How Endpaper works

Signing in

First sign-in is a magic link. Drop your email on /login, click the link we send, set a passphrase and save the recovery key the setup flow shows you once. From then on, your passphrase is what unlocks the encrypted parts of Endpaper.

Enroll a passkey from Settings and subsequent sign-ins skip the email round-trip — Touch ID, Face ID, or Windows Hello signs you in directly. Once a passkey is enrolled, click enable biometric unlock next to it and the daily unlock prompt becomes Tap to unlock. Browsers or password managers that don't support the WebAuthn PRF extension fall back to the passphrase form automatically.

If you ever lose your passphrase, the recovery key gets you back in from /recover. If you've used the recovery key somewhere you no longer trust, rotate it from Settings — the old key dies immediately.

First Light

Each morning, Endpaper opens to First Light — a single page that's yours for the day. Write what's on your mind. The page locks itself when the day ends (the rollover happens at 4am local, so the night-owl edit case is handled), so you can come back to read but not rewrite.

Highlight any line and press ⌘↑ to promote it into a Star — the highlighted text stays in First Light as a locked range linked to the new Star, with the seed visible in both places. The Star carries an immutable seed (the original line) and an editable body (your riff on it).

Stars

A Star is one thought, given a name. Every Star gets a cosmic ID — Endpaper-ε-39281 — where the Greek letter rotates with the month and the number is yours alone. The ID is permanent; the title and body keep changing as the thought grows.

Stars without tags live in the Nebula — the quiet space where new Stars first appear. Tag a Star and it leaves the Nebula automatically. Soft-deleted Stars are restorable from Settings for 30 days.

You can create a Star without promoting from First Light: the home capture surface at / takes a single thought, tagged with the ·🌙· sealed / ·○· open toggle to its right. Sealed by default. Same choice as promotion, same trust contract.

Connecting Stars: tags, Constellations, Galaxies

Two Stars are connected in Endpaper if they share a tag. That's the whole model. There's no separate "link two Stars" graph; tags are the connection.

A Constellation is a saved query — typically a tag, like leverage or decisions. Stars matching the query appear in the Constellation automatically. Constellations have their own writable description, so they can be reasoned about and grown into evergreen thinking.

A Galaxy is a top-level container — Work, Personal, Home, Faith. You usually have 2–5. Galaxies hold Constellations; the agent doesn't reason about Galaxies, they're scaffolding for you.

On any Star, click find related Stars → to see semantically nearby ones (AI-powered, Open Stars only). Click any to open it in a side panel beside the source. Inside that panel: tag both Stars with — type a shared tag, or click suggest → to have the AI propose one based on what the two share. Tick also create a Constellation to land the Constellation in one move.

Below the semantic affordance sits Stars sharing tags → — the user-curated connection mechanic. Tags are plaintext metadata, so this works across storage modes: Sealed Stars appear here too, ranked by tag-overlap count. No AI involved; if you've built the connections yourself, this is the surface that shows them back to you.

AI inside Endpaper

AI works on Open Stars only. Sealed Stars never go to Anthropic or OpenAI — and we can't read them either, because they're encrypted on your device before they reach us. You choose Sealed or Open at the moment you promote a thought from First Light, and you can switch any Star later from its footer (the · 🌙 · / · ○ · marker is the toggle). First Light itself is always Sealed. Read the full privacy posture →

When you invoke an AI feature on an Open Star, the Star's content travels over an encrypted connection to Anthropic (for the panel actions) and OpenAI (for finding related Stars). Both state in their commercial-API terms that they don't train on data sent through their APIs. You can turn AI off at the account level in Settings if you want it disabled across all Stars.

The AI never speaks first. Five surfaces, all reach-for-it:

• Title suggestion — on a Star, press ⌘⌥T in the body editor. Three candidate titles appear under the title field; click one to apply.
• Find related — on a Star, click "find related Stars →". Up to five cosine-nearest Stars from your library; click one to open it in the side panel.
• Tag both / suggest a Constellation — inside the side panel, type or ask for a shared tag. Optionally create the Constellation around it in the same step.
• Ask — click "ask AI →" on a Star, then type a question about it. Answers stay within what the Star says or what's directly inferable.
• Brainstorm — same panel, "brainstorm" tab. Five angles you haven't taken on the thought. Optional steer to bias the directions.
• Synthesize — same panel, "synthesize" tab. Auto-loads the related Stars as a checkbox list; pick the set you want. Returns the through-line across them — not a Star-by-Star summary.

To exclude a single Star from AI entirely, make it Sealed. Sealed means we can't read it, not just the AI doesn't see it — it's a cryptographic guarantee, not a soft promise.

Search (⌘K) is hybrid. Open Stars match via server-side full-text + semantic (Reciprocal Rank Fusion). Sealed Stars and First Light pages are indexed in your browser after you unlock — they appear in the same palette alongside Open results, but the decryption stays local. Type a phrase, get matches by literal words and meaning across everything you've written.

Wrap a query in straight double quotes — "mom-mom", "the leverage of small bets" — to search for that literal phrase. Without the quotes, the words can appear anywhere; semantic matches are folded in too. With the quotes, only Stars and First Light pages containing the exact phrase come back, and the AI side sits out.

Keyboard

⌘K

open the search palette

⌘⌥N

jump to capture (the home page)

⌘S / ⌘↵

save (in editor)

⌘↑

promote a selection to a Star (First Light only)

⌘B / ⌘I / ⌘K

bold / italic / link

⌘⇧7 / ⌘⇧8 / ⌘⇧.

numbered list / bulleted list / blockquote

⌘.

focus mode (dim non-cursor paragraphs)

⌘\

typewriter mode (cursor stays vertically centered)

⌘⌥T

suggest titles for the current Star (in the body editor)

Esc

close any open panel or modal

The AI panel (ask / brainstorm / synthesize) opens via the "ask AI →" link on a Star rather than a hotkey — every reasonable Mod-letter combo is browser-claimed (⌘J = downloads, ⌘⌥J = DevTools). User-configurable shortcuts are coming.

Settings, export, account

In Settings you can: turn AI assistance on or off, set a daily word-count goal, choose your color mode, see your lifetime First Light stats, restore Stars deleted in the last 30 days, enroll or remove passkeys (with the enable biometric unlock toggle next to each), change your passphrase, and rotate your recovery key.

Every Star and every First Light day has a copy markdown button — Sealed content is decrypted in your browser before it lands on the clipboard. Bulk export (the whole library as one zip) and account deletion are coming. Until then, the per-record copy buttons cover any individual page you want out.