Six steps. The longest one is a download, and you only do it once. Everything below happens on your own hardware and your own wifi — there is no account to create, because there is no server to create it on.
Said plainly, because this is the question people arrive with. If you own a reMarkable, you can import your existing files and search them — but you cannot yet write into gemnotes on the device. Supernote and Kindle Scribe are not read at all.
We would rather tell you that now than after you've spent an evening on it.
| Device | Live writing | Import old notes | How |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boox (Go 10.3 tested) | YES | YES | Native app, raw pen strokes with pressure, 5 ms ink latency |
| Any e-ink tablet | YES — via browser | — | A writing surface that runs in the tablet's own browser. Nothing to install; ~30 ms latency |
| reMarkable | NOT YET | YES | .rm v6 files read directly, verified against real files |
| Supernote | NOT YET | NOT YET | Planned — .note via community tooling |
| Kindle Scribe | NOT YET | NOT YET | Not surveyed |
| Paper notebooks | N/A | NOT YET | Planned — photograph the page, recover strokes from the image |
gemnotes runs its models locally, which is the whole privacy promise — and it's also a real cost, so here it is up front:
The tablet does not read your handwriting by itself. It records ink and hands it over — that's what keeps the tablet fast and the battery honest.
This is the part that holds your archive, runs recognition and serves MCP. It creates one folder and one index file:
~/gemnotes/notebooks/*.ink ← your strokes. The source of truth. ~/gemnotes/index.db ← derived. Delete it and it rebuilds.
Nothing else on your machine is touched, and nothing is written outside that folder.
First launch downloads the vision model that reads handwriting. It's the slow step; on a normal connection expect to leave it alone for a while.
You do not install a runtime yourself and you do not pull models from a command line. Making that your homework was a decision we reversed on purpose — it quietly selected for people who could have built this themselves.
Sideload the app, open it once, and grant it the pen. It appears in your app list like any other app and changes nothing about your device.
It can optionally take over as the launcher — so opening the tablet lands on a page — but that is off by default, is a single toggle inside the app, and can be undone three independent ways including one from your computer. The stock Boox launcher is never removed or disabled.
With both on the same network, the tablet finds the computer and sends strokes to it. Nothing routes through the internet — there is no relay server, because there is no server.
Honest limit: the sync server currently filters by local address range and has no pairing handshake. That stops a stranger on café wifi. It is not yet security, and we're not going to call it that.
Write something on the tablet. Send it. On the computer, open the notebook, hit read this page, then type a few words from it into the search box.
Accents are stripped in the index, so typing without diacritics still finds the page — which matters, because handwriting recognition gets accents wrong far more often than it gets letters wrong.
That's the whole loop. Everything else on this site is built on top of it.
If you have years of reMarkable files, point the app at them. It reads .rm v6 directly — the strokes, not a flattened image — and works through the backlog as a queue, so you can close the laptop and it picks up where it stopped rather than starting over.
This is the moment the product either earns its keep or doesn't. In a real run over an 11-page archive, three pages that had never been findable by text came back on the first three queries tried.
Almost always the two are on different wifi networks — guest network, 5 GHz vs 2.4 GHz band on the same router, or a VPN on the laptop. Same network, no VPN, try again.
It is much better on writing laid out in lines than on a rough scratch page — and on scratch pages we do not have a trustworthy number, so we don't quote one. Small writing was a real bug on our side, now fixed; if a page reads badly, tell us and send it if you can.
Export to SVG, PNG, PDF or .ink and take the folder. The format is documented. This is the least dramatic paragraph on the site and it's the reason anyone can justify pouring five years of notes in.