Typst-based PKM for academics, writers, and everyone.
InkyCap is a personal knowledge management tool that helps you explore ideas and write. Tailored for academic workflows, research, writing, task and date awareness; InkyCap provides flexible ways to organize your information. Resurface ideas and convert your linked notes into beautiful publications or other outputs.
Write in Typst
Write with the ease of Markdown and the typesetting power of Typst; equations, figures, poems, visualizations, and citations render perfectly.
Connect your thinking
Connect ideas via [[wikilinks]], view a journal flow, query and compile into new documents, and graph how your curiosity emerges.
You are the sovereign of your data
Every note is a plain-text file stored locally on your computer. No cloud requirements, no generative AI, and no vendor lock-in.
Find what you need, reflected in your notes
InkyCap makes it easy to access your notes directly from your local file/folder structure. The search interface offers familiar academic search expression functionality and regex. You can query your notes' properties to build database-like tables. InkyCap's Journal Scroll lets you view your notes in a chronological flow and the Mycelial View helps you discover where your notes want to grow.
A growing mycelium of notes
The Mycelial View surfaces connections and unnamed concepts as they emerge from the paths inherent in your work. Instead of graphing links between notes, Mycelial View shows you latent links and potential new areas to explore, which are based on the connective strength of recurring content.
Review notes and activities clustered in time
The Journal Scroll view enables you to select any note and scroll back and forth chronologically so that you can easily find the things that you were working on around the same time.
Collections
Create a collection of notes by selecting properties, tags, creation or modification times, and more. A Collection displays all corresponding notes in a table that you can sort by column headers or export as a spreadsheet. Collections turn your notebox into a form of database with many additional features.
Linked notes & zettelkasten
Connect ideas as you type with [[wikilinks]]. InkyCap will maintain the connections for you and enable you to create new notes based on those links. All linked notes are ready to access from the context-aware sidebar. You can view a Journal Scroll of your notes going forward or backward in time via automatic zettelkasten IDs (or other parameters) with links providing extra context as you scroll.
Convenient Typst
The visual editor (WYSIWYM) simplifies Typst markup for beginners. Toggle to the source editor for the full power of Typst. Headings, equations, tables, poetry with idiosyncratic spacing, and code render instantly. The document you are editing is nearly the document you will publish. Select Reading View to see a precise rendering of your work.
Visual editor
Frequently used formatting is accessible from a popup toolbar or / commands. You can also enter Typst markup directly and the visual editor recognizes it. The visual editor inserts discrete graphical components to enable point-and-click adjustments without writing the markup.
Source editor
Built with the open source Typst compiler, you can write and edit using the standard Typst markup. Source edit mode reveals all of the markup behind the Visual editor's display. It functions as you would expect with autocomplete and supports export options such as PDF and HTML.
Templates for style, packages for power
Use the Typst Universe to access templates and packages. InkyCap can import templates for a variety of document styles and outputs beyond documents, such as presentations. You can extend InkyCap's functionality using Typst packages from the Universe. Create visualizations, charts, diagrams, sheet music, and more.
Friendly toward academic workflows
Type tasks or dates in-context, the agenda will track them for you. Use the Collections feature to export a selection of notes as a single PDF like a book, or separately but grouped for example, to make a website. Citations work through native Zotero and BibTeX integration. Collaborate with colleagues by synchronizing through the built-in git functionality or InkyCap's import/export tool, which tracks changes for review.
Citations and bibliographic info is first class
Keep your sources in one place and cite them with an "@" keystroke. InkyCap reads information from your local Zotero database or a .bibtex file. Citations in your notes produce a properly formatted reference list in the style you choose. You can use a global citation source for all your work or specify a distinct file for a project. InkyCap can also import your Zotero notes.
Basic, flexible collaboration
A simple built-in interface enables anyone to use the popular tool, Git, to write in a collaborative (but not real time collaboration) workflow. Synchronize your work on a server such as Codeberg.org, GitHub.com, your own git server, or send a zip package back-and-forth (no git server needed). Press the Sync button and InkyCap will automatically manage changes between you and your collaborators. You can work with suggestions, approve, reject, and annotate or see previous versions.
Agenda of tasks and dates
List tasks within notes, embed them anywhere you are writing. Include memorable dates such as the submission deadline for a call for proposals, academic year milestones, and more. InkyCap shows you an agenda that extracts all tasks and dates from wherever they occur in your notes. The agenda can be searched, sorted, and tagged for your needs. Projects set up in the Collections feature will automatically have their own agendas as you work.
Customizable
You decide what your notes should look like, you can create scaffolds and rules to automate frequently used note structures. Toggle distraction-free mode and enable different features to focus the text you're working on. If you don't like InkyCap's default colour scheme, change the colour preference for light or dark modes.
Fonts bundled for convenience
InkyCap includes elegant fonts suited to different forms of academic work. Junicode for medievalists, linguists, and other disciplines. JuliaMono for scientific and technical notes. iA Writer Duo for the creative souls seeking something closer to a typewriter. You can also use Typst defaults or your own fonts.
Export and import options
Because your notes are Typst underneath, you can export PDFs for submission, portable Markdown, HTML for the web, as well as ODT, DOCX, and LaTeX. Write once and it will be easier to take your work to different journals, a seminar, or a blog without a lot of reformatting. Create or import Typst templates and packages from the Typst Universe to extend functionality or design documents. You can also import from markdown or an entire vault.
What InkyCap does not provide.
| Not Provided | What You Can Do |
|---|---|
| Drawing tools | Easily install packages from the Typst Universe, which gives you a great variety of visualization possibilities. InkyCap also provides one specific form of visualization through its Mycelial View. |
| Real time collaboration | InkyCap includes basic, built-in, asynchronous collaboration features (e.g. change tracking). If you will collaborate with many people online and need real time capabilities, those will be better served using something like the Typst app's online collaboration instead. |
| Mobile app | InkyCap is available as a desktop application (Linux, Mac, and Windows). There are no current plans for a mobile version. Because you can paste or import markdown into InkyCap and it converts that to Typst, you could capture your ideas on a mobile device using a markdown app and transfer those to InkyCap |
| Publish to the Web | You can export your notes from InkyCap to HTML files and then publish those to your server. InkyCap does not host a service for publishing your notes as web pages. |
| Hosted sync or backup across computers | InkyCap lets you automate a back-up process of your notes to a file archive, which you can back-up to any file recovery service you use. You can also sync your files using the git repository of your choice with InkyCap's integrated git connectivity (or use your own sync/backup service). We do not provide a hosted service to automatically synchronize or back-up your information. |
| Canvas-style organization | InkyCap does not currently provide a layer in which you can organize your notes as parts of a visual structure. |
| Grammar checker | InkyCap includes a multilingual spell-checker but there is no built-in grammar checker, speech-to-text, or integrated interface to tools like LanguageTool.org. Through InkyCap's extensions it is possible to connect to LanguageTool (or another app) to operate on your notes. |
| Plugin ecosystem | Typst has an established ecosystem of packages that you can benefit from installing and using in InkyCap. These provide all kinds of additional functionality. You can also write your own packages to use in InkyCap and contribute to the Typst Universe. InkyCap is new and has no plugin ecosystem of its own but there is some experimental, basic connectivity to other applications via its Extensions setting. |