Note Taker

A native desktop note-taking app built on ATProto that lets you write rich documents locally and publish them to Bluesky using the standard.site document lexicon.

This is a demo/prototype exploring what a local-first, decentralized note-taking experience can look like when built on top of the AT Protocol.

How it works

Documents are stored locally in SQLite using BlockNote's block-based format. When you're ready to share, you can publish any document to your Bluesky PDS as a site.standard.document record. The published record includes:

• The full document content in the org.blocknote.document#content lexicon format (preserving all rich formatting)
• A plaintext textContent representation for indexers and search
• Standard metadata (title, publishedAt, updatedAt)

The app tracks which documents have been published and uses a content hash to detect local edits, so you can see at a glance which documents have unpublished changes.

Architecture

• Electrobun desktop shell (Bun main process + WebKit webview)
• React frontend with BlockNote editor, Base UI, and Tailwind CSS
• SQLite for local document storage and Bluesky session persistence
• atcute packages for all ATProto/Bluesky communication
• Typed RPC bridge between the Bun backend and the webview

Getting started

Prerequisites

• Bun (latest)
• Electrobun CLI (bun install -g electrobun)
• macOS (Electrobun uses WebKit on Mac)

Install and run

bun install
bun run dev

This starts both the Vite dev server (with HMR) and the Electrobun app in parallel.

Other commands

bun run typecheck    # lint + type-check + format-check (oxlint, tsgo, oxfmt)
bun run fmt          # auto-format
bun run lint         # lint only
bun run build:canary # production build

Bluesky publishing

1. Open Settings and connect your Bluesky account using an app password
2. The app resolves your handle, finds your PDS, and authenticates directly against it
3. Click Publish in the editor header or use the context menu in the sidebar
4. Published documents show a blue dot in the sidebar and a green "Published" badge in the editor
5. After editing, the badge changes to an amber "Update" button; click it to push changes

Session tokens are stored in the local SQLite database and refreshed automatically.

ATProto lexicons

The project defines custom BlockNote lexicons for representing rich documents on ATProto:

Lexicon	Description
org.blocknote.schema	Generic block, inline content, and style shapes
org.blocknote.defaultBlocks	All 14 default BlockNote block types (paragraph, heading, table, etc.)
org.blocknote.document	ATProto record wrapping BlockNote content with an optional schema declaration

These live in src/lexicons/ and TypeScript types are generated with bun run generate:lexicons (via @atcute/lex-cli).

When publishing, documents are serialized using createLexiconContent() from src/shared/atproto/serialize.ts, which converts BlockNote's in-memory format to the ATProto lexicon format (handling type vs $type union discrimination, content field splitting, etc.).

Project structure

src/
  bun/             # Bun main process (SQLite, RPC handlers, Bluesky client)
  mainview/        # React frontend (editor, sidebar, settings)
  shared/          # Types and serialization shared between both sides
  lexicons/        # ATProto lexicon JSON schemas
  generated/       # Generated TypeScript from lexicons

License

MIT