Open source · Local-first · BYOK

An infinite AI whiteboard that stays on your laptop.

Shannon is a local-first canvas for notes, chats, math, drawings, PDFs, charts, and embeds — wired up to the LLM and search providers you bring. Your notes and your keys never leave the machine.

Watch the demo Download for macOS, Windows, Linux View source on GitHub
or run it from a terminal —
Apache 2.0 licensed No accounts. No telemetry. Anthropic · OpenAI · Groq · Ollama · more
Why Shannon

The opposite of a cloud notebook.

Most AI tools live on someone else's server. Shannon lives in ~/.shannon/. That's a different deal — and it's the whole point.

Everything stays local

Notes, blobs, folders, and provider keys live under ~/.shannon/ on your machine. The only outbound traffic goes to the providers you configure — and you can audit every line.

Bring your own keys

No subscription, no middleman billing. Paste your Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, Together, Ollama, or Perplexity key — Shannon writes it to config.json at mode 0600 and talks to the provider directly.

Open source, end to end

Apache 2.0. The whole stack — canvas, providers, CLI, Tauri shell — is on GitHub. Read it, fork it, rip out the parts you don't want. No closed binaries hiding what's on the wire.

What's on the canvas

One infinite surface for every kind of thinking.

Text, freehand drawing, shapes, arrows, images, paginated PDFs, KaTeX math, 2D graphs, charts, tables, checklists, AI chats with tool calls, Google Docs / Sheets / Slides and YouTube embeds, and cross-note links — all addressable by slash commands inside any text fragment.

A study note on the green-hills background — text outline, a 2D graph, and slash-command tool calls
Notes, math, and graphs on a custom background.
The same note shifted across the canvas, now over the pink-cave background
Pan the infinite canvas; swap backgrounds at will.
A canvas with a table, a freehand drawing, and inline /chat queries
Tables, freehand drawing, and inline chats.
A near-empty canvas on the black-hole background with a single line of text
Or just stare into space.
Get it running

Two ways in. Both local.

Pick the native desktop build for the best experience, or run the npm package as a tiny local web app on localhost:1948 — the year of A Mathematical Theory of Communication. 

# native desktop (signed & notarized on macOS)
↓ github.com/myxamediyar/shannon/releases
# or run as a local web app
$ npm install -g tryshannon
$ shannon                # http://localhost:1948

Your notes, your keys, your machine.

Pick a build, paste a key, open a canvas. That's the whole onboarding.

Releases Code