MyFastNote: user guide

What MyFastNote is for

Most of what you want to write down is short and soon gone: a phone number, something to buy, a thought, a thing to do later. Many note apps first ask you to pick a notebook, type a title and decide where the note belongs. MyFastNote asks nothing. You open it, the keyboard is up, you type, you leave.

Everything you write goes into one list, the newest at the bottom, like a chat with yourself. You never create a note: you just write, and the app decides where one note ends and the next begins.

The app is built on four ideas:

• Writing comes first. The writing screen is a small window of its own that does not load your notes before it opens.
• Nothing in the way. There is no Save button and no question on the way in or out. Leaving the screen saves what you wrote; an empty screen saves nothing.
• Few features. No folders, no tags, no accounts.
• One place. Search, filters and the calendar help you find things, but there is only the one list to come back to.

How notes are kept: the stream, records and the pause

The stream is the list of all your notes, oldest at the top and newest at the bottom, just above the keyboard. Opening the app shows the bottom of it.

A record is one entry in the stream. You do not make records by hand. When you write something, the app either adds it as a new line to the newest record or starts a new record.

It starts a new record when one of these is true:

• more time has passed since the newest record was begun than the pause you set (20 minutes unless you change it in Settings);
• the day has changed;
• you gave the new note a colour or bold that the newest record does not have.

So a run of quick thoughts becomes one record, and notes written hours apart stay separate, without you deciding anything. When the app gets it wrong, Merge with previous and Split here put it right (see What you can do with a note).

Times are kept for every record but are not part of its text. The stream shows a time beside a record only when it is separated from the record above by more than the pause or by a new day. Today's records show the time alone, older ones the date as well. You can show or hide the time of a single record from its menu.

Ways to write a note

All of these open the same writing screen, or save the text straight away:

• Widget. Put the MyFastNote widget on your home screen and tap it. The round icon at one end of it opens the app itself instead, and the microphone at the other end starts dictation.
• App icon. Long-press the app's icon and choose Write a note or Dictate a note.
• Quick Settings. Add the tile called Note to Android's Quick Settings and tap it.
• Notification. Turn on Persistent notification for quick capture in Settings. The notification sits in the notification shade, and you type the note into it without opening anything. It is shown on the lock screen too; whether you can type there without unlocking depends on your phone's settings.
• From another app. Share text to MyFastNote, or select text and choose MyFastNote from the menu that appears. The text is put into the writing screen, where you can add to it.
• In the app. New note in the bar at the bottom starts a new record, whatever the pause.
• By voice. The microphone on the widget and Dictate a note start your phone's speech recognition. What it hears is saved as a note. If the phone has no speech recognition, the app tells you so.

The writing screen: colours, bold and the checkbox button

The writing screen is a card over whatever you were doing, with the keyboard already up. Type, then leave: press Back, put the keyboard away, tap outside the card, or go to the home screen. What you wrote is saved. If you change your mind, leave the field empty and nothing is saved.

Above the field is a row of four colour dots, a B and a checkbox button:

• Tap a colour dot to give the note that colour as its background. Tap it again to take the colour off. The colours are red, amber, green and blue.
• Tap B to make the whole note bold.
• Tap the checkbox button to put a checkbox at the start of the line you are on. That is the quick way to write a to-do.

A note with a colour or bold that the newest record does not have always starts a new record, so a colour is also a way to keep a note apart on purpose.

If you have named a colour in Settings, the name is shown under its dot. If you have also ticked that colour's checkbox option there, choosing the colour puts a checkbox at the start of the note by itself. Taking the colour off, or moving to a colour without the option, takes the box away again, unless you have ticked it by then.

Pressing Enter on a checkbox or bullet line starts the next line with the same sign. Pressing Enter on an empty one ends the list.

With Double-space to save turned on in Settings, typing two spaces at the end of the note closes the screen and saves the note.

Reading and changing your notes

• Tap a record to change it. It becomes a text field with the keyboard and shows the text as you typed it, signs included. Put the keyboard away and it goes back to its formatted look. Changes are saved as you type.
• The newest record can always be continued: tap it and keep writing.
• Backspace at the very start of a record joins it to the record above.
• A record with a colour is tinted across the full width of the screen, so several in a row read as one block.
• A line saying New since you were here sits above the first record that arrived while the app was closed, for example from the widget or the notification, so that you see where you left off.
• A record that would fill more than about ten lines is shown shortened, with … more under it. Tap that to see all of it, and … less to shorten it again. The note itself is not changed, and opening it for editing always shows all of it.

Formatting: checkboxes, bullets, bold and italic

MyFastNote understands a few signs, typed at the start of a line or around words:

You need not remember them: the writing screen has a button for the checkbox, and the same list is in Settings under Formatting.

Tap a checkbox in the stream to tick or untick it.

A record with two or more checkboxes shows how far it has got, for example 2/5, under its time. The figure is dimmed once every box is ticked.

What you can do with a note

Long-press a record to open its menu. On the record you are editing, long-press the narrow column at its start, where the time is shown.

• Select starts picking several records. Tap others to add or remove them, then use Copy, Share or Export in the top bar. The records are taken together, in order of time, under date headings. Back or ✕ ends the selection.
• Copy text copies the record to the clipboard.
• Share… sends its text to another app.
• Merge with previous joins it to the record above.
• Split here, in the menu of the record you are editing, cuts it in two at the cursor.
• The colour dots, B and the checkbox button change the record's colour and bold, and put a checkbox on its first line or take it off.
• Time decides whether this record shows its time: Auto follows the pause, Show and Hide hold for this record only.
• Delete removes the record.

Swipe a record to the left to delete it quickly.

The app does not ask "Are you sure?". Instead, after a delete, a merge or a change of colour or bold, Undo is offered at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds. After that a deleted record still waits in the Trash in Settings for 30 days, where you can restore it or delete it for good.

Finding a note: search, filters and the calendar

Search

Tap the magnifying glass in the top bar and type. The stream narrows to the records that match, and the words you looked for are marked in them. Search takes no notice of accents or of capital letters, so mereni finds měření, and a word that is only half typed already finds something. Tap a result to go to it in the full stream.

• Put words in quotes to find them together and in that order: "meeting monday".
• Put a dash before a word to leave out the records that contain it: meeting -cancelled.
• Tap the calendar icon in the search bar to keep only the results of one day.

Filters

The filter icon beside the magnifying glass opens a row of buttons above the bottom bar: All, the four colours, B for bold notes, an empty box for notes with an unticked checkbox (your open to-dos), and a link sign for notes that contain a web address, an email address, a phone number or a date. One of them is active at a time, and the stream and the calendar both follow it. Tapping the filter icon again closes the row and shows everything.

At the end of the row, set apart, is Hide done: a ticked box with a line through it. It works together with any of the others and hides the notes in which every checkbox is ticked. A list with one box still open stays. It stays on until you turn it off, also after the app has been closed, and a dot on the filter icon shows that it is on. If you tick the last open box of a note while it is on, the note disappears, and Undo is offered for a few seconds.

Calendar

Calendar in the bottom bar shows a month. Days with notes have a dot. Tap a day to go to its first note; a day without notes takes you to the nearest earlier day that has some. As you scroll the stream, the marked day and the month follow. The arrows change the month. Tap Calendar again to put it away.

Back to now

Tap the title MyFastNote at the top to return to the newest record.

Text size and links

Pinch with two fingers anywhere on the stream to make the text of the notes larger or smaller. Settings offers the same as three steps: Small, Medium and Large.

Web addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and dates in a note can be tapped. They open in your browser, your mail app, the dialer or your calendar. A date is recognised when it is written like 4.9.2026 or 2026-09-04. In search results a tap opens the result instead.

Settings

Open the menu with the three dots in the top bar and choose Settings.

Backup, export and moving to a new phone

Backup. In Settings, under Backup, choose a folder once. From then on the app writes all your notes into that folder as one Markdown file, MyFastNote.md, whenever you leave the app, but at most once an hour. Back up now does it at once. Beside that file the app keeps the last five dated copies, so that one bad write is never your only copy. The file is plain text that any editor can read.

Keep the backup folder for backups only. The app tidies it: of the files there whose names begin with "MyFastNote-" and end with ".md" it keeps the five newest dated copies and deletes the rest. An export saved into the same folder under its usual name would be removed with them.

Export. The three-dot menu has Export everything and Export a date range…. For a range you pick the first and the last day in a calendar; the last 30 days are picked to begin with. Either one saves a Markdown file in the place you choose. Selected records are exported in the same way with Export in the top bar.

Import. Import from file in Settings reads such a file back into the app and skips the notes you already have. Colours and bold come back with the notes. This is how you move to a new phone: back up or export on the old one, copy the file over, and import it on the new one. Your notes are not part of the backup that Android makes to your Google account, so the file is what carries them.

Locking the notes

Lock the notes in Settings makes the app ask for your fingerprint, or for the PIN, pattern or password of your phone, each time you open it. While the lock is on:

• writing from the widget, the Quick Settings tile and the notification still works without unlocking, because none of them shows your notes;
• the widget shows no note text, whatever you chose for it;
• the app's screen is kept out of screenshots and out of the list of recent apps.

The lock keeps people from reading your notes in the app. It does not encrypt them, and it does not cover backup and export files, which are plain text. If the phone has no screen lock at all, there is nothing to ask for and the app opens as before.

Languages

The app is in Czech, English, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Dates and the names of months follow the language. On Android 13 and later the choice is also found in Android's own settings for the app's language. The guide inside the app (three-dot menu, User guide) is in the same six languages.

What the app leaves out on purpose

• No folders, notebooks or tags. Colours, search and the calendar answer "which" and "when".
• No reminders and no alarms.
• No accounts, no sync and no cloud. The Markdown backup is how your notes travel.
• No toolbar for formatting. The few signs and the checkbox button cover it.
• No pictures and no attachments. It is a place for words.

See also the privacy policy.