~/cristianecheverria.com
Notas app icon

Notas

A fast, native Markdown notes app for macOS.
Your notes stay plain .md files, and your AI agents can read and edit them over MCP.
Import articles, highlight what matters, and ask Claude about any passage.

↓ Download for macOS All releases

macOS 13+ · Apple Silicon

-- why notes matter more with AI

Writing things down in your own words has always been how learning sticks. AI makes answers instant, but it doesn't make them yours: explanations scroll past, agent sessions end, and context windows forget. A notes app is where the learning stays.

Answers are cheap, understanding isn't

An agent can explain anything in seconds. You remember what you rewrote, connected to what you already knew, and came back to later.

Agents forget, your vault doesn't

Keep the plan, the findings and the dead ends in a note, and the next session, yours or an agent's, starts where the last one stopped.

Track progress, not just results

Learning a topic or chasing a bug takes days. A running log of what you tried and what comes next shows how far you've come and stops you repeating work.

A simple loop

  1. Capture. ⌘N and write the question in your own words before you ask anyone, human or AI.
  2. Investigate. Highlight what matters and ask Claude about any passage right in Notas, or have your agent append findings, sources and next steps to the same note over MCP.
  3. Distill. Rewrite the key points yourself, tag the note, and link related ideas with [[wiki links]].
  4. Return. ⌘P finds it again by title, tag, heading or full text, weeks later.

-- read with Claude

Paste a link and Notas saves a clean, readable copy of the article as a note. Select any passage to highlight it or ask Claude about it, and the answer lands in a Notebook panel beside the text. Everything is saved in the note itself, so it is still just Markdown.

Import any article

⌘⇧I, or paste a link into an empty note. Notas keeps the readable part of the page, the way Reader View does, and adds the source, author and reading time.

Highlight and ask

Select text to highlight it in four colours, or Ask, Explain or Define it. Answers appear as cards in the Notebook panel; click one to jump back to its passage.

Summaries

Summarize at the top of an article gives a short take on what it argues and its key claims, before you commit to a long read.

Read your way

Paper and Sepia themes, serif, sans or mono, a size slider, and narrow to wide columns. Your settings stick between notes.

## Annotations

> [!highlight] yellow
> > Bun's CLI gets over 22
> > million monthly downloads.

> [!explain]
> > use-after-free in send()
>
> A memory-safety bug: a callback
> runs while its buffer is freed…

Plain Markdown, all the way down

Highlights, questions and answers are callouts in an ## Annotations section at the end of the note. Other editors show them, git diffs them, and agents read them over MCP.

Uses your Claude Code login

Claude features run through the Claude Code CLI on Haiku, which is quick and inexpensive for short answers. There is no API key to paste into Notas. Without Claude Code, everything else works as usual.

-- features

Plain files, no lock-in

Every note is a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter in a folder you own. Notebooks are folders. Open them in any editor, keep them in git.

Native and fast

Written in Rust on GPUI, the GPU-accelerated UI framework behind the Zed editor. No Electron, no web view.

Edit, split, preview

Live Markdown preview with autosave, tables, task lists, alerts and syntax highlighting for about 35 languages. Paste or drop images straight into a note.

Fuzzy finder

⌘P opens an fzf-style palette: find notes, run commands, jump to notebooks, tags or headings, or search note contents with /.

Vim mode

Optional Vim keybindings in the editor, with motions, operators, text objects and visual mode. Off by default, toggle with ⌘⇧V.

Focus mode

Hide the sidebar and note list with ⌘⇧D and write full width. Wiki links, backlinks, tags and pinned notes keep everything connected.

Made for macOS 26

A Liquid Glass sidebar, and panels and popups that move on springs: quick, interruptible, and still when Reduce Motion is on.

Updates itself

Check for Updates… downloads the new version, verifies its signature and notarization, and restarts into it. A quiet daily check tells you when one is out.

-- your notes are just files

~/Notas/
├── Inbox/
│   └── meeting-notes.md
├── Work/Ideas/
│   └── mcp-server.md
├── .attachments/   # pasted images
└── .trash/         # deleted notes
---
title: Rust GPUI ideas
tags:
- rust
- gpui
status: active
pinned: false
---

# Ideas
- fuzzy finder
- [[Vim mode]]

-- built for AI agents

Notas ships with notas-mcp, a Model Context Protocol server inside the app. Point Claude Code, Claude Desktop or any MCP client at it and agents can search, read, create and patch your notes. Changes show up in the app live. 

# Claude Code
claude mcp add notas -- /Applications/Notas.app/Contents/MacOS/notas-mcp --vault ~/Notas

list-notebooks create-notebook rename-notebook delete-notebook list-notes read-note create-note update-note patch-note append-to-note delete-note search-notes list-tags tag-note read-backlinks

The app also has a panel (⌘,) with copy-ready config for other clients. The server runs over stdio, so there is no port or password to manage.

-- install

  1. Download Notas.dmg from the button above.
  2. Open it and drag Notas into Applications.
  3. Launch Notas from Spotlight or Raycast. Notes live in ~/Notas.

Requires macOS 13 or later on a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer). Intel Macs are not supported.

-- faq

Does it sync?
Not built in. Because notes are plain files you can keep ~/Notas in git or any folder-sync tool.
Where is my data?
Only on your Mac, in ~/Notas. To use another folder, launch Notas from a terminal with NOTAS_DIR set. Deleted notes go to .trash inside the vault.
Do I need an API key for the Claude features?
No. Notas asks Claude through Claude Code, using the account you are already signed in with. Install Claude Code and sign in once; Notas finds it on its own.
Something broken?
Open an issue on GitHub.