Make yourself at home.

Your first few minutes

1. Keep your new tab. Eterna replaces Chrome’s new tab page. If Chrome asks about the change, choose Keep it. Choosing Change it back turns off the extension.
2. Pin Eterna. Open Chrome’s puzzle-piece Extensions menu and select the pin beside Eterna. Its star will stay within reach in your toolbar.
3. Write something. Open Eterna from the toolbar, choose Notes, and use the new-note control. Type a thought and press Enter. A title is optional.
4. Make a backup. Open Settings and choose Back up now. Keep the downloaded .eterna file somewhere safe.

Already installed and need a refresher? Open Help inside Eterna and choose Show the welcome tour again.

Keep a thought before it goes

Click Eterna’s toolbar star to write alongside the page you are reading. The suggested keyboard shortcut is Alt + Shift + N, or Option + Shift + N on a Mac. Your assigned shortcut appears in Settings, where you can change it.

To keep something from a web page, select the text and right-click. Under Save selection to Eterna, choose New note or a recently edited note. Eterna keeps the source link so you can find your way back.

Open a note to keep writing. Your changes save automatically. Use headings, lists, checkboxes, quotes, code and images; type / to add a block. Select text for formatting options. Open the full-page editor when a thought needs more room.

The Scratchpad on Home is for the passing number, link or thought. Its text stays the same across your Eterna tabs. Clearing it offers Undo.

Give everything a place

Pin the entries you return to, add tags, and search by words from your notes, titles or people. Type #tag in search to filter by a tag. Notes can hold subpages, and an emoji icon can make a familiar page easier to spot.

In Home’s corner panel, Notes, Tasks, Events and People each have their own view. Use the + after the categories to make a custom category from a tag. Removing a category hides its shortcut; it keeps the entries and their tags.

Archive puts an entry away without deleting it. To find it later, open Archive or enable Include archive in search. Move to Trash keeps it recoverable for 30 days, unless you delete it forever sooner. Trash is excluded from search.

Remember what is coming up

Tasks can have a due date, a time and a reminder. Check a task off when it is done; Undo is there if you need it. Completing a task cancels its pending reminder.

Events have a date, an optional time and an optional reminder. You can also write a day or time in quick-add, such as “Dinner with Sam Friday 7pm.” Check the preview before saving, or choose Keep as note.

Reminders appear while Chrome is running. Ones missed while Chrome was closed appear when it starts again. A reminder set for a time already past does not fire. All-day reminders are anchored to 9:00 in the time zone in which they were set.

People help you remember the person behind the plan. Add how you know someone, a note and optional contact details. Choose a follow-up interval, then use Talked today when you catch up. Follow-up nudges live inside Eterna.

Find your kind of quiet

Open Settings and choose a Home style: Corner keeps your notebook in a floating panel, Full brings the whole dashboard into view, and Plain shows the clock and quick-add. Plain still replaces Chrome’s new tab. Use Chrome’s new tab at the bottom of Home to reach Chrome’s own page.

Choose light, dark or a theme that follows your computer. For the background, use the daily photo, your own image, dots or a plain canvas. A personal photo can be moved and cropped; it stays on this computer and is not included in backups.

Fresh photo every day uses Eterna’s photo service and Unsplash. Turn it off in Settings to use bundled photos without those requests. Read how daily photos work.

For a little focus, name one thing in Home’s Corner layout and choose 25 or 50 minutes. Pause or stop when you need to; the timer is shared across your Eterna tabs.

Keep a copy of what matters

Your writing lives in this browser on this computer. It does not sync to an account or another device. Uninstalling Eterna, resetting a browser profile or losing the device can mean losing your notes.

1. Open Settings → Back up now to download a .eterna file.
2. Keep a copy in a place you trust, such as an external drive or your own cloud storage. Backup files are not encrypted by Eterna.
3. To move computers, copy the file across, install Eterna, and choose Settings → Restore from backup. Review the preview before restoring.

A backup includes entries, note images, settings and scratchpad text. Your custom Home background is excluded. Backups made before the rename with a .burrow extension can also be restored.

Settings can remind you weekly or monthly to make a backup. These are reminders: Eterna does not currently make automatic backups.

To start fresh, use Settings → Erase all data. Make a backup first if there is anything you may want later. Erasing local data does not remove backup files you have already saved.

Use it your way

Use Tab and Shift + Tab to move between controls, and Enter or Space to activate them. Focus rings show where you are. Esc closes menus and dialogs, clears search, or returns from the editor, depending on what is open.

Chrome’s zoom controls make the interface and text larger. You can use the full-page editor for more writing space, choose a light or dark theme in Settings, and turn on reduced motion in your computer’s accessibility settings. Eterna follows that preference.

Keyboard shortcuts and markdown are optional. Use the visible buttons and formatting controls if that is more comfortable. When positioning your own background photo, arrow keys also move the image.

A few common questions

Looking for how Eterna handles data? Read the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.