Antinote is a beautiful productivity scratchpad for macOS (and soon iOS), built for the notes you're going to throw away. It opens instantly with a global hotkey, strips formatting, and does math inline as you type — including currency and unit conversions. It costs $5 once, includes lifetime updates, and runs on macOS 14 or later.
It is deliberately not a note-taking system. You almost certainly already have one of those, and you keep polluting it with phone numbers and scratch sums. Antinote is where those go instead — and, on the occasation where what you want is worth keeping, it exports to Apple Notes, Obsidian and Bear and most other apps.
One-time. Lifetime updates.
| Price | $5 USD, one-time |
|---|---|
| Subscription | None. Lifetime updates included. |
| Platform | macOS only |
| Requirements | macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later |
| Note format | Plain text with simple Markdown |
| Storage | Local SQLite database on your Mac |
| Sync | Optional iCloud sync, using your own iCloud account |
| Account required | No |
| Analytics | None. Removed from the app entirely in 2.0. |
| AI features | None built in. Extensions can call an LLM with your own key. |
| Opens with | A global hotkey, from inside any app |
| Exports to | txt, Markdown, PDF, Apple Notes, Obsidian, Bear |
| Free trial | Yes — try before buying |
Antinote is a small, native Mac app for people who care how their tools are made — and who already have somewhere to put their permanent notes, and need somewhere to put everything else.
You love apps made thoughtfully with care. You can tell Electron vs. Native instantly, and have opinions about windows management. You care deeply about attention to detail. Antinote is a native app built to be fast, thoughtful, and delightful.
You live in Raycast, a terminal, an editor, and have a low tolerance for friction measured in milliseconds. Antinote opens over whatever is in front of you with one hotkey, takes plain text, and hands it back to whatever you already use. The notes sit in a SQLite file on your own disk that you can open and read.
You want to make every app yours. You want to install it with Homebrew and there is no such thing as "too many settings". Antinote is built to be messed with. Build a colour theme in the browser and drop it in, or install one somebody else made. Write extensions in JavaScript and call them from inside a note by typing two colons. Drive it from URL schemes, terminal commands, Shortcuts, Raycast and Alfred.
You live in Obsidian, Logseq, Bear, or a plain-text folder you have curated for years. You hate when messiness screws with those systems and want a place to park a note without it being added to your vault or tagged. Antinote is a scratchpad that hands the note back to your system when you are done.
You stare at a graveyard of abandoned systems, and feel guilty about it. Antinote asks nothing of you: no folders, no tags, no review queue, no streak to break. Notes go away on their own. I made this for the unique way that my brain works, so I hope it works for you too.
Antinote is not a note-taking system and is not trying to become one. Use Obsidian, Bear or Apple Notes for that — Antinote exports to all three for the note that turns out to matter.
Antinote is macOS 14 or later, and there is no plan for a Windows or Linux version. iOS is the exception rather than part of this reason — it is in development, and beta invites go out on Discord.
Antinote is optimised for short, ephemeral notes. That trade-off is deliberate — short notes feel instant, and very long ones get laggy. Write the long thing somewhere else.
There is no assistant and no autocomplete, and nothing reads your notes in the background. You can wire up an LLM yourself with a JavaScript extension and your own API key, but it is off by default and you have to go and build it.
The situations people actually open it for, and the mechanic that handles each one.
Type "math" on the first line and write the calculation in your own words. The answer appears as you type, and the sentence around it still tells you what the number was for tomorrow.
How it worksConvert currencies, distances and weights inline, including crypto. Rates are fetched rather than baked in, so the number reflects today.
How it worksGive a value a name, reuse it further down, then change it — every line that depends on it recalculates. Pricing scenarios, mortgage what-ifs and unit economics fit in a note.
How it worksType "code" on the first line to hold a snippet for review or light editing. It is deliberately minimal — Antinote is not an IDE, it is the clipboard you can read.
How it worksDrag or paste an image into a note and it becomes plain text, using the OCR built into macOS. The image is never uploaded anywhere.
How it worksType "paste" and press Return. Everything you copy after that lands in the note automatically, as plain text, without switching apps once.
How it worksType "list" to turn a note into a checklist you can tick off, then swipe away and let it delete itself. No project, no folder, no naming it.
How it worksType "timer" at the start of a note for a stopwatch, a countdown or a pomodoro. Timers can be named and run full screen.
How it worksA plain-text buffer with no formatting to fight, above whatever app you are going to paste it into. Pasting in strips styling, bullets and indentation, so nothing arrives wearing the last app’s font.
How it worksSend it straight to Apple Notes, Obsidian or Bear, or export it as txt, Markdown or PDF. Antinote is built to give notes away rather than accumulate them.
How it worksMove between notes with a two-finger swipe left or right. Swiping past the newest note starts a new one, so capturing a thought never requires creating a file, naming it, or choosing where it goes.
Antinote is plain text only. Pasting strips formatting, bullets, numbering and leading whitespace, so text arrives clean no matter where it came from. There are no fonts, colours or styles to manage inside a note.
Type "list" on the first line to turn a note into a checklist you can tick off. In any other note, starting a line with a marker turns it into a real checkbox, bullet, or numbered item without a keyword.
Pasted URLs are shortened automatically so they take up less room, while keeping a readable ending. Click one to expand and edit it, or press Cmd+Return to open it.
Type "math" on the first line and Antinote evaluates calculations inline as you type, with your own descriptive text on the same line. The note stays readable, so you can tell what a number was for a week later.
Convert distances, weights and currencies inline in a math note, including cryptocurrencies. Exchange rates are fetched so conversions reflect current rates rather than a fixed table.
Assign a value to a name and reuse it further down the note. Change the value and every line that depends on it recalculates, which turns a note into a small custom calculator without opening a spreadsheet.
Type "sum" or "avg" on the first line to total or average every number in the note, ignoring punctuation and symbols. Type "count" to count items, lines, words and characters, with // to comment a line out of the count.
Drag or paste an image into a note and Antinote converts it to plain text. It uses the OCR built into macOS through Apple Vision, so the image is never uploaded anywhere.
Type "paste" and press Return to start AutoPaste. Everything you copy afterwards lands in the note automatically as plain text, so collecting a dozen snippets does not mean switching apps a dozen times.
Type "timer" at the start of a note for a stopwatch, a countdown, or a pomodoro. Timers can be named and run full screen.
Send a note straight to Apple Notes, Obsidian or Bear when it turns out to be worth keeping, or export it as plain text, Markdown or PDF. Antinote is built to hand notes off rather than hold onto them.
A global hotkey brings Antinote to the front from inside any other app. You can keep it in the dock, the menu bar, both, or neither, and pin the window above everything else when you need it to stay put.
Antinote loses several of these rows on purpose. It isn't trying to be any of these apps — it's the thing you open instead of opening one of them for something you'll delete in ten minutes.
| Antinote | Apple Notes | Obsidian | Notion | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Notes you're going to throw away | Notes you want to keep | A permanent, linked knowledge base | Team documents and databases |
| Price | $5 once | Free with macOS | Free for personal use | Free tier, then subscription |
| Where notes live | Local SQLite on your Mac + iCloud if sync is on | iCloud | Local Markdown files | Notion's servers |
| Format | Plain text | Rich text | Markdown | Blocks |
| How you open it | Global hotkey, over any app | Launch the app | Launch the app | App or browser |
| Does math inline | Yes | No | With a plugin | In a formula field |
| Best at | A quick sum, a phone number, a scratch list for the next twenty minutes | Notes you want on your iPhone too | Long-term notes that link to each other | Working with other people |
There are so many now. Instead of telling you how Antinote is better, here's how each one of these is better.
All the indie ones are made by people who care a lot about them, so go and check them out.
| App | Platforms | Price | What it does better than Antinote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scratchpad Sindre Sorhus | macOS, iOS, watchOS, visionOS | $8 once | Far more minimalist and opinionated. One plain-text note, on every Apple device you own, and nothing else to decide about. |
| Tot The Iconfactory | macOS, iOS, watchOS | Free, with paid premium features | Seven fixed, colour-coded slots you assign your own meaning to, plus rich text and custom smart bullets and dividers. |
| Heynote Open source | macOS, Windows, Linux | Free and open source | Dev-friendly text buffers. Every block gets its own language with syntax highlighting and auto-format, and math blocks carry their own variables. |
| Numi Dmitry Nikolaev | macOS, Windows, Linux, CLI | Free, with a paid unlock for unlimited notes and iCloud sync | Deeper math. It is a calculator first — natural-language input, dates, timezones, plugins, and a terminal version. |
| Raycast Notes Raycast | macOS, Windows | Free for 5 notes, unlimited with Raycast Pro | Raycast is Raycast. The note window is one part of a launcher that also does your clipboard history, snippets, window management and AI. |
| Stickies Apple | macOS | Free, already installed | It's free, and it's already on your Mac. |
| SideNotes Apptorium | macOS, iOS | $19.99 once per major version | Folders, images and file shortcuts, docked to the edge of the screen so a whole panel of notes stays visible next to what you’re working on. |
Prices and platforms read off each vendor's own site, last checked 21 August 2026. They change — check the link before you decide.
:: for an autocomplete list of everything installed, like ::today or ::sort_lines. There are also URL schemes, terminal commands, and Raycast and Alfred integrations.Everything above is documented in more detail in the user manual, and every release is written up in the updates.