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Plainva 0.4.0: a Pinboard, a reorganized Settings, and an experimental Calendar and Email

July 19, 2026

0.4.0 is a big one. There’s a whole new way to look at a database, the Settings menu has been rebuilt from the ground up, and two things I’ve wanted in a notes app for years — a calendar and email — have landed as an early, experimental preview. Still plain Markdown files, still your disk, still no format changes.

A Pinboard for your notes

I’ve wanted a Google Keep replacement that lives in my own files for a long time. So there’s now a Pinboard — an eighth .base view type. Point a database’s view at “Pinboard” and it turns into a board of cards, Keep-style: each card shows the rendered note — text, lists, clickable checkboxes, images — laid out in masonry columns, with a Pinned section on top and everything else below.

You capture straight into it: type in the “Write a note…” field, give it a title if you want (that becomes the file name and the H1), and it’s a new note in your storage folder. You can drag cards to arrange them, filter by label chips (your tags, or a multi-select property), tint each card a colour, and show a few of the note’s properties right on the card. Under the hood it’s a plain table with a render hint, so if you open the same .base in Obsidian it’s just a normal table — nothing to migrate.

Settings, rebuilt

The old settings screen was one long scroll. It’s gone. On the desktop, each section is now its own page — Appearance, Editor, Sync, Backup and so on — built from calm, named “cards” that group related options, with a proper vault identity card at the top instead of a cramped dropdown. It’s the same look I then carried into the .base configuration menu: a tabbed panel next to the live view (View / Columns / Filter / Sort / Data source), an icon-tile picker for the view type, a visible/hidden split for columns, and filters written out as readable little chip-sentences you click to edit.

Mobile got the bigger rethink. The bottom bar is now three tabs you arrange yourself plus a fixed More, ＋ is a floating button that follows where you are, and ⋮ opens Settings directly. Settings itself is a master–detail layout with its own Vaults screen. It finally feels like a phone app instead of a desktop app squeezed onto a phone.

Calendar and email — the experimental part

Here’s the honest bit. This release also brings a Calendar and an Email client, and both are marked experimental on purpose.

Why the label: everything else in Plainva runs through automated tests before it ships. These two can’t — they talk to live external accounts (CalDAV, Google, Microsoft; IMAP and SMTP) that I can’t exercise in a test harness. They work, and I use them, but I’d rather be upfront than oversell them. Keep a backup, and please tell me when something’s off.

What they are: the calendar is a real time grid — Day, 3-day, Week, Month and an Agenda — with click-to-create, drag to reschedule or resize, recurring events, attendees and RSVP, per-event colours and standards-compliant invitations, syncing two ways with CalDAV, Google and Microsoft. There’s a mobile calendar too. The mail client is a three-pane reader/composer: read over IMAP or Microsoft Graph, compose with To/Cc/Bcc chip rows and send over SMTP or Graph, and turn a message into a note or a task — or email a note straight from its menu. Remote content is blocked by default in a sandboxed viewer.

If you don’t want any of that, you’ll never see it — it’s opt-in, account by account.

A few smaller things worth the upgrade

You can promote a checkbox into a task database: pick a default task database, and any - [ ] in a note can become a proper task note — carrying its due date, tags and a link back — while the original line turns into a wiki link. An unresolved [[link]] now shows dimmed and dashed, and clicking it creates the note and opens it, exactly like Obsidian. Empty folders sync both ways now, folder pickers browse your live file system (so a folder you just made is selectable), and .base selectors only offer properties of a type that fits.

And macOS: the builds are signed now (with my Developer ID). Notarization is coming separately — for now, right-click → Open on the first launch.

If you’re on 0.2.x or 0.3.x, the built-in updater will offer 0.4.0; otherwise it’s on the releases page. Plain files, no format changes — your vaults just work.

One ask: the Android app is in closed beta, and this is a great moment to try it. Google only lets it into the Play Store once 12 people test it for 14 days straight, so the single most helpful thing is to join and just leave it installed. Two steps: plainva.com/android-beta. iPhone runs separately via TestFlight — waitlist at plainva.com.

— Marco