The simplest notes app for Mac. Press ⌥. (Option+Period) anywhere on your screen. A small card floats up, you type, it saves itself. That's the whole app.
100% free. Open source. Your notes are plain text files you own forever.
The first working version was built for about ten cents of AI tokens. It felt right for an app that proves good software can cost almost nothing to make, so it costs you nothing to use. Free forever, MIT licensed.
(iPhone app: coming soon.)
- One hotkey (⌥.) opens and closes it, from inside any app
- Every open is a fresh note. Whatever you were writing is already saved
- Notes save as Markdown files in
~/Documents/Tenote Notes. Readable by anything, syncable anywhere - Always on top, on the screen where your cursor is
- Auto-saves as you type; every note is timestamped
- Paste images straight into a note
#tagsbecome little chips at the bottom- Markdown preview, a last-3-notes strip, an all-notes view, 5 themes
- Lives quietly in your menu bar. No Dock icon, no clutter
No accounts. No cloud. No tracking. No subscription.
- Go to the Releases page and download
Tenote-x.y.z.dmg. - Open the dmg and drag Tenote into Applications.
- The first time you open it: right-click → Open → Open. (macOS warns about apps downloaded from the internet; this one-time step says you trust it. The app is unsigned. It's free software, so nobody paid Apple $99.)
- Done. Press ⌥. anywhere. The hotkey is built in, nothing else to set up.
You need Node.js (22 or newer) and git. Then:
git clone https://github.com/noemit/tenote.git
cd tenote
npm install
npm startThe ⌥. hotkey is built in, so you can stop here. Recommended: run one more command to set up skhd, a tiny free hotkey helper. With it, ⌥. works even when Tenote isn't running yet (it starts the app for you):
npm run setupWhat npm run setup does (and nothing else):
- Checks if you have skhd; if not, installs it with Homebrew (or tells you what to do if you don't have Homebrew either).
- Adds one line to
~/.skhdrcpointing ⌥. at Tenote. - Starts skhd.
Afterwards macOS asks for one permission. skhd needs it to see your key presses: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility → turn on "skhd". Then press ⌥. anywhere and a note card appears.
Everything lives in ~/Documents/Tenote Notes/ as ordinary Markdown files:
---
id: 2026-08-09_14-32-05
created: 2026-08-09T14:32:05.000Z
updated: 2026-08-09T14:34:12.000Z
tags: [idea, work]
---
Buy milkThey're yours. Open them in any editor, grep them, back them up, leave any time.
Free sync: move or symlink the folder into iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or Google
Drive and your notes sync themselves. Pasted images live in the images/ subfolder.
- Esc or ⌘⏎ saves and closes the card
- Deleting all the text of a note deletes the note
- ＋ starts a new note; the strip at the bottom shows your last 3
- ⚙️ has themes, launch-at-login, and shortcuts to the folders
- The menu-bar card icon has all the same controls
Quit from the menu-bar icon, then drag Tenote out of Applications (or stop
npm start). Your notes stay in ~/Documents/Tenote Notes. Delete that folder
too if you don't want them. If you ran npm run setup: remove the Tenote lines
from ~/.skhdrc, then run skhd --stop-service.
- ⌥. does nothing. Another app may have grabbed the shortcut. Check
~/Library/Logs/Tenote/main.logforshortcutlines; the skhd setup (above) usually sidesteps this. - The skhd binding stopped working. Run
skhd --restart-service, and check that the Accessibility permission is still on. - The window won't come forward over a fullscreen app. Click the menu-bar icon instead.
Plain Node + Electron, zero runtime dependencies. main.js is the whole
backend; renderer/ is the whole frontend. The renderer talks to the main process
over a small IPC bridge (preload.js), and skhd talks to the app over a tiny Unix
socket (scripts/tenotectl.js).
| Command | Does |
|---|---|
npm start |
Run the app (first run downloads the Electron binary) |
npm run setup |
Install & configure skhd for the ⌥. hotkey |
npm run logs |
Tail the log (~/Library/Logs/Tenote/main.log) |
npm run check |
Syntax-check all JS |
npm run icons |
Regenerate tray + app icons (pure-Node PNG encoder) |
npm run dist |
Build dist/Tenote-*.dmg + .zip with electron-builder |
| Env var | Effect |
|---|---|
TENOTE_SHORTCUT |
Override the built-in shortcut (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+Space); 0 disables it |
TENOTE_LOG_LEVEL |
debug for verbose logging |
TENOTE_LOG_DIR |
Custom log directory |
TENOTE_SOCKET |
Custom socket path (must match in tenotectl and the app) |
TENOTE_DEV_DIR |
Lets tenotectl start the app with npm start in this folder |
TENOTE_APP_PATH |
Path to a packaged Tenote.app for tenotectl to launch |
- iPhone app (soon)
- Search across notes
- Plugin system (a community repo once there are plugins worth sharing)
- Signed & notarized dmg once the app has users to justify the Apple fee
MIT. Do whatever you want with it. See LICENSE.