Cairn vs Filepad Markdown

Cairn is a fast, native task and note companion that lives on top of the Markdown files you already own. Point it at your Obsidian vault — or any folder of Markdown notes — and your tasks and notes appear in clean, focused views. Everything you do in Cairn is written straight back to your files as plain text, in the Obsidian Tasks format. YOUR NOTES STAY YOURS • No account, no sign-up, no Cairn cloud database — your tasks live in your own files • Cairn does not send your notes or tasks to the developer • Careful, patch-based edits change only the content you touched, preserving the rest of your note • Works alongside Obsidian, iCloud Drive, Git, or any sync you already use CAPTURE, BROWSE, AND PLAN • Browse and edit Markdown notes directly in your vault • Quick capture into your daily note, with date, tag, and priority tokens parsed as you type • Choose where longer captures are saved • Today, Upcoming, Inbox, and Pool views, plus a global filter for folders, tags, dates, priority, and status • Full support for sub-tasks and task hierarchies • Recurring tasks in Obsidian Tasks format, with safe completion handling • Convert upcoming calendar events into tasks, or mirror your dated tasks into a calendar you choose (optional) STAY ON TRACK • Local reminders for due tasks — including sunrise-relative reminders computed entirely on your device • A Live Activity keeps today's progress on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island • Home Screen widgets and a Control Center quick-capture control • Search across every task in your vault MADE FOR OBSIDIAN — NOT ONLY OBSIDIAN Cairn reads and writes the Obsidian Tasks plugin format (due, scheduled, start, and done dates, priorities, recurrence, tags), so your vault stays fully compatible with your desktop setup. Don't use Obsidian? Create a plain task folder in the Files app and Cairn works as a stand-alone Markdown to-do app. Cairn asks for access only to the folder you pick. Calendar access and location (used to compute local sunrise times) are optional and processed on your device. If you choose iCloud Drive or another Files or calendar provider, that provider's own sync and privacy terms apply.

Filepad opens the Markdown you already have — in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or on this iPhone — and leaves it exactly where it is. Nothing is copied into the app. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. FINDS WHAT IS QUIETLY WRONG HTML tells you when you break it. Markdown does not — it just renders differently, and you never notice. Filepad reads your document the way the renderer does and points at the lines that will not come out the way you meant: a heading with no space after the #, a table row with the wrong number of cells, an unclosed link, a footnote with no definition. One tap fixes what can be fixed by adding text. Nothing is ever deleted to "fix" something. READS PROPERLY Headings, tables, task lists, quotes, code blocks, footnotes, front matter, and [[wiki links]] between documents in the same folder. Jump by heading with the outline, or with the four navigation buttons that sit under your thumb. FINDS THINGS Search inside a document with every hit highlighted, or search a whole folder and see which files hold what you are looking for. Sort by name or by when you last changed something. EDITS AND SAVES CAREFULLY Edit the source with a toolbar for the marks you forget, and a line that tells you what the cursor is sitting on. Saving is atomic, and the previous version is kept beside the file so an edit can be undone. If the file changed outside the app while you were editing, Filepad does not overwrite it — it saves your version alongside and asks you. ALSO OPENS PDF, HTML AND TEXT PDFs and web documents are view-only. HTML is drawn with network access blocked at two independent layers, and when a document tries to reach the internet for an image or a script, Filepad says so on screen instead of quietly fetching it. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No account. No sync service of ours. No analytics, no advertising, no tracking. The app makes no network requests at all. Your folders, your files, your device. Free, and staying free.