Apple Notes — Semantic Search & RAG

Search 7,500+ Apple Notes by meaning and ask questions answered from note content. Entirely local — nothing leaves the machine.

notes is on PATH (wrapper at /usr/local/bin/notes). No venv activation needed.

Ollama must be running (nomic-embed-text for embeddings, qwen3.5 for RAG).

Prefer search over ask

Start with search. It's fast (0.1s), gives you titles + scores + snippets, and is enough for most questions. Only escalate to ask when the user needs a synthesized answer across multiple notes.

Many notes are short bookmarks (a title + a link). search shows you exactly what's there. ask adds 10–30 seconds of LLM time and may just report "I only see titles" for thin notes.

Commands

Search notes by meaning