I think the speed at which you can open previous notes matters.

If it takes you 1 minute of scrambling in a GUI to find a previous note, you are less likely to read previous notes.

And also less likely to write new ones as you know you’ll never visit it again.

I have an app built on the fzy CLI and Ghostty terminal for Apple Notes. It is working well for me:

https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes

> The thing macOS really painfully lacks is not ergonomic ways to run Linux VMs, but actual, native containers-- macOS containers

Linux container processes run on the host kernel with extra sandboxing. The container image is an easily sharable and runnable bundle.

macOS .app bundles are kind of like container images.

You can sign them to ensure they are not modified, and put them into the “registry” (App Store).

The Swift ABI ensures it will likely run against future macOS versions, like the Linux system APIs.

There is a sandbox system to restrict file and network access. Any started processes inherit the sandbox, like containers.

One thing missing is fine grained network rules though - I think the sandbox can just define “allow outbound/inbound”.

Obviously “.app”s are not exactly like container images , but they do cover many of the same features.

You're kind of right. But at the same time they are nowhere close. The beauty of Linux containerization is that processes can be wholly ignorant that they are not in fact running as root. The containers get, what appear to them, to be the whole OS to themselves.

You don't get that in macOS. It's more of a jail than a sandbox. For example, as an app you can't, as far as I know, shell out and install homebrew and then invoke homebrew and install, say, postgres, and run it, all without affecting the user's environment. I think that's what people mean when they say macOS lacks native containers.

Good point, apps are missing the docker layered file system to isolate container file writes.

Could have called it quantumdoc

It’s not too late

I created Hot Notes to fuzzy search my Apple Notes folders and titles, it is working quite well for me. I think it could work well for your nested folders.

https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes

Something I have experimented with for a few sites is using Bun JS with HTML in JS strings.

Bun has a —hot flag that regenerates static html on change.

IntelliJ IDE can detect a // language=html comment above strings which formats the html inside and does highlighting etc.

Just using vanilla JS functions instead of a template language lets you write any logic yourself instead of looking up the template languages way of doing it.

Sometimes using mmap for SQL queries can speed them up (if you want to avoid adding too many indexes or cannot modify the db).

Set this on the connection:

PRAGMA mmap_size=…

https://www.sqlite.org/mmap.html

I think this works as it removes data copying between the os and your process.

Your process reads data from the os to execute the query.

With mmap the data reads have less overhead, so a full table scan may be fast enough.

It is strange. That was how I created the original prototype (from the terminal).

But in order to get the "global keyboard shortcut brings the search window forward from any space" behavior, it needs to be its own app. Otherwise, it would interact strangely with your current terminal windows, as they all have the same bundle ID.

I also want it to be easily installable without any dependencies, and usable for all skill levels.

> explain bundling an entire terminal emulator for something this simple.

- The app takes 40MB disk space, and around 80MB RAM. So quite light.

- Ghostty is fast, and is needed to render the search result list quickly. It is much lighter than a whole browser engine (Electron apps).

- I wanted a single "drag and drop" install method for all skill levels.

- The app needs its own windows and bundle ID so that the global keyboard shortcut can focus the Hot Notes window without interacting with your other terminal windows.

> Not sure that bundling their licenses in a file within Contents/Resources/ is sufficient

You can also view the MIT and other licenses in the About menu.

Alfred, which lets me fuzzy search pretty much anything on my computer, comes in at a whopping 17.1 MB. 80 MB is OK, but standards have definitely been changed due to Electron.

Hello,

This allows you to search for and open your Apple Notes.

Matching is instant, so much faster than Spotlight or the built in Notes search.

I wrote a post about some of the technical aspects here: https://madebyenzo.com/#hot-notes

And the project page is here: https://hotmatcha.dev/hot-notes/

Thanks, Enzo

I wrote https://robata.app for getting an overview of my open windows a while back. Let me know of any changes you would suggest. Thanks.

That looks really nice, but it's not quite what I'm looking for - thanks anyway, though!