Citadel

Citadel is a desktop board you fill with the things you are working from: images, video, PDFs, 3D models, notes, code, and then arrange, mark up, connect, and search. It runs on your machine, keeps your files where you put them, and never asks for an account.

What goes on a board

Drag files straight onto the canvas: images, GIFs, video, audio, 3D models and PDFs. Paste a YouTube link, and it embeds. Write text and notes directly. Drop in a Word document, Markdown or a text file, and it arrives as editable text.

There are code cards with syntax colouring in ten languages, colour swatches, and A/B comparison items that wipe between two images.

What it does that a folder doesn't

Connections that mean something. Draw a thread between two items and label what it is: a source, a contradiction, a question, a proof. The relationship survives the rearranging.

One search across everything. The Index searches every board at once: items, notes, comments, tags, code contents, and connections. Filter by type, tag, board or source file.

Vision checks. Press Y to redraw the whole board in greyscale, blurred for a squint test, or through three colour-blindness simulations. Shift+M Mirrors it, which surfaces drawing errors the eye has stopped noticing.

Study sessions. Timed reference practice over a queue of items, with pause, skip and your own interval.

A time machine. Scrub the board back through its own history and watch it assemble and disassemble. Every save leaves a thumbnail in the filmstrip.

Draw alongside it. Keep Citadel above your art program, drop its opacity, or turn on click-through so your strokes land in the app underneath.

Getting things back out

Export the viewport, a selection or a whole board as PNG or PDF. Save a portable .citadelz archive that bundles every asset. Or send a board out as one ordinary Markdown file, no plugin, nothing to install on the other side, which drops straight into Obsidian or any editor.

Pull a colour palette out of any reference image, and keep research captures attached to the exact region of the image they came from.

Being straight with you

> This is early access. Version 0.2.0, made by one person. It is stable enough that I use it, and there is a guided example project built in that walks you through every part of it.

> Builds are unsigned. Windows SmartScreen will warn you the first time. That is what an unsigned build looks like, not a sign of anything wrong, but you should know before you download rather than after.

> Updates are manual. Citadel makes no outbound request at all, including no update check. Come back here for new versions, or let the itch app handle it.

> What I am committing to: fixing bugs on a reasonable cadence, and reading every feature request. Not a support contract,  just what I actually intend to do.

> The source is MIT. If you would rather build it yourself than pay, that is genuinely fine, and the instructions are in the repository.