Thino: catch ideas before they’re gone

Many ideas are gone by the time a proper note is open, so I made Thino for writing them down on the spot, even offline. It has 488K downloads.

Why I made it

A lot of ideas are gone in a flash. By the time I open a proper note and think of a title, the idea has often slipped away. To hold on to them I needed somewhere I could write things down the moment I open it, with everything going back into my notes so I could find and sort it later.

What it does

Thino started as a quick-capture plugin inside Obsidian: open it, write, done. Later I took it to the web and to phones, so you can jot something down wherever you are, and everything comes back into Obsidian to be organized and reviewed.

Capture without a connection

Ideas don’t wait for a network. So that a phone or computer can capture offline, and every device agrees once you are back online, I rewrote the sync service in Rust. Offline entries go into a queue, changes are pulled incrementally once online, and commits are idempotent, so offline writes and repeated requests never scramble the data.

Today

Thino has 488K downloads and 1,370 stars on GitHub. I created it and lead its design and development. The product page is pkmer.cn/products/thino.