SideNotes is a notes app for thinkers who don't trust the cloud. Notion-easy editing, Obsidian-deep linking, but every note stays as a plain markdown file on your Mac.
James Clear · ★★★★★ · finished Jan 2026
Re-read. The 1% framing is famous but the implementation chapters are the gold.
"You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems."
The migration ran clean overnight, 14 minutes for theCREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLYon a 240M-row table. p99 on the dashboard query is now 38ms, down from 4.2s.
Most notes apps want to live in the cloud, surface notifications, and become a job. SideNotes does the opposite, it stays on your computer, keeps your notes in plain text, and gets quiet when you start typing.
Slash menu for blocks, drag handles, tables, code with syntax highlighting. Every keystroke saves a plain .md file you can open anywhere, vim, BBEdit, the next decade.
Wikilink autocomplete with a real picker. Type @ for a unified note + tag + date mention. Backlinks panel always visible. The graph colours nodes by folder so structure is readable at a glance.
Pick any folder on your Mac, that is your vault. No accounts, no sync conflicts, no pricing tier locking your notes. Move it to iCloud Drive or Syncthing if you want sync. Your call.
Drag notes onto an infinite whiteboard. Connect cards. Resize. The canvas saves as JSON next to your notes, Obsidian-compatible if you ever want to switch.
Press ⌘D for today. The masthead pulls weather, mood, streak, and yesterday's loose ends, so journaling has momentum even on tired days.
Paper, Ink, Forest, Dusk, Carbon, Rose. Each in light + dark. Built on CSS custom props, so the editor, the graph, and the canvas all change at once.
Switch between writing, exploring connections, and arranging things spatially, without leaving the app. Everything reads from the same folder.
All builds are unsigned for now, first launch on macOS may need a right-click → Open. Windows and Linux builds come from the same CI pipeline but get less mileage; bug reports welcome.
Nothing. SideNotes is free and open source, MIT licensed. If you want to support it, star the repo or open a thoughtful issue.
Yes, pick your platform from the Download section. macOS gets the most testing; Windows and Linux builds come from the same CI pipeline but have less mileage. Bug reports welcome.
SideNotes is local-first by design. Point your vault at any folder you already sync (iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing, a USB stick). The app doesn't run a sync service; we don't want to.
Yes. Notes are plain markdown with [[wikilinks]] and #tags. Canvas files use Obsidian's .canvas JSON format. You can switch in either direction without exporting anything.
Not in v0.2. The roadmap leaves room for them, but the goal is to ship the right defaults first (slash menu, graph, canvas, daily notes), instead of pushing customisation onto you.
No. There is no telemetry, no analytics, no auto-update phone-home. The app reads and writes files in the folder you picked. That is the entire surface area.
A solo project, built in evenings and weekends. SideNotes is free and open source, no team, no funding, no roadmap pressure. If it saves you time, the kindest thing you can do is star the repo or send a coffee onchain.