A notebook you can turn in your hands.
Rotor is a note-taking tool built on one simple idea. Your notes have more than one shape, so you should be able to look at them from more than one side.
It comes as a single file you open in your web browser. You don't install anything, create an account or need an internet connection. You write your notes once. Then you rotate them to see the same notes arranged by topic, by project, by status, by week, or by any combination. You can keep writing and rearranging in whichever arrangement you happen to be looking at.
Rotor is a working title for an evolving project. This page describes the design as a whole. Some parts described here, especially the optional AI helpers, are planned rather than finished.
Think about any single note you've taken. "Ask Dana about the budget before Friday" is about money. It belongs to a project and involves a person. It has a deadline, and it's either done or not done.
That one thought has at least five "addresses." Almost every note-taking tool makes you pick one:
- Folders make you choose the one folder it goes in.
- Outlines and pages make you choose the one page it lives on.
- Linked-note tools make it a dot in a web of links.
- Database-style tools make it a row in a table whose columns were decided in advance.
Everything else gets demoted to tags and filters. Tags and filters help you find a note again. They don't let you see your whole collection differently. You can search for everything tagged "budget." You can't easily stand back and look at all your notes laid out as projects down the side, people across the top. Then, a moment later, you can't swap that for weeks down the side, status across the top without building a separate report that goes stale.
Rotor treats your notebook as a cube rather than a stack of pages.
- Each note is a piece of writing: a thought, a task, a quote, a fragment.
- Each dimension is a way of sorting notes. Topic, Project, Status, Person and Week are all dimensions.
- Each dimension has values. The Status dimension might have the values Open, In progress and Done.
- Every note has a position along each dimension. A note can sit in more than one place on a dimension, because a note can be about two topics at once. It can also sit nowhere on a dimension, because not everything needs a status.
You then choose which dimensions to lay out as rows and which as columns. You can also choose some to use as filters that narrow what you see. The result looks like a grid. Each square holds the notes that sit at that crossing, such as all the AI notes that are Open.
That arrangement is called a view, and changing it is called rotation. Drag Status from the columns onto the rows and drag Project into the columns, and your notes rearrange themselves. They are the same notes, seen from a different side.
The principle at the heart of Rotor is:
The cube is the truth; every view is a projection, and every projection is writable.
Put plainly, there's only one copy of your notes. Views are just ways of standing in front of them. You can edit directly from any view, and your changes are meaningful in every other view.
The screen is mostly a grid, with a few controls around the edges: