notd

A capture buffer for ephemeral text drafts.

What it's for

A personal drafts app where unformed ideas and todos land first. Capture quickly here; promote the keepers to Obsidian for notes you'll revisit, or Todoist for tasks you'll act on. Anything left in notd is provisional by design.

Why

Plain files, your folder. Each note is one .md file. Point notd at a Dropbox folder and your drafts sync between machines without ceremony.
Dots, not filenames. Notes are represented by colored dots, ordered oldest to newest. Filenames and dates never appear in the UI — only the text that matters.
One window. Nothing to tune. No tabs, no sidebar, no command palette, no themes. Light or dark follows the system. Cmd+N, Cmd+E, Cmd+, — that's it.
Empty deletes itself. Clear a note's text and the dot disappears. Nothing to file, nothing to archive, nothing to keep tidy.

Get it

Built with Tauri 2 and Svelte. Requires macOS 11 or later.

git clone https://github.com/minac/notd
cd notd
./run.sh build

The script builds the app and installs it into /Applications.

How it works

One folder, one Markdown file per note, plus a hidden .notd-meta.json sidecar that owns dot order and color assignment so they stay consistent across synced devices.

File format Architecture Keyboard shortcuts