About CoreNotes
CoreNotes is a Cornell notes app for high-school and college students. It runs in a browser tab, keeps your notes on your own machine, and costs nothing.
The method
Walter Pauk developed the Cornell Note-taking System at Cornell University in the 1950s, originally published in How to Study in College (now in its eleventh edition). The system works because it separates the recording of information from the processing of it — you write notes on the right, then generate questions on the left within 24 hours.
Most note apps implement the Cornell layout but skip the method. They give you the two columns without the recitation workflow, the spaced review intervals, or the weekly reflection step. CoreNotes implements all of it: every note carries the stage it has reached — recorded, reduced, recited, reflected, reviewed — so the five Rs are a sequence you move through rather than a template you fill in.
Why it’s free
Study tools should not be behind paywalls, and a student should not have to open an account to write down what happened in a lecture. Cornell Notes is a 70-year-old method in the public domain. This is an implementation, not an invention.
No venture capital. No subscription. No adverts. The source is not public at the moment.
Technical
The app itself runs entirely in your browser — the notes are written to local storage first, which is why it works with no connection. Accounts and sync are the one part that needs a server.
| Component | Technology |
|---|---|
| Static site generator | Eleventy v3 (ESM) |
| App bundler | Vite 5 |
| Language | TypeScript 5 (strict mode) |
| Local storage | Dexie 4 / IndexedDB |
| Search (marketing) | Pagefind |
| Offline support | Service Worker (cache-first) |
| Hosting | Cloudflare Pages |
| Fonts | Bunny Fonts (GDPR-safe) |
Accounts and sync run on a Cloudflare Worker with D1. Signing in is required — it is what tells us which notes are yours — and every note is written to your browser first, so the app keeps working with no connection and syncs afterwards.
Privacy
CoreNotes writes your notes to your browser’s IndexedDB and syncs them to your account. We hold your email address and your notes, and we can read them — we don’t, and there is no advertising, tracking or analytics anywhere in the product, but that is a promise about behaviour rather than a claim about what is possible. We considered locking them with a passphrase only you knew, built it, and took it out: a second unrecoverable secret cost more in lockouts than it bought. See the privacy policy for the full accounting.
Clearing your browser’s site data no longer loses your work, because your account still has it — the gap is anything written offline that has not synced yet. CoreNotes still asks the browser to mark its storage as persistent, warns you past 80% of your quota, and tracks how long it has been since your last backup. Getting your work out is deliberately easy — any note exports as a Markdown .md file, Export Markdown writes out every notebook at once, and a full JSON backup imports straight back into the app.
The marketing site (this site) loads fonts from Bunny Fonts — a GDPR-compliant Google Fonts mirror that does not set tracking cookies or collect IP addresses.
There is no analytics on either the marketing site or the app.
→ Read the full privacy policy
Contact
CoreNotes runs all five Rs — not just the two columns. Free to use, nothing to install, and it keeps working when the wifi does not.
Start a Cornell note →