The name
Riss is the Norwegian word for a scratch, the line a blade leaves in wood or stone. It is also what you call a quick outline, the first rough sketch of a thing. Both meanings fit an editor made for the notes you cut down quickly and expect to find again later.
The mark follows the word. The R is drawn as a carving. Every stroke enters like a knife, bites deepest near the start, then thins out to a point, which is how runes were actually cut. The frame around it is carved the same way, because runestones framed their words and we saw no reason to argue with a thousand years of practice.
The philosophy
Most editors treat unsaved work as a debt you owe them before you are allowed to leave. We think that ceremony is the bug. You should be able to close your editor mid-sentence, shut the machine off, and find the sentence tomorrow with the caret still blinking at the end of it. So in Riss Notes the session is the save. Files exist when you want a file, not because the app demands one before it will remember your work.
Much of the rest follows from that one decision. There are no projects and no plugins. Your text lives in two ordinary folders on your own disk, the app sends nothing anywhere, and deleting those folders is a complete goodbye. A text editor is a toolbox you bring on the job, not your shop. We try to keep it sharp and out of the way.
How it came to be
Riss Notes is made by Odikon in Norway. It started with a move to Linux, and with missing something once there: a small, fast text editor with no fuss and no ceremony, for someone with no appetite for the terminal editors. There was also a habit to house, living in a pile of untitled tabs, because a note you have to name before you can write it mostly does not get written. The editor built around all of that grew a memory, and then grew the rest of its toolkit the same way, one missing thing at a time.
Every build is tested hard before it ships, and the app is free to download. If something loses your text, we consider that the only truly serious bug an editor can have, and we would like to hear about it.