A commonplace book that keeps itself.
Trove holds every note, quote, and half-formed thought, then connects them so nothing you write is ever lost.
Three principles
Capture without ceremony
No folders to choose, no tags to invent, no template to fill in. Write the thought down and move on. Filing is the software's job.
Connection over collection
A note gains its value next to its neighbors. Trove links related ideas the moment they are written, the way a good margin note points across a library.
Owned like paper
Your notes are plain Markdown files on your own device. Readable in fifty years, with or without us. Sync, when you want it, is end-to-end encrypted.
The card catalog, without the cards
Scholars once kept commonplace books and card indexes because memory is unreliable. Trove keeps the index for you. Ask for a half-remembered idea in your own words, and the right note returns, alongside everything written near it.
Old notes resurface on their own when they become relevant to what you are writing today.
“Trove gives me what a shelf of notebooks never could: the page I need, at the moment I need it.”
Tomás Ferreira, doctoral researcher at TU Delft
Why a second brain
For five centuries, serious readers kept commonplace books: bound volumes of quotations, observations, and arguments worth returning to. The practice worked because it separated capturing from organizing. You wrote things down as they came, and the book held them until they were needed.
Modern note apps broke that bargain. They made you the librarian: choose a folder, pick the tags, maintain the hierarchy. The filing became the work, and the work made people quit.
Trove restores the old bargain with new machinery. You write. The software reads what you wrote, ties it to what you have written before, and brings it back when your current work calls for it. The book keeps itself.
Begin your book.
Free on one device, with your notes in plain Markdown from the first line.
Start free