Devices, Sync and Sharing

Your notes on all your devices

Culma keeps every device you own up to date, automatically. Write on your laptop, and the words are waiting on your phone.

• To add a device, open the vault menu at the bottom left, choose Paired devices, then Pair a device. Scan the code with your phone, or type it in.
• Offline is fine. Keep writing on a train or a plane; everything catches up when you're back online.
• Two devices, one note, no conflicts. If you edit the same note in two places, Culma merges the changes. Nothing gets overwritten, and there are no "conflicted copy" files.
• The small colored dot beside the vault's name tells you when everything is up to date, and says what's wrong when sync can't work.

Private by design

Everything leaves your device end-to-end encrypted. The server that relays your notes stores them, but it can't read them. Only you and the people you share with hold the keys.

Under Paired devices you'll also find your recovery phrase. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe: it's how you get back into your notes if you lose every device.

Sharing with other people

Right-click a folder or a note in the sidebar and choose Share…. The dialog has two pages:

• People shows who can see it, whether each person can read or also edit, and the invitations you've sent, which you can cancel at any time.
• Invite adds someone you already share with, or creates a link for someone new: give it their name, choose Can read or Can read and edit, and optionally a password. Without one, the link itself is the secret, so anyone who sees it has the note.

Shared notes and folders appear under Shared with me for the other person. Write together, live: when someone else is in the same note, you see their cursor and their changes as they type. You can take a share back at any time, and the person loses access to what you share from then on.

An owner can also share a language model with everyone in the vault, so a colleague or your own phone gets answers from a model running on your desktop. See Finding Things.

Keep your own copy

Your notes are always yours. Vault properties → Backup exports the whole vault as ordinary Markdown files in a single zip, ready for any other app.

Whether a device also keeps a plain .md file for every note is up to you: Vault properties → Keep Markdown files on this device. It's on for a vault you created from a folder of notes and off for one that arrived by sync, because a plain file can be read by anything that can read the folder. Your notes sync, search and open the same either way.

Next: Every version, kept