What is field-notes?

Field Notes is a private, offline journal and safety companion built for people who track psychedelic and other substance experiences. It runs entirely on your own computer: no accounts, no cloud storage, and no network requests, so nothing you write is ever scanned or sent anywhere. The whole journal can be locked behind a password using encryption, and the entire app can be backed up or restored as a single file. The core of the app is a timeline. You can write plain diary entries, or log a session in detail, including what was taken, how much, and how you felt as time passed. Before combining substances, you can check them against a built in reference of known dangerous combinations, and every dose you log is automatically checked against the others. A bundled reference covers hundreds of substances with dose ranges, duration, and other details, sourced from the public domain DoseWiki project, so you can read it fully offline. During an active session, there is a calm support chat, powered by a local AI model that never leaves your machine. You can pick how it responds, for example just listening or keeping you grounded, and you can turn it off completely if you prefer. If the chat detects signs of a crisis, or a dangerous combination is logged, the app surfaces real emergency and peer support contacts, driven by fixed rules rather than the AI itself. Other features include importing a past experience from plain text and having the local model turn it into a structured entry for you to review, searchable offline access to the substance reference, and two way sync with an Obsidian vault so entries can be exported as readable Markdown notes and brought back in. Optional phone access lets you use the journal, checker, reference, and chat away from your desktop, kept private by design. The project is built with Tauri 2 and Svelte in TypeScript for the desktop shell, with a local SQLite database and optional SQLCipher encryption at rest. It works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The authors are explicit that this is a harm reduction and journaling tool, not medical advice, and that the interaction checker only flags some well documented combinations.