Daigo Notebook User Manual

Welcome! This manual describes the functions and recommended ways of using our note-taking app. Using Daigo Notebook is very intuitive and won’t require much learning but this manual gives you additional details you might find helpful. If you’re new to this app, read the Quickstart section first.

Convention: We use the key shortcut Mod to denote the Command key on macOS and the the Control key on other platforms. Screenshots are made on Linux but the look-and-feel of the app is similar on all platforms.

1 Quickstart

1.1 Main User Interface

Use View : Show Markdown (Control+M) to toggle between plain text and markdown view of a note. Here is an overview of the main interface:

You can only edit the selected note when the view mode is set to plain text.

Use Mod-N to create a new note. The dialog looks the same as the right-hand side of the main dialog:

The only difference are the buttons in the bottom row: Save & Close saves the new note. It’s title will be derived from the first line automatically. Save & Quit saves the note and quits the app. This is preselected for certain work flows. Discard Changes closes the New Note Dialog without saving anything you’ve written.

Links versus Files: As the name suggests, a link only adds a link to the note. It does not download or copy content. In contrast to this, adding a file will copy that file in a subfolder of the note’s folder and adding a folder adds all files in the folder to that folder. Added files have the advantage of being synced. They have the disadvantage of potentially using up a lot of storage space, which is limited by your data plan (default: 50GB).

1.2 Typical Workflow

To make the most of this app, we strongly recommend to set the global hotkeys to a default that works for you on your systems and works on all platforms where you use Daigo Notebook (see Preferences : Global for more information). Typical usage is as follows:

Take Note: Press the global new note shortcut Super+Alt+N, enter text, add links or files, and press Mod+Return to save and close.

Find Note: Press the global notes list shortcut Super+Alt+L, focus move Mod+/, enter search terms until note is selected, focus move Mod+/, and switch to plain text with Control+M if needed.

Create View: Go to View : Define Custom View..., click a view number that is free or can be overriden, enter the view name, and either enter a search term in the edit field or use Set to Current Note or Set to Current Search to populate it. Press Done to add the view to the menu.

2 Installation

Important note for users who bought the app via an app store: The app will be installed automatically by the app store if you’ve purchased the app via Apple Store or the Windows Store. The following instructions are only relevant for manual installation when you’ve purchased the app directly from Daigosoft or our reseller Hotmart.

To download the latest version, go to your client area, sign in with your user name and password, and choose the download link for the desired platform. Valid URLs for the login page are:

https://daigosoft.com/app/signin
https://daigosoft.eu/app/signin

Any other URL is not valid. To install the downloaded file, you need to follow one of platform-dependent procedures laid out in the following sections. Note that your software license allows you to install as many copies on as many platforms as you need. However, the license is per-user and you’re not allowed to give away installers or executables to other persons. Please respect these license conditions, which we believe to be fair and based on an affordable pricing.

2.1 MacOS

Open the downloaded disk image by double-clicking its icon. Depending on your system settings, it might also open automatically. Then drag & drop the app icon for Daigo Notebook to your Applications folder and allow the installation with your user name and password. You start the application by double- clicking on its icon in the Applications folder as usual.

2.2 Windows

Open the downloaded installer .exe file by double-clicking it. If a the blue SmartScreen antivirus message pops up, click on “Run Anyway” and follow the installer’s instructions.

Note that Microsoft Defender and many 3rd-party antivirus programs use reputation-based systems to determine whether a file is considered safe or should be blocked by default. Therefore, you antivirus might flag the executable. This does not indicate it contains a virus. We sign our executable and check them for all known viruses. If you have obtained the installer from our site, getting the installer or installed executable flagged is almost certainly a false positive. Follow your antivirus makers instructions to whitelist the application executable.

2.3 Linux

The application is distributed in a (mostly) platform-independent, self- extracting shell script. Double-click the .sh installer file and choose “Run in Terminal”, or run the installer from terminal as follows:

cd ~/Downloads
sh ./daigo-notebook-installer.sh

Do not use sudo to install the application. The application is installed per-user and doesn’t require any special privileges on normally configured Linux distributions. Therefore, the installer will warn you if you run it with elevated privileges.

2.4 Upgrading

Important note for users who bought the app via an app store: The app will be upgraded automatically by the app store if you’ve purchased the app via Apple Store or the Windows Store. The following instructions are only relevant for manual installation when you’ve purchased the app directly from Daigosoft or our reseller Hotmart.

The guidelines for installation laid out above also apply to upgrading the application manually. When the operating system or the installer asks you to remove or overwrite the previous installation, confirm that choice. However, keep the following additional caveats in mind:

• Do not upgrade the application while the old one is running. Quit the running version of Daigo Notebook first, then install the new one.

• Although this case shouldn’t occur, if there is a problem with upgrading the app on Windows, first run the uninstaller, which can be found in the app’s folder in the Program Files folder. Then restart the system and install the new version.

• Never move or remove the notes folder. See section File Format for more details on this folder.

3 File Format

This section lays out the details of the directory structure and file format of notes stored by Daigo Notebook. Unless you are a power user who wants to process the notes in some way, you can safely skip this section.

Daigo Notebook uses a very simple plaintext file format that allows you to use third party tools on notes, makes it easy to export them to another format and therefore avoids vendor lock-in. You do not have to worry about future incompatibility of your notes since they are only text files in UTF-8 Unicode format.

3.1 Directory Structure

Your notes are stored in the folder you can reach from any note folder by traversing the directory up three times. The folder structure is as follows.

• <daigo-folder>/Notebook/Current: This folder contains the currently active notes. It has the following subfolders.

• <daigo-folder>/Notebook/Current/Notes: The main note folder that contains each note as a folder named by a unique ID. Each ID is random and has the format of a nanoid.

• <daigo-folder>/Notebook/Current/Index: The index that is used for searching notes. This is updated and maintained by the app and ought not be changed. If you delete the index, the app will create a new one, however.

• <daigo-folder>/Notebook/Current/Trash: This folder contains note folders that have been deleted. You may delete notes in this folders if you are sure you no longer need them.

• <daigo-folder>/Notebook/Export: This folder contains the notes that have been exported to json, as well as the consolidated files in Files subfolder. File links in the exported json refer to this local Files folder by relative path and file names have been globally disambiguated by the export function File : Export Notes… Alt+S.

• <daigo-folder>/Notebook/Snapshots: This folder contains all automatic and manual snapshots you or the app have made. Snapshots are gzip archives with the file suffix .daigo. The directory can grow quite large but the settings in Preferences : Backups Mod+, automatically prune old backups. The contents of each snapshot are the Trash, Notes, and Index folder at the time of the backup.

Currently, Daigo Notebook has no mechanism to revert to a backup. However, you can revert to a previous version manually as follows:

• Make a snapshot of the current version for safety. File : Create Snapshot Mod+S

• Open the snapshot you want to return to in an archive manager. If it doesn’t recognize the format, rename it by changing the .daigo suffix to .gzip. Remove the folders in the Current folder of Notebook and extract the folders from the snapshot into Current folder.

3.2 Note Folders

A note folder’s name is the note’s ID. A note folder contains the following files and folders:

• the file note.txt: The actual content of the note in plaintext.

• the folder Files: This possibly empty folder contains the files that are listed in a note’s Files section. They must have the same name as in the note’s list of files and may not be renamed or moved.

• a json file .sync_state.json: If present, this file tracks online syncing information like the note version (higher version means more recent note) and a last modified timestamp. This state is used to determine whether a remote file is more recent and whether notes should be merged or one outdates the other when syncing.

3.3 The File note.txt

Here is a minimal example note.txt:

hello world

EOL

Modified:
2026-01-14 11:02:24 .153216602

Created:
2026-01-14 11:02:19 .452463437

It consists of the note text hello world, followed by a blank line, the Unicode letters EOL, and another blank line. It also contains two fields Modified and Created for the modification and creation date. This is the general format of every note file (including the blank lines).

Notes can have different fields and even custom fields are possible. The order of the fields is not relevant as long as they appear after the EOL line. A field name must appear on a line of its own and followed by a colon : to be valid. Field names are case-sensitive but we strongly recommend not to use upper and lowercase variants.

Custom fields are saved, synced, and maintained by Daigo Notebook. A custom field is simply a field name that this version of Daigo Notebook doesn’t know yet and therefore ignores. However, to make sure there are no collisions with future names, it is strongly recommended to use a unique prefix for a custom field if you plan to use one. Daigosoft will not use fields starting with <prefix>- dash separated prefix. For example, a custom field named X-Date will not be used by Daigosoft in the future.

The data of a field consists of all lines that follow the field name line before a new field is introduced. That means the data portion of a field cannot include a blank line followed by a field name ending in a colon. To be on the safe side, it’s best to avoid any data lines that end with a colon.

The following fields are currently used:

• Links: The list of links of the note.

• Files: The list of files of the note, as slash paths relative with the note’s Files directory as root.

• Modified: The date the note was last modified. This is not file access based, since this is not reliable across operating and file systems. Daigo Notes uses equality checks to determine whether a note has been modified. If you modify a note, you might have to change this field for Daigo Notebook’s change tracking to work reliably.

• Created: The date the note was created.