I am Christopher Vargas, known online and in the furry community simply as “Rig Anû”. I am 40 years old, I write this code from Costa Rica, and I am the sole developer behind FoxNotes.
This tool wasn’t born from market research or some grand ambition to compete with the giants of Silicon Valley. It was born out of sheer frustration. It came from a very personal need to have a digital space that actually belonged to me, at a time when the software industry seems determined to turn everything into a dumpster fire.
I got tired of watching the applications I relied on for organizing my notes and writing slowly get worse. I see Microsoft turning OneNote into a vehicle for pushing Copilot into every corner while charging users for the privilege of having a functional desktop experience. I see Evernote transformed into a bloated corporate monster that is slow, cumbersome, and genuinely unpleasant to use. And on the other side, I see tools like Obsidian that, despite being powerful, ask for a monthly subscription simply to grant you the right to encrypt and synchronize your own text files.
My professional background is in software engineering. I’ve spent years working with complex technologies, analyzing systems, and providing enterprise support. My experience building applications with C# and .NET gave me the practical tools needed to create the “engine” behind FoxNotes. I knew exactly how I wanted my software to behave, how I wanted memory management to work, and how I wanted the cryptographic security model to be structured, without depending on third-party libraries that promise the world and deliver disappointment.
But the soul of this application comes from one of my greatest passions.
I am an avid storyteller and worldbuilder. For years I have maintained the “Lore Bible” of my own fictional universe, managing timelines, characters, and even constructed languages inspired by Sumerian and other ancient roots. Anyone who writes complex stories understands the nightmare of losing years of creative work. And anyone paying attention to the modern tech landscape understands the discomfort of uploading their entire imaginary world to the servers of a company that might use that data to train AI models, with all the implications that brings; including the possibility of your ideas becoming training material for systems you have no control over.
FoxNotes is where those two worlds meet: the precision of an engineer and the writer’s desire for a secure, private, and unrestricted canvas.
I built this application -this digital bunker- for myself. I designed it so my stories, my research, and my code would remain under my control and protected by my own cryptographic keys. Today, I share it with the community in the hope that if you also value your privacy and enjoy building your own personal knowledge systems, you’ll find in FoxNotes the same sense of ownership and freedom that inspired me to create it.
Well… maybe not the same peace of mind. I nearly lost my sanity debugging the cryptography and synchronization containers. ðŸ«