Field Notes

A private offline journal and safety companion for psychedelic and other substance experiences.

Field Notes is a journal that understands what an experience is. Write plain diary entries or log an experience as it happens — what you took, how much, and how you're feeling over time. Before you combine substances, check them against a built-in reference of known dangerous combinations. If you want one, an optional AI companion can be there to talk — it runs entirely on your machine, so the conversation never leaves the room.

There are no accounts, no cloud, and no network requests. Your journal can be encrypted with a password, and nothing you write is ever scanned, analyzed, or sent anywhere. It works on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with optional access from your phone: that's the one exception, off until you turn it on, and it uses a free Tailscale account to connect your own devices. Tailscale sees which of your devices are connected, never what's in your journal.

⬇️ Download Field Notes · How to install

Free for Windows, macOS and Linux. The installers aren't code-signed yet, so each OS warns you once on first launch; the install steps show you how to get past it.

⚠️ Harm-reduction and journaling tool — not medical advice, and not encouragement to use anything. Dose and interaction information is a reference and safety backstop only: incomplete, possibly wrong, and no substitute for a qualified clinician. The interaction checker flags only some well-known dangerous combinations — absence of a warning does not mean a combination is safe. In an emergency, contact local emergency services or poison control.

Features

• Journal — log experiences with intention, set & setting, doses, and a running timeline of how you feel. A street name is saved as the substance it means ("acid" as LSD, unless you choose to keep your wording), and Stats counts both spellings as one. Any entry can be saved or shared as a tidy PDF (from the phone's share sheet too), choosing whether it includes intention and setting, moments, the write-up and the rating. Alcohol logs in standard drinks (beer, wine and shot quick picks) and smoked cannabis in hits. Edit, delete, or backdate anything. Logging something that already happened is a first-class option — tick "this already happened" on a new experience and it's saved as a finished trip, with doses defaulting to when it occurred rather than now. Every timestamp in an experience also shows the time since your first dose (14:02 (t+1:23)), so the timeline reads against the clock that matters. An experience you never got round to titling takes the name of the first substance you log into it, so nothing sits in the journal as "Untitled" — rename it whenever you like.
• Plain notes — not everything is an experience. Write ordinary journal entries (a title, your words, a date) alongside them.
• Active arcs — a live trip report charts what each substance is likely doing now, from the dose reference's timings: one line per substance with every dose added in, its height the reference's dose tier, and a "Likely still active" list of phases. Drinks stack on their own scale. Tap a substance for its timing range and what a redose does for it. Anything logged in the last two days that may still be active shows on Today and in Check, live trip report or not, and a finished trip report keeps its arcs with your moments on them.
• Combination warnings — every dose is checked against the others taken around the same time for well-documented risky combinations. Each shows as a quiet note you can tap for what the risk is and what lowers it, and there's a standalone checker to consult before taking anything.
• Dose reference — dose ranges, durations, and graded interaction data for hundreds of substances, bundled with the app and available offline. Search the reference prose, or read any of the 575 substance entries in full — pharmacology, harm potential, tolerance, legality — with the exact dose figures alongside. The dose figures are the Field Notes dose reference: based on DoseWiki (public domain) with substantial revisions, listed in data/dosewiki/. The prose is DoseWiki's, as written.
• Companion (optional, off until you turn it on) — a calm, non-judgmental support chat that runs on a local AI model. It can be aware of your live trip report, look up references, and log things for you when you ask. Pick a support style ("just listen", "keep me grounded", …) and it honors it. It loads in the background so the window never freezes while it thinks, and it tells you up front if your machine is short on memory to run the model. It's improving but still rough in places — see Companion quality. It's off on a new install: turn it on in Settings, and the Companion tab walks you through the separate download. Nothing else in the app needs it.
• Quick dose log — most of what gets recorded isn't a trip you sit through and write up, it's "I took this, at about this time". + Dose on the desktop, or the top of the phone's Now screen, takes a substance, an amount and a time — recent substances and times like "last night" are one tap — and leaves a real entry in the journal. Add the notes, rating and any other doses later, from either screen, or don't.
• Live trip report — a quiet, altered-state-friendly screen for an ongoing experience: elapsed time, one-tap logging, the companion, and an always-visible Get help now button. Timeline notes can be edited after the fact — on the desktop and from the phone.
• Crisis resources — if something you write to the Companion sounds like it might be urgent, real emergency and peer-support contacts are offered, calmly. What you've logged never raises this on its own. This is driven by fixed rules, never by the AI — and your journal writing is never scanned.
• Import from text — paste a past experience in any form, from a one-line note to a full trip report with T+ timestamps, and the local model pulls out the substances, doses, and timeline into a structured entry you review before saving.
• Reference search — search thousands of passages of substance information (pharmacology, tolerance, legality) offline.
• Encryption & backups — optional password encryption for the whole journal, plus one-file backup and restore.
• Obsidian sync — export entries to an Obsidian vault as readable Markdown notes and import them back; works both ways, fully offline. Any single entry can also be exported on its own ("Export this entry" on the desktop, "Export" on the phone) in the same format, so it drops straight into a vault.
• Tag someone in a dose — two people sharing a server who have both allowed it can tag each other in a dose, right after logging it on the phone or later from Edit dose on the phone or the computer. The other person gets a copy of that one dose to change and add to their own journal, or decline; neither sees the rest of the other's journal.
• Phone access (optional, off by default) — Tailscale is built in, so the computer needs nothing else installed: press Connect, sign in to Tailscale in your browser, then install Tailscale on your phone, sign in with the same account, and scan the code. Then use the journal, combo checker, reference, and Companion from bed at 3am. The desktop shows a green "Paired successfully" light the moment the phone first uses the code, so you're not left guessing whether the scan took. Companion replies run as a background job on the desktop, so a slow local model — or a locked phone screen — no longer drops the answer. Starting a live trip report from the phone takes an optional title — or leave it blank and the first substance you log names it. Or skip the trip report entirely: log something you took — substance, amount, and when — as a one-shot entry, for any day you're catching up on. Past entries are editable from the phone too: tap any dose or note to correct it, add one you forgot, or open the entry to change its title, times, rating and write-up. Works without the computer, too: if it's asleep or out of reach, the phone still opens, Check and Look up answer on the phone (the same checker, compiled for it, over a saved copy of the reference), and new doses, moments and entries wait on the phone until the computer is back. The gear next to Help holds the phone's settings: discreet mode, what it keeps for offline use, updating the computer, the Home Screen link, and pairing or un-pairing your devices, which asks for your journal's password (or, if the journal isn't encrypted, a phone PIN set at the computer). Private by design: see Architecture for how.
• Paste a trip log — copy a log from your notes app (8:43am - 35mg mesc, T+1:30 peak…) and it becomes a timed experience, doses recognised by name or street name. Lists of doses, other people's doses and the write-up after the log are sorted out too. Read on the device, no AI; every line shown before it's saved.
• One journal, all your computers (optional) — let a computer that stays on be your Field Notes server, and connect a laptop to it over Tailscale: same journal, everywhere. Each device gets its own revocable key. If the server can't be reached, new entries save on the laptop and are sent when it's back, and the interaction checker keeps working in the meantime. Sync journal to server brings the entries a laptop already had along with it, skipping any the server already has. In Server Mode, the server can start serving at login and — opt-in — unlock from the system keychain after a reboot.
• Substance catalogue & log — keep your own substance list with notes, and review your history grouped by substance. Add one with its drug class and how long it lasts; log something Field Notes doesn't know and the receipt asks once.
• Stats (desktop and phone): dose over time against the reference's dose ranges, spacing between experiences, how often, a calendar, and what you've taken together, plus Trends: what changed lately against the period before (how often, time between, amount per experience, redosing, which drug classes your experiences had in them, and steady rhythms read from the last year), each with a small chart. Routine doses aren't part of Trends. Tap a day, bar, hour or dot to see the experiences behind it. Dose-aware: each dose shown as what it was logged as against the reference's ranges, microdoses recognised, mushroom forms (fresh, capsules, edibles), notes on what an amount tends to do, routine and as-needed doses, doses near bedtime and an optional morning sleep check-in, and a short note when a pattern linked to dependence or withdrawal shows up. No streaks or scores, and a toggle hides substance names for screen-sharing.
• Updates — automatic, a Check for updates button in Settings, and (opt-in, set at the computer) a paired phone can install an update on the computer it connects to.
• Contribute upstream (consent-gated) — export substances you've catalogued that DoseWiki doesn't cover as a draft to submit by hand. Never automatic, never includes journal data.
• Send feedback — a link in Settings opens a prefilled bug report or feature request on GitHub, in your browser. Nothing is sent from the app itself.
• Suggest to the reference — timings you entered yourself, and substances you added that the reference doesn't have, can be suggested back so the next person doesn't have to type them. You see exactly what would be shared (never your journal, a dose, or when), and it opens as a prefilled GitHub issue in your browser for you to submit or close. At most once a month, and only when there's something new, Today asks if you'd like to; anything you've shared is never asked about again. "Don't ask me again" stops it, and the list stays in Settings. Nothing is sent from the app itself.

Screenshots

All screenshots use a fictional demo journal. To regenerate them, see scripts/screenshots/.

Desktop

Journal: experiences and notes by month, with what's likely still active on top	Live trip report: each dose's likely arc, now, and your moments on the line
Experience detail: what you took, when, how it went, and its arcs	Stats: frequency, spacing and calendar, by class or substance
Dose over time: each dose against the reference's ranges	Every dose, by substance: the full history, under Stats
Check: test a combination, see what's still active, keep your own catalogue	Reference search: thousands of DoseWiki passages, searchable offline
Companion: local AI support chat with selectable support styles	Get help now: real crisis and peer-support contacts, always one tap away
Updates: automatic, or check by hand any time	Devices & server: optional, built-in Tailscale, off by default
Encryption & backups: AES-256 at rest, one-file backup and restore	Obsidian sync: two-way Markdown export, fully offline
Your data, one folder: everything lives on your device, erase anytime

Phone

Today: the live trip report, its arcs and moments, at your thumb	Journal: search and filter everything	Entry: a past experience, editable
Arcs: how a past experience likely went, with its moments	Dose over time: tap a dose for details	Check: combinations, from the deterministic checker

Install & update

Download the installer for your computer from the latest release (the files are listed under How to install on that page), then follow the steps for your system. The installers aren't code-signed yet, so the first launch needs one extra click.

Windows

1. Download the file ending in _x64-setup.exe (or the .msi, if you prefer).
2. Open it. Windows shows "Windows protected your PC": click More info, then Run anyway.
3. Follow the installer, then open Field Notes from the Start menu.

macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel)

1. Download the file ending in _universal.dmg.
2. Open it and drag Field Notes into Applications.
3. Open Field Notes. macOS blocks it the first time because it isn't notarized yet: click Done.
4. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway next to "Field Notes" was blocked.
5. Open Field Notes again and click Open. You only do this once.

On macOS 15 Sequoia and later, right-click → Open no longer skips the block, so use step 4. In Terminal, xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Field Notes.app" does the same thing. If the icon keeps bouncing and no window opens, select Field Notes in Applications, press Cmd+I, and untick Locked.

Linux

• AppImage (any distribution): download the .AppImage, make it executable (chmod +x Field.Notes_*.AppImage), and run it.
• Debian / Ubuntu: sudo apt install ./Field.Notes_*_amd64.deb
• Fedora / RHEL: sudo dnf install ./Field.Notes-*.x86_64.rpm

Updating

The app checks for updates on launch and installs them in place ("Install & restart"), signed and verified, fully in-app. You can also install any release over the old version by hand. Your journal is safe either way. All data lives in the OS app-data directory (%APPDATA%\com.fieldnotes.journal on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/com.fieldnotes.journal on macOS, ~/.local/share/com.fieldnotes.journal on Linux), separate from the app itself, so updating never touches it.

Support Field Notes

Field Notes is free, with no ads, accounts or tracking. If it's been useful to you, please consider chipping in toward keeping it going.

Not in a position to give money? Reporting bugs, suggesting features, and passing Field Notes along to a harm reduction group help too.

Architecture

• Tauri 2 + Svelte (TypeScript) desktop app (Windows + macOS + Linux), built on the same stack as Cairn.
• Local SQLite (rusqlite, bundled) at the app data dir — substances, experiences (experiences with doses and plain notes, split by an explicit kind column), doses, timeline_events. No network, no accounts. Opt-in SQLCipher encryption at rest (AES-256).
• The safety-critical layers are deterministic Rust, independent of any model — interactions.rs (interaction rules + class vocabulary, common-knowledge harm-reduction categories not derived from any copyrighted source), crisis.rs (crisis signals in Companion chat + graded resources; journal prose is never scanned — owner's decision, recorded in ROADMAP.md), pw.rs (the dose reference; snapshot + slimming pipeline in data/dosewiki/). The checker, the reference and the corpus search live in the small src-tauri/core crate, which src-tauri/wasm compiles to WebAssembly for the phone's offline mode: one checker, not a second copy to drift.
• knowledge.rs — BM25 over the bundled DoseWiki prose corpus (7,800+ passages, 575 substances), in-process, no embeddings.
• portal.rs — the optional device server. Binds 127.0.0.1 only and is fronted by your Tailscale tailnet; every request needs a paired device's token (devices.rs: one per device, stored only as a hash, revocable); it refuses to serve a locked journal; and it exposes a strict allowlist — wiping the journal, the passphrase, backups, and filesystem access are unreachable from a phone by construction. Its module docs state four load-bearing rules, and tests pin all four.
• tailnet.rs + tailnet/ — the Tailscale built into the app: a small Go program around Tailscale's own tsnet library, shipped as a Tauri sidecar. It joins your tailnet as its own device (field-notes) and forwards HTTPS there to the portal on loopback, so the computer needs no Tailscale install. It never uses Funnel, forwards only to 127.0.0.1, and uploads no logs; a test reads its source to keep it that way. A computer that already published through the Tailscale app keeps using the app.
• remote.rs — the client half: a desktop that uses another computer as its journal. Journal commands go over that computer's portal; new entries queue in the local (encrypted) journal while it's unreachable, with the interaction checker and crisis scan still running locally. The phone's equivalent is src/lib/offline.ts + outbox.ts (same rules: only new entries wait, edits and deletes don't) and a service worker that keeps /m on the phone. It keeps as little as it can in browser storage: what's waiting to be sent, the experiences in progress, and the last day's entries by substance and time, for the offline check. keychain.rs is the opt-in "remember the password" for a server that must unlock itself after a reboot.
• contribute.rs — upstream draft exports, with no HTTP client in the file at all.
• suggest.rs — reference suggestions as prefilled GitHub issue URLs, likewise with no HTTP client; the person's browser opens them.
• The AI features (Companion, text import) talk only to a local Ollama instance on 127.0.0.1 — the app can install it and download a model for you on first use.

Companion quality

The Companion is the least finished part of this app, and it's worth being straight about that. v0.9.0 made real improvements — it no longer invents durations or cites references it never read, and the default model was changed to one that will actually engage when things get hard. There's an evaluation harness (src-tauri/eval/scenarios.json, 30 scenarios) so changes are measured rather than guessed at.

It still has rough edges. It runs long when it should be brief, occasionally misses a tool call it should have made, and its register drifts from the calm, non-directive tone it's aiming for. Prompt work to address that is the next step. Quality also depends on your hardware — a small model on an older machine will be noticeably worse.

None of this touches the safety-critical layers. The interaction checker, crisis detection and dose reference are deterministic Rust that run regardless of which model is loaded, or whether one is loaded at all. If the Companion isn't earning its keep on your machine, turn it off in Settings; everything else is unaffected.

Roadmap

• Companion register — prompt restructuring and worked examples, so it stays brief and non-directive. Measured against the eval harness.

See ROADMAP.md for the full picture and design history.

Development

npm install
scripts/build-tailnet.sh   # the bundled Tailscale helper; needs Go 1.27+
npm run tauri dev
npm run tauri build

Build the helper once before any cargo command (cargo test included): Tauri checks that src-tauri/binaries/fieldnotes-tailnet-<target> exists at compile time. Rebuild it after changing anything in tailnet/.

Releases are cut per RELEASING.md.

Development notes

Things that aren't obvious from the code, and that have already cost a debugging session at least once:

• src/lib/api.ts is the only file allowed to import Tauri's invoke. It is the single seam where the desktop (invoke) and the phone (fetch to the portal) diverge, which is why the UI never had to learn that the portal exists. Import invoke anywhere else and the phone silently breaks.
• portal.rs's EXPOSED is an allowlist. A new command in commands.rs is unreachable from the phone until someone adds it there on purpose — that's the point. The four rules in that file's module docs are load-bearing; tests pin all four.
• Adding a command to EXPOSED is a security decision, not a plumbing one. Ask what it does in the hands of someone holding a phone that isn't yours. ai_start is exposed (it wakes a loopback server the app already owns); ai_install and ai_pull are not (they install software and download gigabytes). The one exception is server_update_install: it installs only a signed Field Notes release, is off until enabled at the computer, and refuses unless the server will come back by itself (see server_update.rs). The switch that enables it is not exposed.
• Known rough edge: browsing to the portal's / (rather than /m) from a phone serves the desktop page, which half-renders and throws console errors. Harmless — the allowlist is server-side — and fixed as part of Phase 3b.
• Verifying the UI without a screen. macOS may withhold Screen Recording / Accessibility, which blocks screenshots and AppleScript. Headless Chromium needs neither: point it at the running portal (http://127.0.0.1:<port>/m#t=<token>) and drive the real app over a real socket, phone viewport and all. This is how /m and the desktop Substances tab are actually verified, rather than merely typechecked.
• Two bugs got past "the tests pass" and were caught by a human on a phone — the Tailscale step being too much to ask of an end user, and the Companion tab giving up forever if Ollama was asleep at page load. Typechecks and unit tests don't open tabs. Drive the thing.
• Windows CI skips cargo test — Windows test binaries die at launch with STATUS_ENTRYPOINT_NOT_FOUND because tauri-build links the app manifest only to the main binary (tauri#13419). The shipped app is unaffected; the suite runs on macOS/Linux.

License

Licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0.

Free to use, modify, and share for non-commercial purposes (personal use, research, education, nonprofits, government). Commercial use requires a separate commercial license — a contract with the author. For commercial licensing, contact the author via github.com/sparkly-quasar.