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Release notes

Every version of Saturn, and what changed in it. The app updates itself, so you already have the top one.

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Latest: Saturn 1.0.0-rc.23 · 16 October 2026

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.23

Latest

Assistants that work beside you, drag to select, and a quicker first run.

New

  • Drag to select. In the grid, drag from an empty spot to draw a band, and every card it touches is selected, scrolling as you go. In the list, drag from below the last row. ⌘ and ⇧ add to what is already selected.
  • A shorter first run on the Mac. One screen: choose where your notes live and start writing. A few tips follow the first time you capture, make a note or open the palette.

Improved

  • Assistants work while you do. A slow search or a permission prompt no longer holds up an assistant's other requests, and it can cancel one it no longer needs. Edits you haven't saved yet are saved before an assistant changes the note, so a title change or a moved task isn't lost.
  • Safer permission prompts. An assistant's permission prompt ignores Return and stray keys for a moment, so it can't be answered by accident.
  • Clearing a selection. Esc clears the list's selection, and a click on empty space in the grid or board clears it there too. With several notes selected, a click elsewhere in the window goes back to just the open note.
  • The list keeps up with your clicks. A selected row's text changes with its highlight straight away, instead of a few frames late.
  • Tasks options read plainly. Group by Note or Date (Note, unless you picked something else before) and Arrangement Ragged or Right. Your current choice carries over.
  • Quieter task composer. The date chip, Create Task and a completed checkbox use the text colour instead of the accent; a date turns red only when it's overdue.

Fixed

  • Ticking a checkbox showed raw markdown. Clicking a task's checkbox turned - [ ] buy into - [ ] - [x] buy. It now just ticks the box. Replacing [ ] with [x] across a note had the same problem.
  • Assistant fixes. list_notes dates follow your local day, a status of "none" files a note at the end of the first column, nested spaces are found by their path, and a canvas arrangement that didn't save now says so.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.22

A tidier task bar.

Improved

  • A slimmer task bar. The bar at the bottom of the Tasks page is shorter, and New Task takes up less room.
  • Fewer buttons when a task is selected. The bar shows complete, its date, and an arrow that opens its note. Edit, Deselect and Delete are in the "…" menu beside it.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.21

A new Tasks page, titles that follow a note's first line, and a lighter look in light mode.

New

  • A calmer Tasks page. Tasks sit in a centred column, one line each, with their date and note beside them. All, Today and Upcoming moved up into the title bar.
  • The task bar. New Task lives at the bottom of the Tasks page and grows into the panel you write in. Select a task and the bar shows what you can do with it: complete, date, open its note, edit, delete. ⌘N on the Tasks page adds a task (Settings › General turns it back into New Note).
  • New tasks land where you can see them. On Today a new task starts due today, on Upcoming tomorrow. The list scrolls to it and highlights it, and moves to the right tab if it belongs on another.
  • Dates & Notes. Choose in the Tasks view options whether a task's date and note sit next to it or line up on the right.

Improved

  • The first line is the title. Edit a note's first line and it becomes the note's title, and its file is renamed to match — notes named by their file, like a dated daily note or an Obsidian import, included. ⌘Z puts the old title and file name back. Rename… now rewrites the first line.
  • Lighter in light mode. The window reads closer to paper, and your App Color still shows through.
  • Tooltips only where they help. Icon buttons explain themselves on hover in Saturn's own style; buttons with words no longer pop a tooltip.
  • Space opens the selected task on the Tasks page.

Fixed

  • Hovering a task could crash Saturn. It no longer does.
  • Right-clicking the title bar no longer offers "Icon and Text" and "Text Only".
  • The sync and import message no longer covers the bar at the bottom of the Tasks page.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Speaking tasks on the Tasks page is set aside for now; Meetings and AI Chat are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.20

A small one: cards drag out of the window, and a space's right-click menu does what it says every time.

Improved

  • Drag cards out of a board or canvas. Pull a card past the window's edge and it becomes a regular drag: drop it into Finder, another app or another Saturn window, as you already could from the list and grid.
  • A calmer status pill. The message at the bottom of the window (syncing, importing, "Deleted 1 note") now matches the selection bar beside it.

Fixed

  • Rename, Change Icon and Move to from the sidebar. Choosing one from a space's right-click menu sometimes did nothing until you opened another space. It now opens straight away.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Speaking tasks on the Tasks page is set aside for now; Meetings and AI Chat are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.19

Deleting is quicker and still safe, and a picture you copy pastes straight into a space.

New

  • Paste a picture. Took a screenshot, or used Copy Image in your browser? Press ⌘V on a list, grid, board or canvas and it lands in the space as an image. Copied text that only brings a picture along, like a passage from Word or Pages, still pastes as text.

Improved

  • Delete without the extra step. Deleting a note no longer asks first. It goes to your vault's trash right away (kept for 30 days), and a message at the bottom of the window says "Deleted 1 note" with an Undo button. Delete a few in a row and it keeps count; Undo brings them all back. ⌘Z still undoes one delete at a time.
  • Return never confirms a delete. Deletes that can't be undone from the screen still ask: Delete Now in Recently Deleted, deleting a space, a board column or several tasks, and restoring default shortcuts. In every one of them, Return and Esc now mean Cancel. Click the delete button when you mean it.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Speaking tasks on the Tasks page is set aside for now; Meetings and AI Chat are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.18

Web pages live beside your notes: the dashboards, reports and small tools an AI makes for you now open in Saturn and run. Plus a tune-up — less code behind the app, and one small fix in how code blocks are read.

New

  • HTML pages. Drop an .html file into a space (a Claude artifact you downloaded, a report an agent wrote) and it becomes a card with a picture of the page. Open it and it runs: charts draw, buttons work, and a page that keeps state, like a habit tracker, remembers it.
  • Paste a page. Copied an artifact's code from an AI chat? Press ⌘V on a list, grid, board or canvas and it becomes a page, named by its own title.
  • Pages update as they change. When an agent rewrites a page's file, the open page reloads and its card catches up.
  • Safe by design. A page runs in its own sandbox: it can read nothing in your vault but itself, it can't reach the rest of Saturn, and links you click in it open in your browser.
  • For assistants. Claude and other assistants connected to Saturn can save a page straight into a space (save_page).

Improved

  • Code blocks read the same everywhere. A code block whose first line carries an invisible line-separator character (it can arrive with pasted text) now reads as code in the editor, as it already did on the Tasks page.
  • Leaner under the hood. About 840 lines of unused, duplicated and outdated code are gone, so there is less to go wrong.
  • Simpler search index. When an update changes how search stores your notes, Saturn rebuilds its index fresh instead of patching the old one. Your notes are never touched; search may take a moment after such an update.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Speaking tasks on the Tasks page is set aside for now; Meetings and AI Chat are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.17

Notes read the way Obsidian reads them, down to headings and underscores, and Saturn is ready for Saturn for Chrome from the Chrome Web Store.

Improved

  • Underlined headings. A line with === under it is a heading, and so is one with --- under it, just as in Obsidian. The underline is drawn as a slim rule beneath the heading.
  • Underscores format too. _italic_ and __bold__ work like their star versions, but never inside a word, so snake_case_names stay as written.
  • Dividers stay dividers. Typing *** or ___ no longer drops you below a line, so you can start *bold italic* text. --- typed right under a paragraph stays a divider instead of turning it into a heading.
  • Saturn for Chrome. Saturn now connects to the extension's Chrome Web Store version, and Settings › Extension links to its store page.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Speaking tasks on the Tasks page is set aside for now; Meetings and AI Chat are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.16

A steadier editor: formatting, deleting and typing around markdown now leave your notes exactly as you meant them.

Improved

  • Formatting that stays put. Bold, italic and the rest format each line you select — never the line break, a list marker or a task's date — and pressing again takes it off cleanly. With nothing selected, Bold turns on for what you type next instead of leaving stray marks.
  • Notes read the way Obsidian reads them. A stray ** or a * between numbers stays text, and formatting never spills across list items, headings or code.
  • Search Settings. Find any setting from the search field in Settings; the row you land on glows so you can spot it.
  • Right-click a search result to move, rename, archive or delete the note, just as in the note list.
  • A little more room between lines in the editor.

Fixed

  • Backspace and Delete beside formatting, links or a task's date no longer remove hidden text on another line or leave stray marks behind.
  • Return at the start of a completed task no longer reopens it, and Tab no longer breaks a code block apart.
  • Pasting into a task keeps its date and its place on the Tasks page.
  • Formatting marks no longer leave a gap, or hide text, until your next edit.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Speaking tasks on the Tasks page is set aside for now; Meetings and AI Chat are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.15

Saturn now works with Saturn for Chrome, a browser extension that saves the web straight into your notes.

New

  • Save from Chrome. With Saturn for Chrome, one click saves the page you're on — its title, picture and any text you selected — into Saturn, and you can add the readable article, tags and a space before you move on. Right-click to save a link, a picture or a selection without leaving the page. Saves go to the space you usually file that site in, or always to the place you choose. It also works in Arc, Brave, Edge, Dia, Vivaldi and Opera. Settings ▸ Browser shows whether it's connected. The extension arrives in the Chrome Web Store shortly.

Improved

  • Sharper disclosure arrows in the sidebar.

Fixed

  • A pasted link takes the page's title instead of the site's name.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Speaking tasks on the Tasks page is set aside for now; Meetings and AI Chat are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.14

Quick Note is now a note in its own window, a keystroke away from any app.

New

  • Quick Note opens its own window. Click Quick Note in the sidebar, press ⇧⌘N, or choose File ▸ Quick Note: a blank note appears in a window centred on your screen, ready to type, and the main window stays where you were. Notes started from the menu-bar icon and the Dock open the same way.
  • Quick Note from anywhere. Press ⌃⌥⌘N in any app to start a note, just as ⌃⌥⌘T adds a task. Both keys live together in Settings ▸ Shortcuts ▸ Quick Entry, where one switch turns them on or off and each can be changed.

Improved

  • New Note names its space. In a space, File ▸ New Note reads “New Note in ‘Work’”, so the separate New Note in Space command is gone — ⌘N always created the note where you were.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Speaking tasks on the Tasks page is set aside for now; Meetings and AI Chat are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.13

Saturn opens sooner, the Tasks page and the sidebar stay smooth in a vault of any size, and a large vault that was interrupted while syncing picks up where it left off.

Improved

  • Opens faster. The window appears complete sooner, and the first launch of the day in a large vault takes less than half as long.
  • A quicker Tasks page. It opens in about half the time, scrolls and resizes without stutter, and launching straight onto it is faster.
  • A smoother sidebar. Scrolling it, and showing or hiding it, costs a fraction of what it did.
  • Adding a task is instant, however many meeting transcripts your vault holds.
  • Large vaults sync more reliably. If Saturn quits while reading a large vault, it resumes where it stopped instead of starting over, and it reads the vault about a third faster.
  • Lighter on memory. Saturn holds less as you work, and closing and reopening its window no longer keeps the old one in memory.
  • Clearer wording in menus, alerts, Settings and Shortcuts.

Fixed

  • Code blocks keep their stars and tildes instead of turning the rest of a line italic.
  • A code block's colors update as soon as you change its language or delete an opening comment.
  • A stray double bracket no longer turns the paragraphs below it into a link.
  • Notes changed just before quitting show correctly in lists and search on the next launch.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Speaking tasks on the Tasks page is set aside for now; Meetings and AI Chat are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.12

Saturn now works with the AI apps you use, with your say-so, and runs lighter: less memory, and a canvas or a note full of pictures that moves smoothly on any Mac.

New

  • Assistants. Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other AI apps that speak MCP can work with your notes through Saturn: search and read them, create and edit them, add and complete tasks, move notes between spaces and board columns, and arrange canvases. Settings › Assistants connects an app in one click. Each app asks your permission the first time it connects, and Recent Activity lists every change it makes. Nothing is ever deleted, and archived notes can be restored. Turn it off there at any time.
  • Spotlight's "Search in Saturn" opens Saturn's search with what you typed.

Improved

  • Lighter and smoother. Saturn uses up to a third less memory. Panning a canvas takes a fraction of the energy it did and stays smooth on older Macs, and a note full of pictures scrolls on far less.
  • Pictures in notes span the full width of the text. A tall one is cropped at the bottom instead of shrinking.
  • Edits made on two devices at once are kept. When two devices change a note while apart and iCloud sets one copy aside, Saturn merges it in, or keeps it as a conflict copy where the same lines changed, instead of losing it.
  • Signing out of iCloud and back in keeps what you typed in between.
  • Reminders ask at the right moment. Dating a task from its date menu, a selection, or the editor's due date suggestion now asks to send notifications, so those tasks remind you too.
  • Siri and Shortcuts. "New Note" opens a blank note ready to type, and "Create Note" asks what the note should say instead of failing.
  • Search keeps up with your typing: each new letter stops the search before it.
  • The Space Views popover shows the views you've turned on more clearly, on any App Color.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Speaking tasks on the Tasks page is set aside for now; Meetings and AI Chat are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.11

Saturn now reads an Obsidian vault as Obsidian does: links, tags, tasks, footnotes and canvases. It merges edits made elsewhere instead of overwriting them, and shows deleted notes and old versions right in the app.

New

  • Backlinks. A quiet capsule at the foot of a note says how many notes link to it and mention it by name. It opens a list of each one with its line, and a mention can be turned into a link from its menu.
  • Links that resolve the way your vault expects. [[links]] find a note by title, alias, file name or path, by one consistent rule, so the same link always opens the same note. Markdown links to .md files open the note. Opening a link to a note that doesn't exist offers to create it instead of making one silently.
  • Renames carry your links. Retitle a note and every link to it takes the new name, in one step you can undo.
  • Search operators in ⌘K and the sidebar: "exact phrases", -exclusions, tag:, in:, is:, status: and has:task.
  • Every command in ⌘K, with its current shortcut. Copy Note Link gives a saturn:// link that opens the note from anywhere.
  • Recently Deleted and Version History. Note › Recently Deleted lists your vault's trash with where each note was and the days left, and puts any of them back. Version History… shows each kept copy of a note against its current text and restores one in a step you can undo.
  • Tags in the text. #tags written in a note's body are tags everywhere: the sidebar, counts, search and tag collections. Nested #tags/like/this work too.
  • Obsidian Tasks dates. Start (🛫), scheduled (⏳) and recurring (🔁) tasks are read and shown on the Tasks page. Completing a recurring task adds its next one just below it, and a task never shows as overdue before it starts.
  • Footnotes. [^1] references, their definitions and inline ^[asides] are styled in the editor, with the definition as the reference's tooltip, and print as footnotes in PDF export.
  • A space's canvas is a file you can open. Each canvas is now a standard Canvas.canvas file in its space's folder, so Obsidian and other canvas tools open it, and it moves with the folder. View › Show Canvas in Finder finds it.
  • App icon picker. Settings › Appearance › App Icon offers Default, Dark, Clear, or Tinted to match your App Color.

Improved

  • Edits made elsewhere are merged, not replaced. When another device, app or assistant changed a note while you were typing, Saturn merges both edits. A conflict copy is kept only where the same lines were changed in both.
  • Your files stay as you wrote them. New notes get readable file names (My Cool Note.md). Frontmatter is edited in place, keeping other tools' keys, order and style. A note without a status is no longer given one.
  • Titles read like Obsidian's. A file is titled by its name unless its first line is its name, so a daily note 2026-10-02.md is titled by its date.
  • Pictures and embeds are found the way Obsidian finds them: beside the note, from the vault's root, or anywhere by name. A missing one shows a quiet placeholder instead of loading forever.
  • Saved links with notes of their own open as their text, with the page one click away.
  • Table column widths are kept on each Mac and no longer sync a file for every column you drag.
  • Faster. The update's first launch is complete in under half a second instead of eight. A first import becomes searchable as it goes, and the search index is about five times smaller. Switching between lists and spaces, opening the sidebar and scrolling the list are all smoother, and Saturn uses less memory with large vaults.
  • App Colors, retuned. Slate, Ocean, Teal, Moss, Gold, Ember and Ruby have softer accents, and the editor's caret wears your App Color.
  • Popovers wear your App Color's wash, and their rows nest neatly in the glass. The Space Views popover and the due date picker are cleaner.
  • The Tasks page's tabs: dragging the highlight across them now changes its width smoothly as it goes.
  • The Dock menu adds New Task.
  • Safer when the disk is full. A save that can't be written is undone completely, and nothing it held reappears with your next edit.
  • Trash and conflict copies never expire into a permanent delete, even on a drive with no Trash.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate. Updating re-reads your vault once.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Speaking tasks on the Tasks page is set aside for now; Meetings, AI Chat and Assistants are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.10

A refined icon, and a download that wears it.

Improved

  • The icon, refined. A night-blue sky that brightens toward the horizon, and a planet with soft light falling across it.
  • The installer disk. When you open the Saturn download, its disk shows Saturn's icon on your desktop and in the Finder sidebar, not a plain drive.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.9

PDFs, videos, recordings and documents now live beside your notes as cards of their own, and opening a vault you already keep in another app leaves every file exactly as it was. Saturn also has a new icon.

New

  • A new icon. Saturn's icon is redrawn, with light, dark and tinted looks on macOS 26 that follow your Dock and Finder appearance.
  • Files as cards. Drop, paste (⌘V) or choose ⌘K › Import Files… to add a PDF, video, audio recording or document. Each shows as a card with its first page or frame, and opens in its own viewer: PDFs with find, video and audio with playback, everything else in Quick Look. Each file is kept in your vault beside a small note, so Obsidian shows it too.
  • File embeds. ![[file.pdf]] in a note draws as a card; click it to open the file.
  • Export Canvas. Space › Export Canvas… saves a canvas as a standard .canvas file other apps can open.

Improved

  • Your vault stays untouched. Opening a folder of notes no longer writes anything into them. Saturn adds its own details to a note only when you edit that note here.
  • Renames from other apps. A note renamed or moved by another app is followed as the same note, not treated as deleted and imported again.
  • Notes synced to several devices keep one identity, even when each device first saw them under a different name.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.8

Saved links are here for everyone: keep any web page beside your notes. This build also fixes a bullet that could turn into a dash, pictures drawn upside down, and a window that forgot its size.

New

  • Saved links. Paste a web address (⌘V) onto your notes, drop one in from your browser, or choose ⌘K › Save Link…. Each link is an ordinary note in your vault, a .md file whose source: names the page, with its preview picture beside it. It shows as a card with the page's picture and opens as the live page, with your own notes on it alongside. Clippings that Obsidian Web Clipper or Readwise already saved in your vault open the same way.

Improved

  • Deleting pictures, embedded notes and dividers. Backspace or Delete on one removes it whole. From the line next to one, the first press selects it and the second removes it, so it never gets joined to your text. A due date pill deletes in one press. Next to a code block or a table, the key moves into it instead of breaking it.
  • Task cards close smoothly. The quick capture card shrinks away the way it came in, with no grey flash, and the edit card on the Tasks page no longer jumps as it closes.
  • Board columns. Cards scroll under the column's header line and never show above it.

Fixed

  • A new bullet you had just typed (- ) could turn into a plain dash after you switched to another app and back. Spaces at the end of a note are now kept as you typed them.
  • Pictures pasted into a note were drawn upside down. The files themselves were fine.
  • The main window opens at the size you left it.
  • After switching between light and dark mode, the note list kept the old mode's text colors.
  • The Dock said Saturn was "Not Responding" (offering Force Quit) even while it worked normally.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Assistants (the MCP server) is still behind its feature flag.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.7

Notes from Obsidian now read in Saturn as they do there: math, highlights, callouts, section links and embeds. Deleting a note now moves it to your vault's own trash folder, where you can still get it back.

New

  • Obsidian syntax. $…$ and $$ math is typeset, with a live preview while you edit it. ==Highlights== are marked, and %%comments%% stay quiet. > [!note] callouts draw as soft boxes with an icon; - and + make them foldable, and clicking the icon picks the kind. [[Note#Heading]] and [[Note#^block]] open the note scrolled to that place. ![[Note]] on its own line shows the note as a card, and ![[picture.png|300]] sets a picture's width. Everything stays plain markdown in your files, and PDF export draws it too.
  • Deleted notes go to your vault's trash. Deleting a note moves its file and its pictures into .trash/ in your vault (the folder Obsidian uses), where they stay for 30 days before going to the system Trash. ⌘Z brings them back, and Note › Show Deleted Notes in Finder opens the folder. A file removed outside Saturn is kept there too.
  • Notes never archive themselves. Archive holds only what you archived. Before, a file deleted on another device could show up there.

Improved

  • Checking a box in a note plays the same press and checkmark as the Tasks page.
  • The subscription notice is a small capsule over the editor. It says what you keep before what it asks.
  • Embedded note cards run clean to their edge, with the hairline just outside them instead of greying the card.
  • The note window's buttons sit as far from the window's edge as from its top.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Assistants (the MCP server) and saved links are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.6

Spaces can now hold spaces, so a vault of nested folders opens as it is. This release also makes Saturn faster to launch, steadier while it syncs with iCloud, and complete in every frame it shows.

New

  • Spaces inside spaces. A space can hold other spaces, to any depth, and each one is its folder in your vault, so an Obsidian vault opens with its folders intact. The sidebar shows them as a tree: hover a space for its disclosure arrow, or ⌥-click it to open or close everything inside. Drag to reorder, and pause over a space (or nudge right) to put one inside another. Move To…, New Space Inside… and ⌘Z work on spaces too.
  • Where a space lives, in its title. A nested space's title reads "Work › Projects", and clicking a parent opens it. Turn this off in Settings › Spaces.
  • Keyboard control in the grid and on the board. Arrow keys move between cards, Return opens one, Delete removes the selection, ⌘A selects all, and ⌘-click or ⇧-click extends the selection.
  • Editor text size. ⌘+ and ⌘− make the editor's text larger or smaller, including headings, code and tables.
  • Word and character counts sit at the foot of a note's ⋯ menu.
  • ⌘K remembers what you opened. Its recent notes are the ones you last opened on this Mac, not just the last ones edited.

Improved

  • Faster launch, and the window arrives whole. Saturn opens 25% faster with 4,400 notes and 38% faster with 45,000, and its first frame is the finished window, never a partial one.
  • Every switch lands in one frame. Changing spaces, views or collections shows the destination complete: its notes, the canvas's layout and its first pictures, together. A picture that arrives quickly simply appears; only one you had to wait for fades in.
  • iCloud files that aren't downloaded yet are handled with care. Saturn tells a file that's still in the cloud from one that's gone, so it never archives a note because its file hasn't arrived. Changes it can't write yet are kept and written once the file is ready.
  • Big canvases respond sooner. Opening a canvas of 14,800 cards for the first time lays it out in about 15 ms instead of 413 ms. Panning and zooming a very large canvas holds the app up less than half as long.
  • Your other devices' space settings stay put. Changing one space's icon, colour or order no longer puts back an older copy of the others.
  • A note in a subfolder stays there when you edit it. It used to move up to its space's top folder.
  • Titles fit narrow windows. A long title in the titlebar fades as it slips behind the buttons instead of being cut off, and the spacing beside the sidebar button is even.
  • The sidebar's rows fade under the search field as you scroll, like the note list under its header.
  • Dragging a canvas card to the sidebar reads as one card from start to finish, whether you drop it, cancel, or bring it back.
  • ⌘K and Quick Open run what you typed. Pressing Return opens the answer to the query in the field, and nothing runs after the palette closes.
  • Problems are shown, not hidden. A save that fails shows one banner and keeps retrying; a vault write that fails shows one alert and tries again when you come back to the app.
  • Your vault folder is followed. Move it in Finder and Saturn follows it; if it disappears, Saturn pauses rather than making a new, empty one. Notes saved as UTF-16 now import.
  • Accessibility. Reduce Motion replaces movement with crossfades everywhere, text follows Increase Contrast, and grid and board cards have proper VoiceOver labels and actions.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Assistants (the MCP server) and saved links are still behind their feature flags.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.5

A correctness release. Saturn now takes more care with the files you did not make in Saturn, with edits arriving from your other devices while you type, and with very large spaces.

Improved

  • Your other device's edit survives your typing. Another device's change could reach an open note in the same moment you pressed a key, and the keystroke was saved over it. Both edits are kept now. A note that picks up unsaved edits during a sync keeps the incoming change, and an edit in a table cell no longer lands in another device's row.
  • Saturn keeps the files you already have as they are. Frontmatter written by Obsidian, Hugo or Jekyll is read and kept as it was, including keys Saturn cannot use, and each file's own created and modified dates. A file you named yourself, whether in Finder, in another editor, or when Saturn adopted it, keeps that name through edits, retitles and undo. A Finder duplicate (note 2.md) becomes a new note with its own id and no longer takes over the original.
  • Big spaces answer immediately. In a space of 14,815 notes, creating a note went from about 350 ms to 30 ms, deleting one from about 360 ms to 28 ms, and moving one note to another space from about 10 s to under 25 ms. Typing and creating notes in the list block the app about half as long as before.
  • The canvas opens on its real layout. A large canvas used to show a temporary grid first, then jump to where your cards actually are. It now opens straight on your layout, and opening the Work canvas blocks the app for about a third as long (353–449 ms → 119–145 ms). Zooming out to a whole space and back in no longer stalls while card text is laid out.
  • Very long lines are editable. Each keystroke in a note with a 1 MB single line took 12.6 s. It now takes 60–134 ms. Deleting next to hidden formatting no longer splits an emoji, IME composition is left alone, and Writing Tools adds a single divider.
  • Section names stay in place when you scroll. In the note list, the card grid and the Tasks page, each section's name is drawn once and moves with the scroll. Two copies of a name no longer appear during a scroll, and the rows fade under the titlebar again.
  • Undo can't bring back a deleted note or overwrite newer text. Undoing an edit to a note that has since been deleted, or changed from another window or device, is refused instead of applied. A card that returns to a canvas goes back to where it was.
  • Task lines keep what you wrote. Obsidian's 🔼 priority marker is kept, "next Friday" means the right Friday, due dates follow you across time zones, and saving a task no longer renames its note's file.
  • Board columns sync between your Macs. A space's columns travel with the vault, and a card whose column hasn't arrived yet is no longer moved into the first column.
  • Image documents look like their pictures. An image opened in its own window takes the image's shape. Rename… works from every menu that offers it. Card dates read "Today", "Yesterday" or "Sep 12".
  • Menu icons show when highlighted. The view-mode pickers' icons no longer disappear under the hover highlight.
  • Typing in the Tasks page's date field no longer deletes, checks off or opens the task behind it.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays yours and readable in Finder. Sign in to iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Assistants (the MCP server) is still behind its feature flag.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.4

The three views that hold a whole vault — cards, board and canvas — now draw themselves instead of assembling themselves. Plus Ramble: say your tasks out loud and watch them land.

Added

  • Ramble. On the Tasks page, press the mic and speak a pile of tasks in one breath — "email Dana about the lease, book the dentist, and I still owe Sam the numbers" — and they arrive as separate, clean task drafts. Nothing is written until you press Return; Esc walks away, ✕ drops one. It listens and thinks entirely on your Mac, and the words that reach your list are always your own: if the model invents a phrase, that one task falls back to what you actually said rather than the batch being thrown away. If extraction is unavailable or times out, your tasks still appear — you were heard.

Improved

  • Cards stop going missing when you flick. Every card in the grid used to be a small assembled view costing about 7 ms to put on screen, and a fast scroll asks for roughly 180 of them a second — so the app fell behind its own scrolling and left holes where cards should be. Cards are drawn now, directly, and the grid owns its own scrolling. Storms that ran at 36–48 fps run at 120 fps, the blocked time behind them dropped by two thirds, and the scrollbar finally represents the real height of the list (the bottom is the bottom).
  • The board holds up under thousands of cards. On a vault of 14,815 notes with 5,460 in a single column: every lift, reorder, cross-column drop, autoscroll sweep and ten rapid alternating drags 50 ms apart run at 8.33 ms a frame with zero late frames. Memory stays flat at 535 MB through the whole run.
  • Dragging a card on the board feels like moving one object. The lifted card now rides over the sidebar instead of being clipped at the column's edge, it follows its own edges rather than snapping to the pointer, and a card you drop becomes its row the moment it lands — shaded and clipped as the row it is turning into, with no hovering copy and no shadow gap. A quick re-drag during a landing picks the card back up.
  • The canvas tidies itself the way Arrange always did. Automatic layout used a row grid, so one image document left dead air under every card beside it, and repeated Arranges drifted — a five-card space grew from 836×563 to 1124×739 over three presses. Both paths now use one packing: 3,000 of 3,000 arrangements land at zero drift.
  • Clicking on the canvas costs nothing. Every click, right-click, drag, marquee and arrow key used to walk the whole space — a right-click on a large canvas re-read all 14,815 notes before the menu could open. They all resolve through the spatial index now. Overlapping cards also agree at last about which one is on top, so the card you click is the card you see.
  • Dropping images on the canvas answers immediately. A Finder drop imports in 12–17 ms, but a drop from Photos, a browser, or the floating screenshot thumbnail waits on the other app to write the file. The canvas now plants dashed placeholder cards at the exact spots the real ones will take, shown only if the drop is still empty-handed after 150 ms, and retires them as the images land.
  • Scrolling the sidebar is smooth on the efficiency cores. A six-second sidebar scroll ran at 20.5 ms a frame (49 fps, 70% of frames late); the cost was one button wrapper per row, re-laid-out about 55 times a second across every visible row. It now runs at 8.33 ms — 120 fps, 2.5% late.
  • Resizing the window and toggling the sidebar cost less. The workspace's three columns are now laid out independently, so a column whose size did not change is not rebuilt. Blocked main-thread time on a window resize is roughly halved (1.83 s → 0.87 s).
  • Typing stays smooth in very long notes. Return and Backspace on a list or task line — the thing you type most in a notes app — re-read the entire document on every keystroke. They reuse the parse that is already there now. And pasting a large block into a long note takes the same staged path that opening one does, instead of styling the whole insert at once.
  • Images drop onto a window that isn't focused, and link clicks keep working after you edit a link's URL.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate — the 1.0 build in everything but name, and deliberately not announced as a full release yet.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal — Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays user-owned and readable in Finder; sign into iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.
  • Assistants (the MCP server introduced in rc.3) is still held behind its feature flag.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.3

A smoother sidebar, a new welcome, and a quieter Settings. A small release on top of rc.2.

Improved

  • Dragging the sidebar divider is noticeably smoother. Finding a column width is a back-and-forth motion, and every time your hand crossed back over a width it had already been at, Saturn re-measured every visible row from scratch — 92% of all the measuring during a drag was work it had already done. It remembers now: an eight-second drag went from 1,456 measurements to 81, the time the app spent blocked dropped a third, and the worst frames got 29% shorter (82 → 92fps on the note list, the app's most expensive surface to drag against).
  • The sidebar tucking away as you narrow the window no longer costs a stutter. Drag the window edge past the point where the sidebar auto-collapses and the whole workspace was being rebuilt on every frame of the tuck — 166–186 rebuilds across a sweep that needs 13. The panel now slides and clips instead, so what is inside it holds still while it goes.

Changed

  • A new welcome. First launch now opens on a photograph of Saturn, with the app's name arriving over it rather than sitting on it. The App Color slider in *Personalize* still washes the real thing you are about to land in.
  • Settings says less. A pass over every pane cut the explanatory sentences under controls that already explain themselves. Nothing was removed but words.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate — the 1.0 build in everything but name, and deliberately not announced as a full release yet.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal — Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays user-owned and readable in Finder; sign into iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.2

Capture a task from anywhere with ⌃⌥⌘T. Delete hundreds of notes without the app freezing. And a set of things that were quietly slow — renaming a Space, moving a batch of notes, clicking a tag, pressing Return in a long note — are now instant.

New

  • New Task from anywhere. ⌃⌥⌘T raises a small capture card over whatever you are doing, even when Saturn is in the background: type the task, press Return, it lands in your Inbox. The same card comes up from *File ▸ New Task* (⌃⌘N), ⌘K, the menu-bar icon, and the Tasks page — one card and one destination, whichever way you reach it. The key is rebindable in *Settings ▸ Shortcuts*, and takes effect immediately.
  • Segmented controls follow your pointer. Press and drag across the Space view switcher, the Tasks tabs, and the pickers in Settings, the way macOS 26's own controls do. The selection tracks your hand and settles where you let go.

Improved

  • Deleting a lot of notes no longer looks like a crash. Deleting 200 notes locked the app for an unbroken 5.7 seconds — spinning cursor, nothing on screen. The longest pause is now 239 ms, and the whole delete finishes in 2.2 seconds instead of 11.7. At 600 notes it is 8.8 seconds instead of 61. A pill in the corner counts the notes as they go, with Stop while it runs and Undo once it is done, and it says so when it moves on to clearing out images nothing references any more.
  • ⌘Z works after deleting the note you had open. It never had, and not for the reason anyone thought: the undo was armed and correct, but with the editor gone, Edit ▸ Undo reached nothing at all. It is routed now — which also means ⌘Z is reliable when no text field has focus.
  • Renaming a Space is instant. A Space *is* a folder, so renaming one changes nothing inside your notes — but Saturn was rewriting every file in it anyway. On a 7,000-note Space: 24 seconds → 19 ms.
  • Deleting a Space and keeping its notes: 41 seconds → 3. Same 7,000-note Space.
  • Moving a batch of notes to another Space: 28.7 seconds → 2.0 for a thousand notes. Dragging a multi-note selection onto a Space in the sidebar, or onto Archive, takes the same fast path — a 50-note drag used to be 50 separate saves.
  • Clicking a tag now costs what clicking a Space costs. A tag with 81 notes took 1.6 seconds to open while a Space with 1,013 notes took a quarter of that: opening a tag was quietly reading your whole library and sorting it out afterwards. Now around 150 ms, and it no longer grows with the size of your vault.
  • Pressing Return in a long note. Every Return scanned the entire document twice looking for a code fence. Two thousand Returns in a 200 KB note: 1.8 seconds → 0.009.
  • Searching while the index is still building no longer re-reads every note on each keystroke, and the first sync after launch no longer runs a full-library scan it did not need.

Fixed

  • The `+` and `…` buttons above a Space sometimes did nothing. Two independent causes, both real. The clickable region was worked out one render pass *after* the buttons were drawn, so for 15–47 ms after every navigation a click on them became a window drag instead. And each button's hit area was a circle inside a square slot, leaving 21% of it — the corners — silently swallowing clicks. The buttons are now live on their first frame and clickable to their edges.
  • A note could make Saturn move files outside your vault to the Trash. A .md file whose image: path pointed up out of its own folder (../../Documents) was followed without any check, and deleting that note took the target with it. Image paths are now confined to the note's folder. This needed no unusual file — ../Attachments/pic.png is ordinary Obsidian layout.
  • Notes could be marked archived on every device by a sync scan that ran while file moves were still queued: for a moment a file was at neither its old path nor its new one, and the scan read that as deleted. Both sync passes now wait for pending writes to land.
  • The onboarding backdrop no longer drags with the window. Moving the welcome window bared a hard-edged strip of undimmed desktop down one side.

Notes

  • Still a release candidate — the 1.0 build in everything but name, and deliberately not announced as a full release yet.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal — Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays user-owned and readable in Finder; sign into iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.1 (24)

Still the same release candidate, rebuilt. Moving and resizing windows costs a fraction of what it did, dragging either divider is smooth on a long list, and the download is a third of the size.

Improved

  • Dragging a window no longer makes Saturn work. macOS saves a window's position to preferences every frame you move it, and each save made SwiftUI re-check every view that reads a preference — so an eight-second drag that changed nothing on screen rebuilt 17,252–17,575 sidebar rows, at 67–86% of a CPU core and 3.4–4.3 W. It is now 19 rows, 15–19%, and 32–66 mW. Fast Macs hid this behind a steady frame rate; slower ones did not.
  • Sticky notes fly cleanly. The glide moves a window every frame, so it was paying the cost above on each one of them — three previous rounds of tuning the animation were aimed at the wrong thing.
  • Dragging the sidebar divider is smooth on a big vault. The live width was held by the window's top-level view, so every tick of the drag re-evaluated the whole shell. It now lives where only the pieces that move read it: main-thread blocked time over a ten-second drag falls from 7.5–7.8 seconds to 0.75–0.9, and shell re-evaluations from about 1,100 to zero.
  • The same fix for the note-list divider, on both the note list and a Space's own workspace: 539 re-evaluations to zero, blocked time 7.7–7.8 seconds down to 6.0–6.5 — the rest is the editor honestly re-wrapping your text.
  • The download is about a third of its previous size. A 32 MB machine-learning model was being shipped inside the app for a feature that is switched off in release builds. It is fetched only if you ever turn that feature on.
  • Saturn no longer asks macOS for calendar access. The permission was left over from the calendar integration removed earlier this month; nothing had used it since.

Fixed

  • Dragging the sidebar closed no longer bounces. Closing it by dragging made the column jump back out — up to 96 points — before it closed, worst from a wide sidebar. It now closes from exactly where your hand left it.

Notes

  • This is the same release candidate as build 23, rebuilt as build 24. It is the 1.0 build in everything but name, and the version is deliberately not announced as a full release yet.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal — Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays user-owned and readable in Finder; sign into iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.

Saturn 1.0.0-rc.1 (23)

Saturn can be bought. This release turns on the licence — a 14-day trial, then $29 once — and brings a much faster search, a smaller disk footprint, and a new opening.

New

  • Saturn is now a paid app, with a 14-day trial. The whole app is free and complete for 14 days, with no card and no account. After that it is $29 once — not a subscription — and yours permanently, with every 1.x update free including security and macOS compatibility fixes. Buy from Settings ▸ Licence, or from saturnnotes.com. This is a launch price and will rise to $49; buying now keeps the lower one forever.
  • If the trial ends, Saturn becomes read-only rather than locking you out. Every note stays open, searchable, exportable and copyable — what stops is writing new text. Your notes were never inside Saturn to begin with: they are Markdown files in your own folder, and they stay exactly as reachable as they were before you installed it.
  • A new opening. The welcome window is Saturn, and your documents are its ring — notes orbiting slowly in a shared plane behind the setup form. One revolution takes 84 seconds; it is scenery behind something you are reading, not a thing demanding attention, and it loops for as long as you linger.
  • Your licence arrives by email, and activates in one click. Buying opens Saturn straight back up with the licence applied. The same licence is attached to your receipt email as a file, so a new Mac is Settings ▸ Licence ▸ Open Licence File… — and on a second Mac signed into the same iCloud account, usually nothing at all: the licence travels with your notes.

Improved

  • Search no longer stalls on a big vault. Building the result snippets flattened each note's body before picking the ~120 characters to show, which meant walking up to 8,192 characters per result, for up to 50 results, on every keystroke — on the main thread. Measured on a vault of 11,673 notes it was 743 of the 959 main-thread samples the entire search path spent, and a single query could stall the interface for 108–185 ms. It now finds the match first and only formats what it shows.
  • Saturn reclaims disk space it used to keep forever. Every vault the app had ever opened left a complete local index behind, and nothing removed them — 981 MB of leftovers for a 335 MB vault, and on one machine 6.9 GB across 43 directories. Indexes for vaults you no longer have are now swept.
  • The date chip stops blinking while you type. Typing "next mon" on the way to "next Monday", or "at 9a" on the way to "9am", used to parse to nothing for a keystroke or two and the suggestion would vanish and come back. Half-typed forms are understood, so the chip stays put — and "9a"/"5p" now work on their own, because that is how people write them.
  • Resizing the sidebar is smoother on long note lists.

Fixed

  • Undo of a deleted note, renaming an image document, and Reveal Space in Finder could write to your vault while the app was meant to be read-only. All of them now respect it, along with three more paths that had the same problem: restoring a deleted note's images, renaming or removing a space folder, and pasting or dropping an image.
  • The licence file offered on the purchase page could not be opened by the app. It was saved in the wrong shape, so Open Licence File… rejected it — on the one path that exists for when the one-click activation doesn't work.

Notes

  • This is a release candidate. It is the 1.0 build in everything but name, and the version is deliberately not announced as a full release yet.
  • Requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Universal — Apple silicon and Intel.
  • Your vault folder stays user-owned and readable in Finder; sign into iCloud to keep it in sync across your devices.

Saturn 0.0.18

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.