Search and discover connections across Apple Notes

apple-notes is an MCP server for semantic search and connection-discovery across the user's own Apple Notes: hybrid search (vector plus BM25, re-ranked), Swanson-ABC "bridges" that surface non-obvious connections between two notes tied to a shared intermediary, entity threads, and cited synthesis over everything the user has written. Embeddings, search, BM25, clustering, and bridges all run on-device by reading Apple Notes' SQLite store directly; only the final synthesis step calls an LLM, and the user chooses whether that LLM is local or cloud. The server exposes many tools - search-notes for the default hybrid search, find-notes for an exact substring match, get-note/list-notes/list-folders/list-tags, related-notes for tag/wikilink/vector-similarity connections, bridge-notes for non-obvious A-B-C connections, feed for a ranked evidence-first connection stream, entity-notes/list-entities for mention-weighted entity lookups (needing an optional graph database), get-tables, create-note/update-note, check-changes, and index-health - and this skill's job is knowing which one to reach for.

Use it when the user wants to find, recall, or look up something from their own Apple Notes; surface non-obvious connections across notes; synthesize a position from everything they've written on a topic; index their notes; or query by tag or folder. Do not use it for creating reminders or for any non-Apple-Notes note system - it is macOS and Apple Notes only, and does not search Obsidian, Notion, Google Docs, or other stores. Entity tools need the optional layered graph database; without it, fall back to hybrid search, exact search, related notes, or bridges instead.

Setup requires the bun runtime to have Full Disk Access, since the server reads Apple Notes' SQLite store directly:

git clone https://github.com/connerkward/mcp-apple-notes
cd mcp-apple-notes
git checkout <reviewed-tag-or-commit>
bun install

After granting Full Disk Access to the exact bun binary path and registering the server with the user's MCP client, the first index of roughly 1,800 notes takes a few seconds. Search input is a natural-language or exact-substring query, optionally scoped by folder or date range; output ranks results with score = RRF(vector, BM25) x title_boost x recency_factor, where temporal queries like "recent" or "latest" auto-shift to a 1-day recency half-life at 70% weight while normal queries keep a 90-day half-life at 10%. A "synthesize what I think about X" request is served by a separate web app endpoint (GET /api/synthesize?q= on http://localhost:3741/) that writes a grounded answer with inline citations back to the source notes.

It registers as an MCP server with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or as a bundled Claude Code plugin. Synthesis is the only part that calls an LLM: either local via LM Studio or Ollama, keeping notes on-device, or real OpenAI, defaulting to gpt-4o-mini, with everything else - embeddings, search, BM25, clustering, bridges, entities - running on-device. Each search also runs a roughly 1ms change-detection check and kicks off one background incremental re-index if notes changed, so a just-edited note missing from results is usually just re-index catch-up lag rather than a real miss.

Apple Notes users who want semantic and exact search, non-obvious cross-note connections, and cited synthesis over their own notes, without their note content leaving the device except for the specific act of generating a synthesized answer.