The first public release of HelloNotes — a private, local-first Markdown knowledge base for the Mac.
Your notes are ordinary .md files in a folder you choose. No database, no account, no sync service of ours. The folder in Finder is the library, and every note stays readable in any editor on any platform.
What's in it
- A native live editor built on TextKit 2 — Markdown styles itself as you type, with syntax-highlighted code, LaTeX maths, Mermaid diagrams and collapsible callouts rendered natively rather than in a web view.
- Connected thinking —
[[wiki-links]]with autocomplete and aliases, backlinks, unlinked mentions, transclusion, and an interactive graph and mind map. - Find anything — full-text search with snippets, Open Quickly, nested tags, bookmarks, daily notes and templates.
- Intelligence on your Mac — summaries, tag and link suggestions, and questions answered across your whole library, on-device with Apple Intelligence, or through your own model if you prefer.
- Version history with Git — initialise a repository, commit as you write, browse any note's history and restore an earlier version. Sync to your own remote.
- Cloud storage — works in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive and Google Drive folders, with coordinated reads so online-only files materialise on demand.
- A GitHub-identical preview, rendered with cmark-gfm.
Existing Obsidian vaults open as-is — wiki-links, tags, aliases and front matter intact.
Installing
Download HelloNotes.dmg, open it, and drag HelloNotes to Applications. The app is signed with a Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so it opens without a security warning — no Gatekeeper changes and no right-click → Open needed.
Requires macOS 15 or later. Universal — Apple silicon and Intel. Free.
shasum -a 256 HelloNotes.dmg
aec653d8715604d349fa97afb860c67cc722256cb0adb1f0f4f08a96da03bd05
Documentation
The user manual, feature tour and screenshots are at https://hellotham.com/hellonotes/
Published by Hello Tham.