Tisty — Free Open Source Notes, Documents and Tasks

Notes, documents and tasks that stay yours: plain Markdown on your own disk, for Windows and macOS.
Not a to-do list you empty — a record of what you worked out, searchable years later, with an MCP door for your assistant.
No accounts. No subscriptions. No telemetry. No server.

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Download Tisty

_{Prefer a direct download? GitHub Releases carries the signed installers — Windows (.exe) · macOS (.dmg, one per chip)}

Tisty is Opensource. Read it, build it, run it, or take one of the stable releases already out there. Nothing is hidden and all of it can be audited.

It is not a to-do app as you know it. A list gets emptied and forgotten. Here what you close stays: what you did, when, and what you worked out on the way. Months later you search for how you solved something and it is there — the description, the journal, the steps, the documents you leaned on.

I am not a company. I am a developer who kept solving the same problem twice, so I built the notes, documents and task manager I wanted and gave it away. It is meant to stay small and useful, not to grow a thousand features nobody uses. No ads, no telemetry, no accounts, no subscriptions — a local-first productivity tool that lives on your machine and nowhere else.

Why people choose Tisty over other task managers:

• 100% local — your tasks, your journal and your documents never leave your computer. No cloud, no server, no account. If you sync two machines, you can ask Tisty to leave the largest attachments in that shared folder instead of carrying them onto every disk; it never does that unless you choose it.
• Truly free — no premium tier, no feature gates, no trial. AGPL v3, and commercial terms only for organisations that cannot comply with it.
• Your data outlives the app — plain text and Markdown on your own disk, readable with cat and searchable with grep.
• Finishing keeps everything — completing a task moves it to the archive with its steps, its notes and its attachments intact, documents included.
• Fast and native — a Rust core inside a Tauri window: it starts quickly, stays small, and looks like it belongs on both systems.

I use Tisty every day on macOS and Windows. If something feels off, open an issue — this project keeps improving because of real-world use.

It is for one person, by design. No assignees, no permissions, no boards. If you need to run a team, Tisty will not carry that.

Table of Contents

• Why I Built This
• What It Is / What It Isn't
• What Makes It Different
• Who Is This For?
• The Idea It Is Built On
• Getting Started
• What It Does
• Your Data and Privacy
• Two Machines, If You Have Two
• A Command Line, If You Want One
• An Assistant, If You Use One
• What It Will Never Do
• FAQ
• Alternatives
• Localization
• Other Tools by the Same Author
• Support the Project
• Standing On
• Contributing
• Licence
• Project health

Why I Built This

Organising your day is harder than a list makes it look. There are more moving parts than fit in your head, plans shift under you, and something you thought was small turns out not to be. Which is why finishing it feels good.

But look at what the task gathered on the way. The steps it actually took. The notes you wrote while working it out. What you looked up, what it turned out to connect to, the documents you leaned on. That is where the effort went.

Mine looked like "fix the intermittent timeouts on save". By the time it was done it had collected the ticket, the commit, and two paragraphs explaining that the real cause was a missing index on a table nobody was looking at.

Eight months later the same thing happened somewhere else. I remembered solving it. I could not remember how — and the note that held the answer had gone with the tick.

That is the whole reason Tisty exists. A task is not a line you cross out. It is a tree: the steps, the journal, the files and the documents that grew around it while you worked. Finishing it should not prune it.

I wanted it to stay mine, too. On my disk, in files I can open without asking anyone. So I built the thing I wanted, used it until it stopped annoying me, and put it here in case it is the thing you wanted too.

What It Is / What It Isn't

It is a personal task manager where finishing something is the beginning of its useful life. Tasks carry a description, a journal, steps and attachments; when you complete one it moves to the archive, and search reaches all of it, documents included.

It is for one person. No assignees, no permissions, no boards. If you need to run a team, Tisty will not carry that, and you deserve to know before you install it rather than after.

It is not something I sell. Nothing is locked, nothing expires, and there is no version of this with more in it. It is a program I wrote for myself and gave away.

Your data is files. Plain text on your own disk, readable with cat and searchable with grep. If Tisty disappeared tomorrow, everything you wrote would still be there and still make sense.

What Makes It Different

If you are looking for a free, open-source, offline task manager with no account, no subscription and no AI, this is what Tisty is:

The Eisenhower matrix, not numbered priorities. A task is urgent, important, both or neither — do, decide, delegate, drop. That names the decision instead of hiding it behind a number, and it is the difference between a list that sorts and a list that helps you choose. Around it: lists for where work belongs, tags for what cuts across, steps for the parts, and a journal for what you learn on the way.