Notez 0.3: Series Retrospective — From Local Notes to a Long-Term Trusted Workspace

Over the past few months, the Notez 0.3 series has essentially re-walked the path of "note-taking + knowledge base + AI collaboration".

If 0.2 was still more like an "advanced local note-taking tool", by 0.3.9 we’re more like building a workspace where you can "trust your text assets and workflows for the long term".

This article doesn’t go through the changelog version by version. Instead, it looks at several dimensions of what actually changed in the 0.3 series — and the thinking behind those changes.

1. Editing Experience: From "Nice to Use" to "Safe for Long Documents"

0.3.4 and 0.3.5 are the two updates in this series with the biggest engineering effort, but they may not look the most "flashy" from the outside.

In 0.3.4, I basically rebuilt the editor architecture from the ground up: rewrote the UI and state management, reworked the editing flow, and made details like the cursor, selection, and floating toolbar much more stable.
Then in 0.3.5, I focused specifically on performance for ultra-large files (500,000+ words): faster loading, smoother scrolling, and more reliable undo/redo and selection synchronization.

Why spend so much time on things that "don’t look like new features"?

Because in reality, many people use Notez to store "really big stuff": paper libraries, project documentation, knowledge archives, even novels and scripts. Only when these extreme scenarios run smoothly do I feel comfortable saying, "You can put important things in here."

The goal of the editor in the 0.3 series is to upgrade from "pretty good experience" to "a place that can be your primary environment for writing and organizing".

2. Retrieval and Context: Letting AI Truly Understand Your Knowledge Base

Starting from 0.3.1, Notez has taken more seriously one thing: giving AI a stronger sense of context around your knowledge base.

A new editing mode was added: in the right-side Chat panel, you can use natural language to rewrite, continue, polish, or restructure selected text—without copying and pasting back and forth.
We added citation previews, full-text view, and retrieval-hint dialog, so that before you see the answer, you already have a clearer sense of what AI is referencing and how it retrieved it.
Later minor versions kept improving deep retrieval accuracy, ranking, and latency, trying to stay stable under large-scale corpora.

To me, a good knowledge tool is not just one that "answers questions", but one where you can clearly know "why it answered this way" and "whether it missed important context".

The 0.3 series is far from the endpoint here, but it has started to tie together the three actions of "retrieval + editing + conversation".

3. Personalization and Sense of Control: Making the Tool Fit Your Habits

Starting in 0.3.3, Notez has gained more capabilities that lean towards personal style:

Custom prompt styles and tones: you can set multiple style presets for AI so that outputs better match your own writing preferences, instead of stacking prompts from scratch every time.
Custom icons for files/folders: in an increasingly large knowledge base, simple visual markers are often more useful than complicated categorization.
Pressing Space to stop AI output: a very small but high-frequency action—when you feel the answer is enough or going off-track, a single Space can stop it.

Later on, custom buttons in the editor toolbar and custom prompt buttons all fall along this same line: giving you more room to "tame the tool", instead of being constrained by a fixed workflow.

4. Under-the-Hood Architecture: Leaving Room for Long-Term Iteration

After the editor rewrite in 0.3.4, 0.3.6 did something also very "unsexy" but crucial: it refactored the entire file storage system.

You can now customize your save folder or specify a Vault path.
The internal storage format was adjusted as well, which means it’s incompatible with older versions—so I repeatedly emphasized "be sure to back up before upgrading".

The reason for making such an aggressive decision is that it’s increasingly clear to me: Notez is unlikely to be a product that ships a few "big versions" every year while keeping the internal architecture untouched. It’s more like something that will keep trialing, and refactoring, along a gradually deepening path.

To be able to keep adding capabilities in the future (for example, finer-grained indexing or more flexible multi-device sync designs), the underlying storage has to be simple, clear, and maintainable enough. In the short term this may just look like "fussing around", but in the long term it’s about keeping your data in a reliable structure.

5. Performance and Stability: Making "Fast" and "Reliable" the Default

Across the various patch versions, there’s also a less visible but important thread: performance and stability.

0.3.5’s optimization for ultra-large files;
0.3.6’s smoothing of interaction details like selection states and the floating toolbar;
0.3.7’s ongoing tuning of outline styles, selection/focus states, and local database concurrency and self-adaptive behavior;
0.3.2’s fix for missing citation links;
0.3.8’s fix for file metadata storage bugs;
0.3.9’s handling of network and routing issues when accessing overseas models.

These are all things you might not notice immediately, but once they break, it hurts.

Ideally, they should be things you barely feel: editing is always smooth, retrieval always responds, data is always there, login always succeeds. That’s also why many updates in the 0.3 series look "plain": the priority has been filling in low-level potholes rather than adding increasingly flashy toggles.

6. Accounts and Login: From Standalone App to Service

By 0.3.8 and 0.3.9, we started filling in a piece of the puzzle that had been intentionally postponed: accounts and login.

0.3.8 introduced basic user login, and many future online capabilities will be built on top of accounts.
0.3.9 further improved login options: it supports both online login and key-based login, and fixes network and routing issues when accessing overseas models.

The reason we postponed accounts to the later 0.3 stage is that I didn’t want Notez to start out as a tool where "you must log in and store everything in the cloud". For local knowledge and private notes, that premise is not friendly.

The direction now is:

Local stays a first-class citizen—you can use only local features if you want;
Accounts and online capabilities are an optional enhancement layer, providing stronger compute power, richer model access, and future collaboration possibilities.

7. After the 0.3 Series

Looking back from the 0.3.9 milestone, it feels a bit like: "These past six months have really been about laying groundwork for the future."

The editor rewrite and storage refactor are about the "infrastructure";
Deep retrieval and context optimization make AI better understand your content;
Custom styles, toolbar, and prompt buttons give you more ways to steer the tool;
Performance improvements and stability fixes make these capabilities truly usable;
Login and accounts start to connect this local workspace to a broader world of models and services.

If you’ve been using Notez since the 0.2 days and stayed with us through this "rebuild-heavy" period of 0.3, thank you for your patience and feedback. If you’ve just started using Notez recently, welcome to jump in at this stage where the foundation is relatively well laid.

What’s coming next?

Finer-grained knowledge management and retrieval;
Workflows closer to real-world writing and project collaboration;
More open ways to integrate models and tools;
And, under the premise of not sacrificing privacy, exploring more "multi-user / multi-device" forms.

If you have any particularly strong experience—good or bad—with any change in the 0.3 series, feel free to write in, open an issue, or post in the community. These real usage stories matter far more than any version number or changelog.