Documentation

Red Pen Documentation

A free, local-first review-notes layer for everywhere you build (WordPress, Node/Express, any website, Blender, and Ableton Live), plus the Red Pen Hub, a single board that aggregates notes across every project.

What Red Pen is

Red Pen is a developer tool for leaving review notes on the thing itself. Instead of a separate tracker full of "the button near the header is misaligned", you pin a typed note directly to that button, on the page where it lives. Every note carries a type, a priority and a status, and collects into a per-project repository. Replies and screenshots exist on some surfaces and not others; the Surface matrix is the per-feature answer.

It is the same idea and the same note model on five surfaces, so you learn it once and use it everywhere. They are not identical: each is at its own maturity level, and the Surface matrix is the per-feature answer. A companion piece, the Hub, rolls every project's notes into one board.

The principles

• Free and open, forever. Everything that ships is free wherever it ships, across every surface and the Hub. You never make an account or paste a key, and nothing expires. The surfaces are at different maturity levels, so "free everywhere" has never meant "identical everywhere": the Surface matrix says which surface has what, and where it shows a gap the feature is unbuilt rather than paywalled. If it saves you time, you can back the next release; support is optional and never gates a feature.
• Local-first, no phone-home. Your notes live in your site's database, a local file, or your browser. There is no service on the other end, so nothing is measured and nothing can be switched off remotely. Nothing leaves your machine unless you send it somewhere yourself.
• Dev-only by default. Red Pen is a tool for the people building the site, not its visitors. WordPress checks a capability, Express checks NODE_ENV and the connection's remote address, Blender and Ableton only run inside your own session. The drop-in script is the exception: it is a bare script tag, so the guard is yours to write and its page says how.
• One model, many surfaces. A note is a note whether it was left in WordPress, an Express app, a static page, a Blender scene, or Ableton. The shared model is what lets the Hub aggregate them.

The surfaces at a glance

Which one do I install?

Current versions

This documentation set describes these releases. See each surface's page for its full changelog and the Roadmap for what is planned next.