Notes

The Notes feature in Open WebUI provides a dedicated workspace for content creation and knowledge management. While normal chats within Open WebUI preserves your linear conversations, Notes allow you to curate specific content, such as long-form drafts or coding cheatsheets that exists independently of any single conversation. These notes can be written and enhanced using your LLMs and seamlessly injected into new chats as context.

The Note Editor​

The Notes interface is a full-featured writing environment that supports Markdown and Rich Text.

Floating Formatting Toolbar​

Notes utilizes a context-aware Floating Toolbar for formatting, rather than a static bar at the top of the screen.

• Click on empty space: The toolbar will appear at your cursor location, allowing you to start new elements like Headers or Lists.
• Double-click text: Highlighting or double-clicking existing text summons the toolbar to apply styling options.

Toolbar Options:

• Headers: H1, H2, H3 for document structure.
• Lists: Bullet points (·) and Numbered lists (1.).
• Task Lists: Interactive checkboxes (☑) for to-do lists.
• Styling: Bold, Italic, Underline, and Strikethrough.
• Code: Inline code formatting </>.

Drag-and-Drop List Reordering​

List items can be reordered by dragging. Visual drag handles appear when hovering over list items, making it easy to reorganize content.

While this toolbar is native to the Notes workspace, it can also be enabled for standard Chats.

Input Tools & Metrics​

• Metrics: The top header displays real-time Word and Character counts, useful for drafting content with length constraints.
• Voice Dictation: Click the Microphone icon (bottom left) to dictate text directly into the note using speech-to-text.

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AI Integration​

LLMs are directly integrated with your notes, turning the editor into an AI-assisted workspace. Click the AI (Sparkle/Star) button at the bottom right of the screen to access these features.

1. Enhance​

The Enhance feature allows you to use AI as an in-place editor.

1. Highlight a specific section of text (or select nothing to target the whole note).
2. Click Enhance.
3. The LLM (selected in the Note's Controls) will rewrite your text directly in the editor with enhancement in mind.

2. Chat (Sidebar)​

The Chat button opens a dedicated sidebar conversation focused specifically on the note's content. This is a "Chat with Data" mode.

• You can ask the AI to summarize the note, extract specific data, or critique your writing.
• Edit Toggle: Inside the chat sidebar, there is an Edit toggle. This allows you to manually modify the highlighted context sent to the LLM before you press send, giving you granular control over the query.

Undo / Redo​

The Undo/Redo arrows (top right) track all changes. Crucially, this includes changes made by the AI. If the Enhance feature produces a result you dislike, you can simply click Undo to revert to your original text.

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Using Notes in Chat​

You can inject the content of your Notes into standard chat sessions to provide context to the AI.

How to Attach a Note​

1. Go to the main Chat Input bar.
2. Click the + (More) button.
3. Select Attach Notes.
4. Choose the desired note(s) from the list.

The full content of the note will be loaded into the context window for that conversation.

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Management & Sharing​

Open WebUI provides several ways to export and manage your notes via the More (...) menu in the top right corner.

Download​

You can export your notes in standard formats:

• Plain text (.txt): The raw text content.
• Plain text (.md): Preserves Markdown structure (headers, code blocks, etc.).
• PDF document (.pdf): A rendered document with visual formatting applied. Dark mode styling is automatically detected and applied.

Sharing​

• Copy Link: Copies the direct URL of the specific Note to your clipboard (useful for returning to the note later).
• Copy to Clipboard: Copies the entire contents (text) of the note to your clipboard for pasting into other applications.

Delete​

You can delete notes permanently from two locations:

1. From the Notes Dashboard: Click the More (...) button on the individual note card in the list view and select Delete.
2. From the Editor: While inside an open note, click the More (...) button in the top right corner of the screen and select Delete.

Quick Note Creation via URL​

Notes can be created directly by navigating to /notes/new with optional query parameters:

• /notes/new — Opens a blank note
• /notes/new?title=My%20Title&content=Initial%20text — Pre-populates title and content

This enables bookmarks and shortcuts for fast note creation.

Creating Notes from Search​

You can also create notes directly from the global search bar:

1. Open the search using the keyboard shortcut (Cmd+K / Ctrl+K) or by clicking the search icon.
2. Type your initial note content.
3. Select "Create a new note" from the actions list.
4. This will immediately open a new note with your search text as the content.

Importing Notes​

You can import existing Markdown (.md) files into your Notes workspace:

• Drag and Drop: Simply drag .md files directly onto the Notes list view to import them.

View Options​

The Notes dashboard offers different ways to organize your content:

• Filter: Toggle between Created by you (your private/shared notes) and Shared with you (notes others have shared).
• Layout: Switch between List and Grid views for visual preference.

Sharing Permissions​

Administrators can control sharing capabilities via environment variables or the Admin Panel:

• Internal Sharing: USER_PERMISSIONS_NOTES_ALLOW_SHARING (Controls sharing with other users/groups on the server).
• Public Sharing: USER_PERMISSIONS_NOTES_ALLOW_PUBLIC_SHARING (Controls generating public external links).

These can also be configured in Admin Panel > Settings > Users > Default Permissions.

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Use Cases​

While Open WebUI has dedicated Prompts (for slash commands) and Documents (for RAG), Notes serves a unique middle ground for iterative work and precise control.

1. The "Living" Draft (Iterative Writing)​

Unlike a static prompt or an uploaded document, a Note is a workspace.

• Scenario: You are writing a blog post or documentation. You draft the outline, use the Enhance tool to expand bullet points into paragraphs, and use the Chat sidebar to brainstorm titles. The Note becomes the final product, rather than just a reference.

2. High-Fidelity Code Staging​

RAG (Documents) uses vector search, which is probabilistic—it might miss a crucial line of code in a large file.

• Scenario: You have three specific functions from different files that you need to refactor together. Copy/pasting them into the chat is messy. Instead, paste them into a Note. When you attach the Note, you guarantee the LLM sees 100% of that code exactly as you arranged it, without the "fuzzy" guessing of RAG.

3. Transient Data Sanitization​

Sometimes you need to analyze data (like error logs) but need to clean it first.

• Scenario: You have a server error log containing sensitive API keys. Paste the log into a Note, manually delete the keys or use Enhance to "Anonymize this text", and then attach the sanitized Note to a chat to ask the AI for a solution. This prevents leaking sensitive data into your main chat history or embeddings.

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Limitations​

It is important to understand how Notes function technically compared to other features like "Documents".

Context Injection vs. Vector Search​

• Documents (RAG): When you upload a file to "Documents". the system uses vector search to find relevant chunks of the file based on your query. It is probabilistic.
• Notes (Deterministic): When you attach a Note, you are performing manual context injection. The system does not guess; it forces the LLM to read the entire note. This guarantees the model sees the information, but it requires you to select the correct note manually.

Context Window Usage​

Because attaching a Note injects the full text into the chat:

• If you have a very large note (e.g., 10,000 words) and attach it to a model with a small context window (e.g., 8k tokens), the model may run out of memory or "forget" the beginning of your conversation.

Read-Only Context​

When you attach a Note to a standard chat, it is read-only for the AI.

• The AI in the main chat cannot automatically update the text inside your Note file. If the AI suggests changes to your project, you must manually copy those changes back into the Note editor.