The Notebook widget gives you ruled pages on every new tab. Add a photo of a printed page, a slide, or a receipt, and its text lands on the page, read on your device with no network at all. For handwriting, pick a vision model you connected. Sticky notes and a plain scratchpad come with it.
Free. Open source. The on-device reader ships inside the extension.
Each is a widget: add it from Add widget, add it twice if you want two, remove it when you are done. Every one has a full-screen control, and Escape brings the page back.
Ruled pages with tabs and titles. Add a photo with the button, paste a screenshot, or drop an image on the page; the text is added under what you already wrote. Copy a page, or download the whole notebook as Markdown.
pages · photo to text · Markdown exportSquare notes in six colors on a board. Drag one by its top edge. New notes land on a stack; pull one off and it stays where you let go. Drop it on another board and it moves there. Drop it on any other card and it becomes a widget of its own, right beside that card.
drag · stack · pull offOne text box that is there every time you open a tab. No save button: it saves as you type. For the phone number you need in five minutes and the thought you do not want to lose.
plain text · saves as you go| Read with | Good at | What leaves your browser |
|---|---|---|
| This device | Printed and typed English: handouts, slides, screenshots, receipts.Tesseract, compiled to WebAssembly and shipped inside Fogar with its English data. Works offline. | Nothing |
| Ollama | Handwriting, as well as the vision model you pulled can read it.Add an Ollama profile in an LLM Chat widget, pull a vision model such as llava or qwen2.5vl, and tick “This model reads images”. | Nothing, it stays on this computer |
| A cloud model | Handwriting, usually well.A profile for Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or OpenRouter, with your own key. | The photo, to that provider |
Photos are scaled down to 2000 pixels on the long side and re-encoded before they are read. Fogar keeps the text, never the photo.
The rest of Fogar is a new tab that answers from a model running in your browser. See what leaves in each mode.
Not with the built-in reader, which is made for printed text. It can if you run a vision model in Ollama on the same computer and pick it as the reader: the photo goes to localhost and nowhere else. How well it reads depends on the model.
Only if you pick a cloud model as the reader. On this device, and with Ollama on this computer, nothing leaves. With a cloud model, the scaled-down photo goes to that provider’s endpoint with your key.
No. Fogar scales it down, reads it, and adds the text to the page. The photo itself is not stored, in the notebook or in the backup.
Onto another Post-its board, the note moves there. Onto any other card, such as your todos or the agenda, the note becomes its own Post-its widget next to that card. Drop it back on its own board and it just moves.
In this browser’s extension storage. Notebook pages, sticky notes, and the scratchpad all ride along in the backup file under Settings, and the Notebook also downloads as Markdown. None of it syncs between computers.
Fogar is on the Chrome Web Store. One click to add it, and it updates itself from there. Then open a new tab.
Free, from the Chrome Web Store. Brave, Arc, and Edge install from it too.
On your phone, or not on Chrome? The same Fogar runs as a web app at app.fogar.ai. Open it once with a connection, add it to your home screen (Safari: Share, then Add to Home Screen; Chrome: the menu, then Add to Home screen), and set it up from there; after that it works offline. The widgets that need Chrome’s own APIs, Sessions, bookmarks, Inbox, Feed, Jira, and Agenda, stay on the desktop.
Loaded the zip before the listing went live? The store copy has a different extension ID, so your data will not follow on its own. Three steps move it over.
Todos, notes, recipes, widgets, sessions, and settings go into one file.
It opens on your next new tab, empty.
Once it looks right, remove the old copy in chrome://extensions.
Can't use the store? The same build is here as a zip: unzip it, turn on Developer mode in chrome://extensions, and Load unpacked. It will not update itself.