Linwood Butterfly

Linwood Butterfly is a free, open-source app for people who think better with space around their ideas. Instead of writing top to bottom on a fixed page, it gives you an endless workspace where you can place notes, sketches, diagrams, images, and documents wherever they make sense. It suits class notes, meeting notes, research, math, planning, whiteboarding, storyboards, and any project that starts messy and needs room to grow.

You can write by hand with a stylus, touch, or mouse, type text and Markdown, add shapes and lines, place photos, and import PDFs, SVGs, and image files. Work can be exported as PDF, SVG, images, or portable Butterfly files. Templates include plain, ruled, grid, dotted, and music paper. As documents grow, you can split work into pages and folders, use layers, mark areas and waypoints, save reusable packs, and keep palettes and text styles ready. Most elements stay editable, so you can move, resize, recolor, and refine them later.

Your files stay under your control. Work offline, store documents locally, choose a custom data directory, or connect WebDAV and Nextcloud for your own sync. No account or subscription is required. Butterfly is free, community translated, available on phones, tablets, desktops, and the web, and licensed under AGPL-3.0.