A persistent desktop workspace for deep work — parallel timers, sticky markdown notes, habit heatmap, and tasks. All offline. All yours.
Every feature in Nerva was added because the alternative cost us a flow state.
Run three deep-work sessions at once — writing, code, and reading — each on its own clock. Every tick is wall-clock anchored, so timers stay accurate through laptop sleep, suspend, and full reboots.
No more "I closed my laptop for lunch and the pomodoro lied to me."
Pop a note out of the main window and it floats on top of your editor, browser, Slack — wherever you are. Write in markdown: headings, bold, lists, code. It autosaves every 250 ms into an append-only log.
The thought you almost lost is now one keystroke away.
Tap once for done, twice for partial, three times for missed. Streaks compute themselves. A full-year heatmap shows you the shape of your consistency — the same way GitHub shows contributions, except this one is about your life.
Hit Ctrl + Space from anywhere — even from a popped-out sticky note — to summon the command palette. Start a timer, jump to a habit, open the heatmap, switch theme, snooze a task. Never reach for the mouse.
Dock the task panel inside Nerva, or pop it out as a tiny always-on-top widget you can park in the corner while you work in your IDE. Priority dots, due times, one-click complete.
No popups. No "tip of the day". No login walls.
Event-sourced SQLite log. Every keystroke is an append. The runtime replays on launch — even after a power cut, you're back exactly where you were.
The app makes no outbound calls. No usage tracking, no error reporting unless you explicitly enable it.
Press the ☼ in the top bar to toggle. Sticky notes keep their amber tone in both — by design.
Native Rust core + Tauri shell. Not Electron. Your fan won't spin up because you opened a timer.
Ctrl+Space command palette. Ctrl+H habits. Ctrl+T tasks. Ctrl+N new note. Configurable.
Apache-2.0. The full source — Rust core, React UI, build scripts — is on GitHub. Audit it, fork it, ship your own.
One file per platform. No installer wizard tricks.
More info → Run anyway, or install the Bytical trust certificate
once to silence the warning forever. The Microsoft Store build (in review) bypasses this.
Yes — Apache-2.0 licensed open source. No paid tier, no upgrade nag.
Yes. There is no cloud component. All data lives in a local SQLite database on your machine. Nerva is fully usable on a plane, in a tunnel, or on day-3 of an internet outage.
No. The app makes zero outbound network calls unless you explicitly check for updates from the menu.
Nerva uses wall-clock math, not interval ticks. When the machine wakes, each running timer computes now − started_at and shows the real elapsed time. No phantom pauses.
Yes. Notes autosave every 250 ms into an append-only event log. On next launch the app replays the log to reconstruct in-memory state — including cursor position.
Nerva is signed with a self-signed certificate during early releases. Click More info → Run anyway, or install the Bytical trust certificate once to silence the warning forever. The Microsoft Store build (in review) bypasses this entirely.
Not yet — macOS support is on the roadmap. Today Nerva ships for Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 / 24.04, Fedora, Arch) and Windows 10 / 11.
Open an issue at github.com/piyushptiwari1/nerva/issues. We read every one.