Markdown Notes is now Saturn. Same app, same notes, same files — a new name, a new icon, and every keyboard shortcut is now yours to change.
New
The app is called Saturn. The name and the icon changed; nothing else did. Your notes stay exactly where they are, your licence and trial carry over untouched, and the app updates itself as usual — there is nothing to reinstall and nothing to move. If your vault folder is called "Markdown Notes", it keeps that name and Saturn keeps reading it; only a brand-new vault is created as "Saturn".
Every keyboard shortcut is editable. Settings ▸ Shortcuts lists all 30 commands, grouped the way the menu bar is — File, Go, View, Note, Format, Tools — and lets you rebind any of them. Click a shortcut to record a new one; Esc cancels, Delete clears it. Reassigning a key that's already taken asks first and tells you what it would leave without a shortcut, rather than quietly stealing it. Combinations macOS owns (⌘Q, ⌘Space) and text-editing ones (⌘C, ⌘Z) are declined with a sentence explaining who owns them. Changes take effect the next time you open Saturn, and any row you've changed says so.
Search your shortcuts by pressing them. The ⌨ button in Settings ▸ Shortcuts turns the search field into a listener: press a combination and it tells you which command owns it. It accepts keys the recorder won't let you assign, because "what is ⌘A?" is a fair question to ask.
Improved
A new app icon.
Dragging a space in the sidebar lands where you dropped it. Reordering a space could snap the row back to where it started and then shuffle the new order in behind it — a visible double-take on every drop. The row now settles into its new position directly.
The sync pill respects Reduce Motion. Its rise-and-fade announcement collapses to a plain appearance when Reduce Motion is on, matching the import progress pill that shares the same slot.
Under the hood
A tightening pass removed around 1,500 lines: duplicated logic replaced by single definitions, dead code and retired fallbacks deleted. No behaviour changes — 0-warning builds on both platforms and the full logic suite green.
Markdown Notes 0.0.17
Tasks understand dates you type in plain English and can remind you, the canvas is one continuous view instead of two, spaces are yours to shape, and a long list of things that used to be slow are now fast.
New
Type a task's date instead of picking it. "Call Kyle at 9am tomorrow", "review the draft next Friday", "pay rent on the 30th" — the date is recognised as you type and shown as a chip before it's applied, so nothing happens behind your back. Tap the ✕ on the chip and the words stay words. Due dates now carry a time as well as a day, so a task can be due at 09:00; the picker has a text field at the top that takes the same phrases. In the editor, typing @ on a task line offers dates alongside notes, and a suggestion appears on the line you're writing — press ⌘⏎ to accept it, Esc to dismiss it.
Reminders for tasks that are due. A notification arrives when a task comes due — at its time if it has one, in the morning if it doesn't — and you can complete the task straight from the notification. On by default; turn it off, or change the all-day hour, in Settings ▸ General ▸ Reminders. Permission is only requested once you actually have a dated task.
Open a selection of notes as a wall of windows. Select several notes, then *Open N Notes in Windows* from the right-click menu or the selection bar. Each note opens in its own window and they're tiled across your screen so all of them are readable at once — the layout is chosen for how much text each window can actually show, so six notes come up 3×2 on a laptop and 6×1 on an ultrawide. Past what fits, it asks first.
Choose which views your spaces offer. Settings ▸ General ▸ Space Views turns list, grid, board and canvas on or off for the switcher; at least one stays on. Hiding a view changes nothing about your notes or layouts — turn it back on and every space returns to the view it was using.
Set a space's statuses when you create it. The New Space card now lists the starting statuses as editable rows — rename them, reorder them, add or remove them before the space exists — or switch statuses off entirely and get a space with none.
Add a note straight into a status. Every status header in the grid and every column header on the board carries a +. The note is created in that status rather than in the space's first one.
Improved
The canvas is one view at every zoom. Cards used to swap to a different design once you zoomed far enough out. Now there's a single card that simply shows less as you pull away: the preview text and metadata fade out, and the title holds on — riding the card down, then staying legible at a constant size when the card itself is smaller than the words. Text stays crisp at any scale, lines never reflow as you zoom, and dragging, selecting and right-clicking work the same everywhere. It's also far lighter: on a space of 1,700 cards, pinching went from stuttering about one frame in ten to none, and peak memory during a pinch dropped from 2.2 GB to 740 MB.
A board always has a column. A space with no statuses used to show an empty state. It now shows a real No status column holding every document, plus a dashed Add Status column — one click names your first status and the board folds into it.
Search no longer freezes on the first letter. In a large library, typing a single character into search could lock the app for close to four seconds. It's now about a quarter of a second, and search uses a third of the CPU it did.
The pause after you stop typing is gone. Saving a note quietly re-read the entire collection behind whatever was on screen — including surfaces the editor was covering. Measured on a 30,000-note library: the canvas went from 303 ms to 85 ms, the grid 264 → 95 ms, and the Archive, at 6,317 notes, from 466 ms to 53 ms.
Creating and deleting notes is quick again at scale. On the same library, ⌘N went from 442 ms (and as much as 17 seconds at its worst) to a steady 147 ms, and deleting a note from 5.1 seconds to 223 ms. Dropping a card on a busy board went from over seven seconds to 25 ms.
The app stops working when you do. Sitting in the background with 11,000 notes loaded, it now measures zero CPU and zero energy over minutes at a time — nothing runs when you're not using it.
Importing a vault tells you how far along it is. A large folder takes minutes to bring in; the status line now reads *"Importing 6,500 of 9,001 notes"* instead of sitting silent.
Resizing and collapsing the sidebar is smoother — the note list was rebuilding its whole collection twice per frame while you dragged. Dragging the divider went from 42 to 60 fps and collapsing the sidebar from 81 to a full 120.
The Tasks page fits a narrow window. Its header used to be wider than the column it lived in, which quietly ate the left margin off every row — the page looked misaligned rather than cramped. The scope tabs now scroll, the header tightens in stages as the column shrinks, and the title truncates instead of being drawn over.
Sticky Notes settings read as settings. The corner picker sits on its own row beside its label rather than as a poster in the middle of the pane, and the explanation underneath is shorter.
Fixed
Deleting a note could leave the app running hot forever. Deleting the note you had open put an internal cleanup step into a loop that never ended — the app stayed pinned at full CPU and about 6 W, indefinitely, while still drawing at a perfect 120 fps and looking completely healthy. Fixed, and pinned by a test.
Undoing the deletion of an image document destroyed the image. The undo rebuilt the note without its image reference — and, because that empty state was written back to the file, the loss synced to your other devices. Undo now restores the document exactly as it was.
Undoing a deletion doubled the note's tasks. The restored note's task lines pointed at the wrong record, so the next pass inserted a second copy of every one of them — permanently. Fixed.
"Delete Space ▸ Delete Notes" counted the wrong notes. Archived notes weren't included in the count but *were* included in the deletion: archive 50 of a space's 53 notes, be told the space holds 3, and lose all 53. Both the count and the deletion now mean the same thing.
The app's own deletions came back as changes from elsewhere. Deleting notes made the vault watcher re-examine the folder over and over — 13 passes and 426 ms for a batch of 20 — as though another device had done it. Deletions are now recognised as your own, while a genuine external deletion still archives the note as before.
Search said "No results" during an import. While a vault was still coming in, searching offered to create a note that already existed but wasn't indexed yet. It now says the index is still building.
Notes
This is an early preview — expect rough edges, and keep a backup of anything important.
Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, or iOS 26 or later.
Your vault folder stays user-owned and accessible in Finder; sign into iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
Markdown Notes 0.0.16
Notes can now be exported to PDF, dictation got a new look, images can be dropped anywhere, and the Tasks list is markedly faster.
New
Export a note — or a selection of notes — to PDF. ⇧⌘E opens a live preview of the printed page; the document is typeset in the app font you already chose, with your headings turned into a PDF outline you can navigate in Preview. Tables, code blocks, quotes, lists and checkboxes all carry over, and the page breaking is deliberate — a heading never lands alone at the foot of a page. On iOS the same export goes straight to the share sheet.
Drop an image anywhere. Image drops used to work only on the canvas and the grid, and only from Finder. Now every surface takes them — the sidebar, the note list, the board, the canvas, the grid, and directly into the editor — and they arrive from anywhere you'd drag from: a browser, Photos, Notes, Mail, or Finder. Dropping several at once creates several documents; the badge tells you how many before you let go.
Improved
Dictation has a new surface on Mac. The old bar-graph waveform and its floating pill are gone, replaced by a single aurora that lives in the panel itself and answers to your voice — brighter as you speak, settling as you pause. It's drawn in your app color and dims all the way out under Reduce Motion.
The Tasks list is faster to scroll and faster to touch. A round of work on how rows are built and hit-tested: on a large list, scrolling costs about half the CPU it used to, and the due-date and checkbox controls respond on the first press rather than after the row wakes up.
Deleting a space asks the right question from every entry point. The sidebar's context menu and the workspace's "…" menu now share one flow: a space that still holds notes offers to move them to the Inbox or delete them along with it; an empty one just confirms. Renaming is in both menus too.
Titlebar controls sit square in the window. The rightmost control cluster was slightly further from the window's edge than from its top; the margins now match on both sides in every titlebar.
Fixed
Two copies of the app can no longer corrupt each other's index. Running an installed copy and a second copy against the same vault had them racing each other's reconciliation — most visibly as a crash when undoing a bulk change on the Tasks page. A vault's index now has one owner at a time, claimed with a kernel lock that's released automatically if the holder quits or crashes; a second copy offers to hand over rather than fighting for it.
Opening a window no longer crashes on first layout. A layout arrangement in the titlebar bands could trap on the very first pass on macOS 26.5.2, before anything was on screen. Fixed in all four bands.
Importing a batch of images no longer stalls the app. A large drop used to block the interface for a third of a second per image while it decoded; import now happens off the main thread, with thumbnails sized as they land instead of holding full-resolution copies in memory.
Notes
This is an early preview — expect rough edges, and keep a backup of anything important.
Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, or iOS 26 or later.
Your vault folder stays user-owned and accessible in Finder; sign into iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
Markdown Notes 0.0.15
A crash on closing a window is fixed, plus a round of polish: one checkbox everywhere, sticky notes that stay where you put them, and a first run that looks like the app it's introducing.
Improved
Task checkboxes are one mark, everywhere. The checkbox in a document, in the Tasks list, in the quick-add composer and behind a swipe were drawn three different ways and never quite matched. There's now a single mark — a rounded square that fills with your app color and knocks the checkmark out of it — drawn identically in the editor and in every list, at the same size, in the accent color you chose. Checking one animates; with Reduce Motion on it simply cross-fades.
The welcome screen previews the app you're about to use. It used to be forced dark, so the color you picked on "Make it yours" was previewed on a surface darker than any sidebar you'd get. The panel now follows your light/dark setting and wears the workspace's own backdrop — the same material, tint wash and grain the sidebar has — so the color you land on is literally the sidebar a second later. It also carries the same rounded corners as the window it springs into, so the shape stops changing mid-transition.
Fixed
Closing a window can no longer crash the app. Tearing a window down shifts the keyboard focus, and that arrived back at the window's own titlebar while the window was already halfway gone — the app then tried to take a reference to it and was killed on the spot. It doesn't take that reference any more. The same mistake was sitting one file over in the canvas, unreported, and is fixed too.
Sticking a note you'd already opened in its own window no longer moves it. Opening a note in a window, sizing and placing it, then sticking it used to fly it off to your chosen corner and undo the arrangement you had just made. It now starts floating right where it is — the corner preference answers where a note goes when it *leaves* the workspace, not where your own windows belong. Unsticking leaves the window exactly where it sits too, rather than sailing it back.
The welcome panel can't be dragged out of shape. Its edges could be pulled well past the size the layout is built for — narrow enough to squash the copy, wide enough to strand it — because the size limits it was setting never actually took hold. They do now.
Notes
This is an early preview — expect rough edges, and keep a backup of anything important.
Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, or iOS 26 or later.
Your vault folder stays user-owned and accessible in Finder; sign into iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
Markdown Notes 0.0.14
A speed release: the kanban board, the grid, and the sidebar all stay smooth in a vault with years of notes in it.
Improved
Kanban drag-and-drop no longer slows down as a space grows. Dropping a card into a column used to take about half a second to settle in a space with a few thousand documents, and it got worse the more documents there were. It's now about 40 milliseconds, and flat — the same whether a column holds 15 cards or 600. Dragging across columns holds a steady 120fps.
The grid is as smooth as every other view. It was the slowest surface to animate; it now sits alongside the board. Showing or hiding the sidebar over a 2,400-document grid runs at the display's full rate instead of dropping to around 26fps, and scrolling drops roughly a third as many frames. Dragging the window edge no longer re-wraps every card's text on every frame — the cards slide as a unit and re-flow at natural steps.
Collapsing and expanding the sidebar is smooth in big vaults. With a dozen spaces and hundreds of tags, that animation ran at 21–39fps on every view — list, grid, kanban and Tasks alike. It now runs at 56–101fps, because the sidebar only builds the rows you can actually see.
Opening a document from the list is about 40% faster (106ms → 64ms). The sidebar was quietly rebuilding every space and tag row on each save; it no longer does.
Fixed
Right-clicking a card on the canvas works at every zoom level. Zoomed out past the point where cards become drawings rather than individual views, the context menu silently stopped appearing. The canvas now resolves the menu itself by hit-testing the click, so Open, Pin, Archive, Reveal in Finder and the rest are always there — and right-clicking a card selects it first, so you can see which one the menu is about.
Returning to Tasks no longer flashes the top of the list. The page used to paint one frame at the top before snapping to where you actually were. Your scroll position is now restored in the first frame drawn.
Notes
This is an early preview — expect rough edges, and keep a backup of anything important.
Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, or iOS 26 or later.
Your vault folder stays user-owned and accessible in Finder; sign into iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
Markdown Notes 0.0.13
Updates now actually tell you they're ready — and the app's corners finally match the window's.
Fixed
The "update ready" card actually appears. Markdown Notes downloads updates quietly in the background, but if you left the app open it could sit on a finished download for up to a week without saying so. Now the moment an update is staged you get the gentle reminder — the sidebar card, the dock badge, and a notification if the app is in the background.
"Check for Updates…" always has a visible answer. When an update is already downloaded and waiting, the menu item now brings the reminder card back instead of appearing to do nothing.
Improved
One click to update: the card's "Relaunch to Update" applies the already-downloaded update and relaunches straight away, with no extra confirm dialog to click through. Dismissing it (✕) still only defers — the update installs on your next quit either way.
The editor page's rounded leading edge now matches your window's actual corner radius, at any window size and on any macOS version, instead of a hard-coded curve that was noticeably rounder than the window it sat in.
The pinned sidebar cards — meeting capture and "update ready" — now nest into the window's bottom-left corner exactly, and share one set of geometry so they always read as one family.
Notes
This is an early preview — expect rough edges, and keep a backup of anything important.
Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, or iOS 26 or later.
Your vault folder stays user-owned and accessible in Finder; sign into iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
Saturn