Take notes without leaving PowerToys Command Palette.
Type your thought, press Enter, and it is saved as a Markdown file in a folder you choose.
English · 繁體中文
Inkling adds note taking to Command Palette: capture a thought in seconds, then browse, search, and edit your notes without opening another app. Notes are plain Markdown files in a folder you choose, not records inside an app: any editor opens them, your cloud drive syncs them, and nothing is lost if Inkling goes away. Sync, phone access, and heavier editing therefore come from the cloud drive and editor you already use.
Microsoft Store — Inkling Notes,
or winget install --source msstore --id 9NDGWN4JTXHH. Inkling is also listed in
Command Palette's built-in Extension Gallery, so you can find and install it
without leaving the palette. Inside Command Palette the commands are just
"Inkling".
| Requires | |
|---|---|
| Windows | 10.0.19041 or later |
| Command Palette | 0.11 or later (the standalone Microsoft.CommandPalette package) |
No .NET install needed — the published package is self-contained. The assets on GitHub Releases are CI builds for the Store submission and are not signed, so Windows will not sideload them; to build it yourself see docs/development.md.
Summon Command Palette, type Inkling, and pick Inkling: Quick capture.
Type your thought and press Enter. That is the whole loop.
To write the body in the same breath, use the ;; separator:
coffee machine idea;;Look up pour-over vs. espresso first. Everything before it
is the title, everything after is the body. A title on its own is a perfectly
good note.
Want it in fewer keystrokes? Give Quick capture an alias: CmdPal Settings →
Extensions → Inkling → Inkling: Quick capture → Alias. With ! set, typing !
and a space opens capture directly. Punctuation beats a letter, which would
collide with real searches. A global hotkey skips the search box entirely.
The UI follows your Windows display language — English, Traditional Chinese, or Simplified Chinese. Screenshots here were taken on an English system.
| Quick capture | Type and press Enter. Notes with similar titles are listed underneath so the same thing is not captured twice. Multi-line text on the clipboard offers itself as the body (why) |
| Preview after capture | Saving keeps you on the note so you can check it; Enter again closes the palette. Switchable in Settings |
| Browse and search | Titles and bodies are both searched, multiple words are AND-ed, title matches rank first. With no matches, Enter goes straight to quick capture |
| Markdown preview | Enter renders the note. Ctrl+U toggles raw source and remembers the choice — useful for pasted HTML that vanishes when rendered |
| Edit | Ctrl+E opens the built-in form; Ctrl+O opens the file in your default editor instead. Saving closes the palette, the same as creating a note |
| Copy and locate | Ctrl+Shift+C copies the body without the front matter; Ctrl+L shows the .md in File Explorer |
| Scratchpad | A note that is always there, for anything that needs no title. No autosave (why) — Tab then Enter saves and closes |
| Delete | Ctrl+D deletes after confirming, and the file goes to the Recycle Bin. Inkling: Delete notes handles many at once and always confirms before touching files Inkling did not create |
Archiving, tags, and pinning are not built yet.
With a note selected, on the list and preview pages:
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Ctrl+E |
Edit (form) |
Ctrl+N |
New note (list page only) |
Ctrl+U |
Toggle rendered / source |
Ctrl+Shift+C |
Copy body |
Ctrl+O |
Open in the default app |
Ctrl+L |
Select the file in File Explorer |
Ctrl+D |
Delete (list page only) |
Ctrl+K |
Open the menu — every item shows its own key |
Only Copy carries Shift, because Ctrl+C belongs to the search box.
Which letters are off limits and why.
Enter and Ctrl+Enter press the two buttons in the bottom toolbar, so what
they do depends on the page — the toolbar always shows the current pair. On the
edit form, save with Tab to "Save" then Enter; Esc leaves without saving.
Why the pages are deliberately mirrored.
CmdPal does not let users rebind an extension's shortcuts. The aliases and global hotkeys of top-level commands are yours to configure.
---
id: 20260810-143052-a7f3
title: coffee machine idea
created: 2026-08-10T14:30:52+08:00
updated: 2026-08-11T09:15:00+08:00
---
Look up pour-over vs. espresso first.The data format is a promise:
- The
idis the note's identity; the file name is only for humans. Renaming a title never renames the file, which keeps cloud-synced folders out of trouble. - Front matter Inkling does not understand is left alone, including fields added by Obsidian and dates it cannot parse.
.mdfiles without front matter show up too, with the title taken from the first meaningful line. Point Inkling at an existing notes folder and it just works; those files are never rewritten.- Files must be UTF-8 (a BOM is fine). Anything else is skipped rather than read as garbage, and the list says how many were skipped. Subfolders are scanned; new notes go in the root.
- The scratchpad is
scratchpad.mdin the root, plain text with no front matter, hidden from the list and from search.
Select the Inkling row in the main search box and press Ctrl+K → Settings,
or CmdPal Settings → Extensions → Inkling.
| Setting | Default |
|---|---|
| Notes folder | %OneDrive%\Inkling, or Documents\Inkling without OneDrive. Full paths only; created on first save. "Browse…" opens the folder picker |
| Quick capture separator | ;; — any length; half-width and full-width count as the same; clearing it restores the default |
| Preview after capture | On |
Inkling does not sync. It writes Markdown into the folder you choose and leaves offline availability, conflict handling, and phone access to your cloud drive. Obsidian and similar tools can point at the same folder.
OneDrive users: mark the folder "Always keep on this device". With Files
On-Demand, cloud-only placeholders trigger a download on read and search stalls.
If two machines edit one note at once, OneDrive makes a name-ComputerName.md
copy; both rows appear, tagged Conflict copy, and each acts on its own file.
Changed a setting and nothing happened — close the settings page and reopen it. That page is bound to one extension instance, so after a reload Save silently does nothing.
Wrong UI language — it follows the Windows display language, not the regional format, and there is no override. Sign out and back in after changing it.
Your settings reverted to the defaults — if settings.json was left invalid,
Inkling moves it aside as settings.json.corrupt-<timestamp> and starts fresh
rather than failing silently forever. The old values are still in that file.
Everything else — deploy, registration, trimming, the diagnostic log — is in docs/development.md.
The in-depth docs are written in Traditional Chinese.
| docs/development.md | Build, deploy, project layout, troubleshooting |
| docs/design-notes.md | The reasoning behind every decision, for maintainers and other CmdPal extension authors |
| docs/known-issues.md | Known defects, each with a reproduction |
| CHANGELOG.md | Release history |
| CONTRIBUTING.md | Read before changing this repo |
| PRIVACY.md | What the app collects and sends (nothing, and nothing) |
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome — use the issue templates. Before opening a PR read CONTRIBUTING.md; this repo has a few rules that are not obvious.