# I built NoteRepo, a quiet daily notes app for macOS

> NoteRepo 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/noterepo/

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

I built NoteRepo, a daily notes app for macOS. It's free and open source.

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

Every note is a list. You type bullets, press `Tab` to nest them, and NoteRepo 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 link to an X post becomes a preview. You can drop or paste screenshots into any day, search everything with `⌘K`, and jump back to today with `⌘D`.

![NoteRepo showing today's note with titled links and an X post preview](https://flaviocopes.com/images/noterepo/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, or to load an X post preview.

I moved my own notes over from Reflect, so NoteRepo comes with an importer for Reflect daily notes.

Under the hood it's the [AHA stack](https://flaviocopes.com/the-aha-stack/) (Astro, HTMX, and Alpine.js) running inside Electron.

## Get it

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

Download `NoteRepo-1.0.0-arm64.zip` from the [1.0 release](https://github.com/flaviocopes/noterepo/releases/tag/v1.0.0), unzip it, and drag NoteRepo to your Applications folder. It runs on Apple silicon Macs. On an Intel Mac, build it from source with the steps in the README.

The app isn't signed with an Apple Developer ID or notarized, so the first time you open it, macOS says it "could not verify NoteRepo is free of malware". Click **Done**, go to **System Settings → Privacy & Security**, scroll down to NoteRepo, and click **Open Anyway**.

You can also remove the quarantine flag in Terminal, then open the app again:

```sh
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/NoteRepo.app
```

The [README](https://github.com/flaviocopes/noterepo#opening-it-the-first-time) explains what to do on a work laptop.