# I built Note Repo, a quiet daily notes app for macOS

> Note Repo is my free, open source daily notes app for macOS. It opens on today, keeps your notes in a local SQLite file, and has no accounts.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2026-09-29 | Topics: [News](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/news/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/note-repo/

![Note Repo, a quiet, local-first daily notes app for macOS](https://flaviocopes.com/images/note-repo/banner.png)

I built Note Repo, a daily notes app for macOS. It's free and open source, like my [Tranquillity Maker](https://flaviocopes.com/tranquillity-maker/) app.

When you open it, you see today, ready for your first bullet. Scroll up and you find the earlier days, but only the ones where you wrote something. There are no empty pages to skip and no future days.

Here's the app in 30 seconds:

<video controls playsinline preload="metadata" poster="/images/note-repo/demo-poster.jpg" width="1920" height="1080" style="width: 100%; height: auto;">
  <source src="https://flaviocopes.com/images/note-repo/demo.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>

Every note is a list. You type bullets, press `Tab` to nest them, and Note Repo saves as you type.

When you paste a link, it fetches the page title and shows it next to the domain, instead of a long URL. A YouTube link gets the video title, and an X post gets the first line of its text. You can drop or paste screenshots into any day, search everything with `⌘F`, and jump back to today with `⌘D`.

![Note Repo showing today's note with titled links](https://flaviocopes.com/images/note-repo/screenshot.png)

Your notes stay on your Mac, in a single SQLite file. There are no accounts and no AI features. The app only goes online to read the title of a link you paste. For an X post, that title is the first line. Once a day it also asks GitHub if there's a newer version.

I'd also like an iPhone app for Note Repo, and I wrote about [how to sync a Mac app with its iPhone app](https://flaviocopes.com/mac-iphone-sync/) while planning it.

Note Repo is a native Mac app written in Swift. SwiftUI draws the window, and each day is an AppKit text view. The whole download is 1.5 MB.

The first versions ran the [AHA stack](https://flaviocopes.com/the-aha-stack/) (Astro, HTMX, and Alpine.js) inside Electron. Note Repo 2.0 replaced that with the Swift app, which looks the same, opens the same notes, and uses about a third of the memory.

## Get it

The code is on GitHub at [flaviocopes/note-repo](https://github.com/flaviocopes/note-repo), MIT licensed.

Download the zip from the [latest release](https://github.com/flaviocopes/note-repo/releases/latest), unzip it, and drag Note Repo to your Applications folder. It runs on Apple silicon and Intel Macs with macOS 14 or later.

Since version 2.2, Note Repo is signed with my Apple Developer ID and [notarized by Apple](https://flaviocopes.com/macos-open-anyway/), so it opens like any other app you download. After that, it updates itself from GitHub.