Quickstart
Pick the environment you're going to use noggin in. Each page below covers install and your first five minutes in one place. The same noggin file (and the same items inside it) works across all of them — they're different experiences over the same data, not different products.
VS Code
Sidebar tree, drag-and-drop, inline note editor, Copilot Chat integration. The richest experience.
Desktop app
Standalone Windows app — the same tree and details UI as VS Code, no editor required. Its sidebar can juggle more than one noggin.
Talk to your agent
Use noggin through GitHub Copilot Chat, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex — the agent picks the verbs for you.
Bare CLI
Drive noggin from your terminal with noggin push, noggin show, etc.
JavaScript / Node
Embed noggin in your own tool. fileNoggin(), verb methods, events, serializers.
What they all have in common
- Items form a tree. Each item has a title, a done flag, a created-at timestamp, and append-only notes.
- At most one item is active — that's your current spine through the tree.
- The same on-disk file (YAML by default) backs every experience, so you can drive noggin from the sidebar in one window and the CLI in another and they'll stay in sync.
If you're not sure which to pick: the VS Code experience is the most discoverable, the desktop app is the pick if you don't live in an editor, and the agent experience is the most ergonomic if you spend your day in a chat window already.