paste it into a calendar, a mail, a task list or another note, and one click opens that exact page. Links can also open a PDF at an annotation or a page in the web reader.
Collect copies of files and notes — click cards in any gallery, or choose “Add to box” — then start a new email with all of them attached, or drag them out from Finder. Your originals stay as they are; closing the box deletes the copies.
When rows are not enough, a row becomes a full document with its own toolbar: headings, lists, quotes, code, formulas, tables, callouts and multi-column layouts. All documents are gathered under #document, and one click opens the text in your Markdown editor of choice.
Type # to ##### and a space for headings H1–H5; select many lines and delete them in one step, with one undo.
See your pages as dots and links in a panel beside the page, one to three steps out or everything, with previews and pictures.
Names, notes, boards and the contents of your files — PDF, Office, Apple and OpenDocument formats — ignoring case, diacritics and script.
Keep notes, tags, boards, images and library files the same on your Macs, through your own iCloud Drive. Off until you turn it on.
The interface and help are available in English, Serbian, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Hebrew. Your notes stay exactly as you wrote them.
Violet, Warm gray, Slate, Graphite, Paper, Neutral and Mono — each with its own colours and fonts, from serif reading text to a monospaced code look. Follow the system's light or dark mode, or pick one. Language, layout, outline style and editor width sit right beside them in Settings, with sliders for the sidebar's text size (12–22 px) and icon size (12–26 px). The sidebar itself is in colour: every place and tag with its own icon.
Pay once, use it for good. No subscription and no account.
Launch price until 15 January 2027, then 30 €.
Payments, taxes and invoices are handled by Paddle, our Merchant of Record. Prices may include VAT/sales tax depending on your country. Features that use Claude need your own Anthropic API key; that usage is billed by Anthropic, not included in the price. See the refund policy.