notd

A boring, fast, native-feeling macOS app for capturing short text drafts. Each draft is one .md file in a folder you choose (default ~/Dropbox/Apps/notd/). Notes are represented by a row of colored dots at the top of the window — filenames are never shown. Sync is whatever your Dropbox client does; the app itself does no network I/O.

notd lives in the menu bar. Closing the window hides it; clicking the tray icon brings it back. Right-click the tray icon → Quit notd (or ⌘Q) to actually exit.

Local development

Prerequisites:

• Node 20+
• Rust (stable, 1.77+) — brew install rust or rustup
• Xcode Command Line Tools — xcode-select --install

Install and run:

npm install
npm run tauri dev

Build

npm run tauri build

This produces a .dmg under src-tauri/target/release/bundle/dmg/.

File format

Notes are plain Markdown files in your chosen folder, one per note, named YYYY-MM-DD-HHmmss.md. A hidden .notd-meta.json in the same folder tracks dot order and color assignment so they stay consistent across devices when synced via Dropbox.

If .notd-meta.json is missing or invalid, notd rebuilds it from the file modification times the next time it loads the folder.

CLI

notd-cli is a small Rust companion CLI in cli/ for scripting and Claude Code workflows. The binary is named notd-cli to keep it distinct from the GUI app. Run it via the ./notd-cli wrapper at the repo root (rebuilds on source change, otherwise execs the binary directly), or install it system-wide with ./run.sh cli (puts it at ~/.local/bin/notd-cli).

./notd-cli help              # commands and positioning
./notd-cli ls                # list notes, oldest → newest
./notd-cli show last         # print the most recent note
./notd-cli new "quick idea"  # create a note (or pipe stdin)
./notd-cli append 7 "more"   # append to note #7
./notd-cli grep "pattern"    # case-insensitive search; hits show note index
./notd-cli rm 7              # delete note #7

The CLI reads the same config.json the app writes, so it operates on whichever folder you've chosen in the app.

License

MIT