MojoPad

Encryption and Privacy

Some notes are nobody's business. MojoPad encrypts at two levels, both with AES-256-GCM and scrypt key derivation — modern, audited primitives.

Encrypting a page

Edit ▸ Encrypt Page… (⇧⌘E). Choose a password (and an optional hint). From then on the page's content exists on disk only as ciphertext. Locked pages show a lock screen in the editor and a 🔒 in the page list, and they are excluded from search, linking, exports, AI indexing, the web server, and Static Publishing — no leaks through side doors. Unlock with the password; the page stays unlocked until the document closes (or the re-lock timer fires).

Encrypting a document

File ▸ Set Document Password… protects the whole document: every page's name and content is encrypted at rest, and the document demands the password when opened. Change or remove the password from the same menu (you'll need the current one). There is no recovery — MojoPad never stores your password; a forgotten password means the content is gone. That's the point.

What's covered, precisely. Page names and page content, of course — but also the things about your writing that are just as telling: your folder tree and every page title in it, your belief stamps (the sentences you wrote about changing your mind), your task areas, projects, goals and labels, your territory names, and the paths of any folders the document follows. All of it goes under the same password.

What deliberately stays readable is the machinery a locked document needs in order to be unlocked: which version of the format it is, when it was created and last changed, how many pages it has, and the scrambling data the password is checked against. Someone with the file and no password can see that a MojoPad document exists and roughly how big it is. They can't see a single word of it, or what any part of it is called.

Documents you locked with an earlier version of MojoPad are brought up to this the first time you unlock them — no action needed, and the password doesn't change.

The re-lock timer

Settings ▸ Security ▸ Re-lock encrypted content: after 1, 5, 15, or 60 idle minutes, unlocked encrypted pages lock themselves (their plaintext is dropped from memory) and password-protected documents close. Off by default; recommended on a shared Mac.

The wider privacy story

  • Your documents are local files. Nothing syncs anywhere unless you put it somewhere.
  • MojoPad's own AI features run on your Mac via Ollama — no page content ever leaves the machine. See Local AI.
  • The semantic index (which contains content-derived vectors) is encrypted along with password-protected documents.
  • If you connect an outside AI assistant of your own, that assistant is the one exception, and it's one you choose: what it reads goes wherever it sends it. See AI Agents for exactly where that edge falls and how to set it.
  • MojoPad phones home to exactly nobody.