// the find
saber-notes/saber
The cross-platform open-source app built for handwriting
Saber is a cross-platform note-taking app written in Flutter and Dart, aimed at people who write by hand on tablets, phones and desktops. Its distinguishing features are dark-mode inversion of ink, images and PDFs, a highlighter the author says stays uniform where strokes overlap, and a dual-password scheme meant to keep notes unreadable to whoever runs the sync server. It suits students and anyone who takes more handwritten notes than typed ones.
Dark-mode inversion covers imported images and PDFs, not just the app chrome, which is the part that matters when you are reading a textbook at night. One Flutter codebase ships to Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, Linux, Flathub and F-Droid, and .github/workflows has a build job per platform plus a tests job that reports to Codecov. The encryption design is the right shape: notes are only readable with the user's own password, so a server operator, hosted or self-hosted, cannot read them. That is the README's claim, and I have not audited it.
Sync is effectively Nextcloud-only. The Links section names one Nextcloud server and nothing else, and the README does not document the sync protocol, so anyone wanting a different backend will be reading source. Install and build instructions live on the GitHub wiki rather than in the repo, so contributors depend on pages that can drift from the code. A check_flutter_submodule script and workflow suggest the Flutter SDK is pinned as a submodule, which means SDK upgrades are likely a manual chore; I have not read .gitmodules to confirm how it is set up.