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Why we built Notez

ProductivityDenis Povarov

Most note-taking apps are excellent at swallowing information and mediocre at handing it back. You write things down for months, and the value of that archive quietly trends toward zero — not because the notes are bad, but because finding the right one at the right moment costs more effort than rewriting it from memory.

Notez started from that frustration. Two problems, one product.

Problem one: capture has too much friction

The moment worth capturing is almost never a moment when you are sitting in a notes app. You are in a terminal. You are in a code editor. You are reading something in a browser tab with fourteen other tabs open.

So Notez does not assume the app is already open.

  • The CLI. A small native binary. notez "the thing you just thought of" and it lands in your workspace. It also takes a file path, so notez ./diagram.png uploads it.

  • MCP. Notez runs a Model Context Protocol server, so Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Windsurf can read and write notes directly. Your assistant writes into your notes instead of into a chat log you will lose.

  • Type-anywhere capture. In the web app, with nothing focused, just start typing. Letters go to search; ⌘↵ saves what you typed as a note. ⌘V starts a note from whatever is on your clipboard — text or files.

  • Quick capture. ⌘E for a new note from anywhere. Paste a bare URL and Notez saves it as a bookmark note.

Notes that arrive from somewhere other than the app get a badge saying where they came from — CLI, MCP, API, AI chat, a URL capture, an import. It sounds like a small detail. In practice it tells you a lot about how you actually work.

Problem two: retrieval does not scale with your archive

The second problem is worse, because it gets worse over time. Search that only matches the exact words you typed fails precisely when your archive is large enough to be valuable, because you no longer remember the words you used.

Notez uses hybrid search: keyword matching unioned with semantic vector search. You can search for the idea and find the note even when you remembered none of its vocabulary.

On top of that sits AI chat (⌘J), which is not a general chatbot bolted onto a sidebar. It has 29 tools pointed at your workspace — it searches your notes by keyword and by meaning, walks the note tree, reads your tags and custom properties, filters by them, and can create notes, set property values, retag notes, and move cards between board columns.

We are deliberate about its limits, and we would rather state them than have you discover them: AI chat can't delete a tag, a property or a board column, and a note it deletes goes to the Bin for 30 days. It edits, renames and moves notes, adds them to favorites, and creates tags, properties and board columns. Every edit it makes keeps the previous version in version history, so you can roll it back.

There is also a Similar Notes panel on every note, which surfaces related writing you had forgotten about — the connections you would never have thought to search for.

Sharing, and what we still have not built

Notez launched single-user. Since v0.3.0 a workspace can hold more than one person: the owner invites members by email, presence shows who is reading a note right now, and each note records who made the last edit.

What we did not build is real-time co-editing. Two people editing the same note do not get their keystrokes merged — the second save is refused with a conflict, and the writer is told to reload before continuing. Automatic merging of concurrent rich-text edits is possible, and it is also how you get a paragraph neither author wrote. We would rather refuse a write than invent one.

Beyond that: no comments, no per-note permissions, no private notes inside a shared workspace. The workspace is the unit of access — the same boundary AI chat and MCP keys already respect. Single-note sharing is still exactly one thing: a public, read-only link, on or off.

Some other things that do not exist, so you are not surprised: no folders (tags, nesting, boards, and favorites do that job) and no offline editing.

How it is organized

There are no folders in Notez. Instead there are four overlapping ways to organize, and you can use as many or as few as you like:

  • Tags, with colors, managed from the sidebar.

  • Nesting — any note can have sub-notes, arbitrarily deep, with breadcrumbs.

  • Boards — a kanban view where columns come from a built-in Board property.

  • Custom properties — eleven types (text, number, date, checkbox, URL, email, phone, select, multi-select, relation, and member), workspace-scoped, filterable and sortable.

Notes render in three views — Table, Grid, and Board.

Where we are

Notez is live and in active development. It is a web app, a desktop app for macOS, and a CLI for macOS, Linux, and Windows. Version history keeps 30 days of revisions. Deleted notes sit in the Bin for 30 days. ⌘Z undoes deletes, card moves, and property changes.

Start on the free plan — 1 GB of storage and a real monthly AI allowance, no card. If you have an existing archive, Notez imports from Notion (.zip), Evernote (.enex) and Obsidian or any folder of Markdown files (.zip).

We will keep shipping in public. The changelog is where the details land.

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