💡 Why NoteWise?

YouTube has become one of the richest learning platforms on the planet — university lectures, conference talks, technical deep-dives, language lessons, and entire courses are all freely available. But video is a passive medium. You watch, you nod, and two days later the details are gone.

NoteWise was built to fix that gap.

The idea is simple: your time watching a video is valuable. The notes that should come from it — the structured, searchable, reviewable kind — should not require an extra hour of your day. NoteWise automates that step. Point it at a YouTube URL and walk away with local Markdown study notes that are deeper and more useful than most people would write by hand.

Where it shines:

• 📚 Students catching up on lecture recordings or supplementing textbooks with YouTube explanations
• 🧑‍💻 Developers staying on top of conference talks, tutorials, and technical deep-dives without watching at 3x speed
• 🌍 Language learners extracting structured notes from native-language content
• 📋 Researchers quickly distilling hours of talks into organized, searchable reference material
• 🏢 Teams turning internal video presentations into shareable written documentation

The output is not just a transcript summary. It is structured, hierarchical Markdown with headers, sub-topics, definitions, examples, and concepts explained in depth. Chapter-aware videos can be split into per-chapter files, and long courses can be processed into organized local notes. Everything lands in your filesystem: portable, searchable, and permanently yours.

Quick start

uv tool install notewise
notewise setup
notewise process "https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID"

Generated notes land in ./output by default.

Prefer another install method?

# Try without installing
uvx notewise --help

# Standalone binary installer
curl -fsSL https://notewise.click/install | sh

Windows PowerShell:

irm https://notewise.click/install | iex

See the full installation guide for uv, uvx, pipx, pip, Docker, and standalone binaries.

Demo

_{Watch the full demo: demo/notewise.mp4}

Documentation

Common commands

notewise process "https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID" --format md,docx --quiz
notewise process "https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAYLIST_ID"
notewise transcript "https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID" --format json
notewise doctor
notewise update

notewise update checks the latest release and prints the right upgrade command group for standalone binary or Python package installs. Run notewise --help or open the command reference for the full CLI surface.

Development

git clone https://github.com/whoisjayd/notewise
cd notewise
uv sync --dev
make test

Website work uses Bun from website/:

bun install --frozen-lockfile
bun run lint
bunx tsc --noEmit
bun run build

Docs live in docs/. Do not run Prettier on Mintlify MDX; validate docs config with:

python -m json.tool docs/docs.json
node --check docs/umami.js

Read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a PR.

License

MIT with Attribution. If you use NoteWise in a project or build on top of it, include credit and a link back to this repository.

Thanks

NoteWise is built on a great open-source ecosystem. See GRATITUDE.md for acknowledgements.

Found a bug? Open an issue. Security concern? See SECURITY.md.