Myne

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Getting started

Install Myne, create your first encrypted vault, save your recovery phrase, write your first note, and run the browser client from your own address.

Myne is a local-first, encrypted markdown notebook. You write in plain markdown, and Myne encrypts every note on disk, so the files on your computer stay unreadable without your password. There is no account email, no sign-up form, and no Myne server that can read what you write. This section gets you from a fresh install to your first note in about five minutes. You don’t start from a blank page either: when setup finishes, Myne seeds a small example vault — five ordinary notes in one Getting started folder — and opens the first of them, Start here.

A vault open in Myne: a sidebar with note titles on the left, an editor on the right showing a markdown note in progress.

What makes Myne different

  • Encrypted by default. Encryption is the only mode; there is no plaintext option to forget to turn on.
  • No account, no email. You don’t sign up. A vault is created locally, protected by a password only you know.
  • A vault is a set of encrypted files that stay where you are. It is not a single file and not a cloud account: each note is its own encrypted file. On a computer or a phone that is a directory Myne creates and manages on your disk. In a browser it is the browser’s own storage for the site, with no folder to open; see Myne in your browser.

Until you turn on sync or name a remote AI provider, Myne runs entirely on your device; nothing leaves it.

AI is the one other door out, and it is off until you turn it on. Myne never sends your notes anywhere you have not named, and never downloads a model — but if the provider you name runs somewhere other than this computer, what you send it leaves this device. Turning on AI covers what each option means.

What this section covers

  1. Install Myne: how the app is distributed and verified.
  2. Myne in your browser: running Myne in a desktop browser at app.myne.md, and the trust boundary that differs from the desktop app.
  3. Create your vault: the four-step setup wizard, opened by a short safety briefing you acknowledge before setting a password.
  4. Your recovery phrase: the 24-word backstop that can unlock your vault.
  5. Unlocking your vault: what you see each time you open Myne.
  6. Your first note: the example notes Myne seeds for you, plus writing, autosave, and where notes live.
  7. A tour of the interface: every region of the window, named.

Already have a vault somewhere else?

If you are not starting fresh, two of the Welcome screen’s three doors are for you instead of this chapter.

  • Restore from backup takes a .myne-backup file from another machine and rebuilds the vault from it; follow Restore from a backup.
  • Add this device to an account is for a vault that already exists on another device and syncs. The vault arrives over sync rather than from a file, and a device already signed in has to approve this one; follow Add a device.

Either way, come back here once your vault is open.

Limits

Encryption protects the files at rest on your disk. It does not protect a vault that is unlocked and open on your screen, and it cannot help if your password and recovery phrase are both lost — there is no reset, because a reset would mean someone else held a key to your notes. Anything you deliberately take out of Myne — an exported note, a PDF, a recovery phrase saved to a file — is an ordinary unencrypted file from the moment it is written. How Myne protects your notes sets out where the guarantees start and stop.

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