Celestine

Celestine is a local-first desktop notebook for handwriting, rich text, images, and diagrams on one infinite canvas. It is built with Tauri, Rust, React, and TypeScript.

Alpha: The core canvas and desktop shell work. Handwriting recognition and native platform pen adapters are planned but are not implemented yet.

What works

• Infinite pan-and-zoom canvas
• Pressure-sensitive vector ink using Pointer Events
• one-to-one pen tracking with pressure-aware stroke width
• local English handwriting recognition on macOS using Apple Vision
• Eraser, text, shape, image, and handwriting-conversion tool modes
• Rich-text cards with headings, lists, checklists, code, tables, and Markdown math notation
• Image paste and local upload
• Folders, tags, favorites, search, and recent-note ordering
• Dark and light themes
• Configurable single-key shortcuts for XP-Pen per-app mappings
• Debounced local autosave through the Rust backend
• Markdown export with Celestine metadata comments for non-Markdown canvas objects

Quick start

Requirements:

• Node.js 22 or newer
• Rust 1.88 or newer
• The platform prerequisites from the Tauri documentation

npm install
npm run tauri dev

For browser-only UI development:

npm run dev

Create a production frontend build:

npm run build

Default pen shortcuts

Configure the same keys in the tablet driver's per-application profile:

Command	Key
Select	V
Pen	B
Eraser	E
Text	T
Shape	S
Convert handwriting	H

Hold Space and drag to pan. Use the wheel or trackpad to zoom.

Storage and privacy

Celestine does not require an account and does not send note content to a server. The Tauri app atomically saves the workspace to workspace.json in the operating system's application-data directory. Browser-only development uses localStorage.

Images are currently embedded in the workspace as data URLs. Moving them into a content-addressed asset directory is planned before large libraries are supported.

Markdown compatibility

Rich text exports as ordinary Markdown. Math annotations use $...$, and future diagram text can use fenced mermaid blocks. Ink and spatial shapes do not have a standard Markdown representation, so exports include HTML metadata comments for those objects. A portable Celestine sidecar format is planned to preserve the complete canvas.

Project structure

src/                  React interface and canvas engine
src/components/       Library, editor, tools, settings, rich-text cards
src/lib/              Persistence bridge and Markdown export
src-tauri/             Tauri configuration and Rust persistence backend

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the data flow and platform strategy.

Roadmap

• Native pen diagnostics for pressure, tilt, eraser, and hover
• On-device English handwriting recognition
• Closest-font selection and user-selected handwriting fonts
• Lasso selection and editable diagram connectors
• Undo/redo history and crash-recovery journal
• Content-addressed image assets and portable workspace export
• Windows Ink and Linux tablet validation

Contributing

Keep changes focused and preserve local-first behaviour. Run the TypeScript build and Rust checks before opening a pull request:

npm run build
cargo check --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml