Commonplace is a modern take on one of the oldest tools in knowledge work: the commonplace book. Keep articles, PDFs, web pages, notes and images in one durable, fully-searchable place — organised the way you think.
For people who collect more than they can remember — and want a single, private library they can search in an instant, instead of a graveyard of rotting bookmarks and read-it-later queues.
Commonplace is built around retrieval — not as a feature on the side, but as the whole point.
One search box reaches everything — an article's text, a PDF's extracted words, a captured web page, and your own notes all feed a single full-text index. Type a half-remembered phrase; the item surfaces.
The decisive problem with any commonplace book was never collecting — paper and ink were cheap. It was retrieval: a book filled front-to-back is useless the moment it's full, because you can't find anything in it.
Locke solved that in 1685 with a clever first-letter, first-vowel index. Commonplace solves the same problem with instant full-text search across every word you've saved — the discipline the paper version demanded, done for you.
A shelf of books with tabbed sections — a mental model you already know. The search and tags give it the retrieval power the paper version never had.
A Library is the whole store. A Book is a collection on a theme — Theology, Radio, Software Ideas. Sections (and sub-sections) are the tabs within a book. Items are the things you save. Keep as many separate collections as you like; each is its own database on disk.
Whatever the type, every item carries the same spine — title, source, author, date, status, tags, notes and full extracted text — so one search and one tag system span all of them.
Import a .docx or .rtf and read it in a clean, formatted view. The text is extracted and indexed for search.
Attach a PDF; its text is extracted and its pages rendered for reading — with text-precise highlights and draggable sticky notes.
Paste a URL and capture the page as a clean reader-view snapshot. It's kept even if the original changes or vanishes.
Write a note in Markdown with live preview — and your own words are folded into the search index alongside everything else.
Drop in one or many images and keep them as a single item, tagged and searchable like the rest.
Paste the clipboard's richest form — rich text, HTML, an image or plain text — straight into a record.
Arrange text, image and link cards freely on a scrapbook page — drag, resize and colour them however you please.
Keep any file for the record — it lives in a readable folder beside the database, not locked inside an opaque blob.
Every searchable surface — article text, a PDF's words, a captured page and your own notes — feeds one fast index. Retrieval isn't a feature here; it's the reason the program exists.
A lightweight tag tree — reorder, promote, demote, merge. One item can sit under as many tags as you like, surfacing wherever you go looking for it. This is Locke's "common place" heading, modernised.
Attaching a PDF, capturing a page, pasting a clipping or dropping in images is close to one gesture. Tagging and filing are possible and pleasant — never required before you can save.
PDFs and captured pages aren't just stored — they're read inside Commonplace, with highlights and sticky notes pinned where they belong, and your notes searchable alongside the source.
Keep work, study and home in their own self-contained databases. Each collection is its own folder on disk; switch between them live, back any one up on its own.
The database and every saved file live in a readable folder you choose. No account, no cloud, no telemetry, no subscription. Open the folder, back it up, move it, or walk away — your files are still yours.
Articles, PDFs, pages, notes and images become durable records — not bookmarks that rot or a queue you never drain.
One search box reaches every word you've saved, including your own marginal notes. Retrieval is the whole point.
Books, sections and a tag tree let you file things under headings that make sense to you — as much, or as little, as you want.
Local-first by design: a readable folder on your own disk, on Windows or Linux. No account, no server, no lock-in.
A single, durable, searchable place to save what you find — and the retrieval power its paper ancestors never had.
Windows 10 and 11, and Linux, 64-bit. It's a native cross-platform desktop application — the same app and the same data folder on either operating system.
Both. Install it the usual way, or run it as a portable application from a USB stick or any folder. The portable build is the same binary with the same functionality and reads the same database files. Useful if you move between machines or prefer not to install software at all.
In a readable folder on your own machine — a database file plus a files/ folder holding everything you've saved, in a location you choose. Back it up, put it in a synced folder, or copy it to another machine. Commonplace doesn't phone home and there's no cloud component. Keep as many separate collections as you need.
No. Writing is supported — notes are first-class and fully searchable — but the organising idea is the collection of saved things, not the page of prose. Think of it as part OneNote, part Zotero, part Obsidian, but simpler, and built around keeping and finding rather than authoring.
It's named after the commonplace book — the personal store of passages, facts and observations that careful readers kept for centuries. There's a fuller write-up of the history and the thinking.
Updates within the current major version are included. If Commonplace doesn't suit you, drop me a line within 30 days and I'll refund the purchase.
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