Stela
A minimalist, glassy Markdown notes app for Windows — plain .md files synced straight to your own Google Drive. No server, no tracking, no lock-in.
Context
Stela is WYSIWYG Markdown that round-trips losslessly to plain .md — no split-pane preview, no syntax noise — in a black-and-white, frosted-glass interface with a gliding caret. Rich content is built in: KaTeX math, Mermaid diagrams, Chart.js charts, Excalidraw drawings, images, video and voice notes with a live waveform.
There is no Stela server. Notes live as .md files in the user’s own Google Drive: OAuth 2.0 with PKCE, the drive.file scope only — Stela can touch nothing but the files it created — and the refresh token sits in the OS keychain, never in plain text.
Bilingual FR/EN spell-checking runs fully offline via Hunspell in a background worker. Built with Tauri v2 — a Rust shell around a React 19 front — and shipped as a Windows installer. No analytics, no telemetry.
Architecture
- Shell
Tauri v2 + Rust
Native Windows shell; OAuth tokens live in the OS keychain (Credential Manager).
- Editor
React 19 · WYSIWYG Markdown
Inline formatting with a lossless .md round-trip; the note title is simply its first # H1.
- Sync
Google Drive · drive.file scope
PKCE auth, debounced auto-save, background polling, explicit conflict handling.
- Spell check
Hunspell FR/EN, offline
Runs in a background worker with automatic language detection — nothing leaves the machine.
Process
- 01
Your Drive is the backend
Running zero servers is a feature: nothing to breach, nothing to subscribe to, no lock-in. The drive.file scope keeps the blast radius at exactly the files Stela created.
- 02
Plain .md or nothing
The editor is WYSIWYG but the file on disk stays clean Markdown that any other tool can open. If Stela disappears tomorrow, the notes lose nothing.