Apple Notes importer

Status: shipped in #247. Built on the importer plugin contract from #246 (see docs/importers.md). Lives at apps/electron/importers/apple-notes/.

The Apple Notes importer pulls every note out of the macOS Notes.app and writes them into your workspace as plain markdown files, preserving folder hierarchy, attachments, and timestamps.

Behaviour

Concern	Behaviour
Platform	process.platform === 'darwin' only. On every other platform import yields nothing and the chooser logs a single line.
Source	Live read of Notes.app via osascript. There is no offline file to point at — the importer ignores the input path on the dry-run pass and writes via ctx.workspaceFolder on the write pass.
Folder hierarchy	Every Apple Notes folder maps to a markdown subfolder under Imported/apple-notes/<folder-name>/. The default folder ("Notes") is preserved as-is.
Attachments	Saved next to each note under Imported/apple-notes/<folder>/assets/<note-slug>/<n>.<ext> and referenced from the markdown body via relative paths.
Tags	#hashtags already inside the note body are surfaced into frontmatter tags:. Every note also gets imported and apple-notes tags.
Locked notes	Skipped. The importer logs each one and reports a count in the final summary.
Empty notes	Skipped silently (with one summary count).
Dry-run	First run yields a single preview note. Confirm with the JSON-input dance below to write.

Frontmatter shape

Every imported note ends up with:

The host-written copy at Imported/apple-notes/<title>.md (the file the plugin contract creates from the yielded ImportedNote) carries the same fields plus apple-notes-folder and apple-notes-id under meta. The hierarchy-preserving canonical file at Imported/apple-notes/<folder>/<slug>.md carries the frontmatter shape shown above verbatim.

Two-pass flow (dry-run preview → write)

The plugin contract from #246 takes a single input: string parameter and no first-class dry-run flag. To stay inside the contract this importer treats input as a JSON config when it starts with {:

input value	Effect
anything that is not JSON (default from the chooser)	Dry-run. Enumerates Notes.app, yields a single synthetic preview note listing every note that would be written, grouped by folder. No attachments are saved.
{"confirm": true}	Write. Re-enumerates, saves attachments to disk, and yields one ImportedNote per real note.

In the renderer chooser flow:

1. Pick Apple Notes from the importer chooser.
2. The renderer passes the workspace folder as input (default), so the first run is always a dry-run. A note titled "Apple Notes — Import preview" appears under Imported/apple-notes/.
3. Read the preview, then re-run with the Confirm option (the renderer sends {"confirm": true} as input) to write the real notes.

The dry-run note also contains a built-in checklist block telling you to re-run with confirm — so even a user who's never seen this doc can find their way through it.

Inline images

Apple Notes stores image references inside the note's HTML body as private URLs (x-coredata://… or applewebdata:…) that aren't reachable from outside the app. The importer:

1. Drops those broken references during the HTML→Markdown unwrap.
2. Saves each attachment via the AppleScript save verb to Imported/apple-notes/<folder>/assets/<note-slug>/<n>.<ext>.
3. Appends each saved image to the bottom of the note body as ![](assets/<note-slug>/<n>.<ext>).

This loses the original inline placement (Apple doesn't expose anchors) but keeps every image attached to its source note. Non-image attachments (PDF, audio, video) follow the same path with their original extension.

AppleScript permission

On the first run the OS will prompt:

"Mark It Down" wants to control "Notes". Allowing control will provide access to documents and data in "Notes", and to perform actions within that app.

Click OK. If you click Don't Allow the importer fails with:

AppleScript permission denied for Notes. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation, find the running Mark It Down application (or your terminal in dev), and enable Notes.

Re-toggling the permission requires re-launching the app — that's a macOS restriction, not ours.

File layout

Every other surface stays untouched — the loader from #246 picks the folder up automatically because it ships an index.ts.

Testing locally

Then:

1. Open Notes.app and create a folder "MID Test" with one note that has a title, a body with #testing somewhere in it, and a pasted image.
2. In Mark It Down, click Import from… in the activity bar and pick Apple Notes.
3. Confirm the preview note lists MID Test and your test note.
4. Re-run with confirm — the test note shows up at Imported/apple-notes/MID Test/<slug>.md, the image is at Imported/apple-notes/MID Test/assets/<slug>/1.png, and the body's frontmatter has tags: [imported, apple-notes, testing].

Edge cases

Case	Behaviour
Locked note	Skipped, logged.
Empty note (no body, no attachments)	Skipped silently.
Note in multiple folders	Apple Notes only stores one container — we follow that.
Attachment Notes.app can't read (rare, e.g. recovered cache rows)	Logged, skipped, surrounding note still imports.
Non-image attachment (PDF, audio, video)	Saved to assets/<slug>/<n>.<ext> with its original extension; appended to the body as a plain link.
Very large library (5000+ notes)	The osascript script writes one record at a time so we don't blow Apple's text-item-delimiter limits. The dry-run preview truncates each folder's listing at 50 entries with a "and N more" trailer.

Future work (out of scope for #247)

• .exporter archive fallback for non-macOS users.
• Anchored image placement (would require parsing the WebKit DOM Apple ships in the body — possible, but not worth the brittleness for v1).
• Surfacing attachment captions ("Drawn on iPad", "Scanned…") as alt-text.
• Per-folder include/exclude filters in the chooser.