A simple notes app

13 October 2026 · Rob Schmitt

For a while now my notes have been split between two apps. The ones I write quickly go in Apple Notes. The ones I want as files go in Obsidian. Neither is quite what I want, and that gap is more or less why Soot exists. This week I’ve been thinking again about how I describe Soot, and what should come first when someone lands on the website.

Apple Notes is easy. You open it and type. But your notes live in a database, and these days I want my AI agents to read what I’ve written down, which is hard when it’s shut in there.

Obsidian keeps everything as plain Markdown files in folders, which is exactly what I want underneath. But it’s a lot of app. I got caught up in plugins and settings, and there’s a long list of features I’ll never touch. I never agreed with how it manages attachments, or how my notes are shown in its sidebar, and I never quite got it looking the way I wanted. Plenty of people love all of that. I wanted less of it.

So Soot, my notes app for Mac, iPad and iPhone, sits in between. You open it and write, like Notes. Underneath, every note is a plain Markdown file in a folder you choose, like Obsidian. And there’s less of it: folders, search, twelve themes, and sync if you want it.

Until this week the website’s headline was “Notes that stay yours.” I liked it. Then I read another notes app’s App Store listing and found the same promise, almost word for word, in its second paragraph. A bit of looking around and it’s everywhere. Everyone with plain files says your files stay yours. It’s true of Soot, but it’s true of half the category, and it’s a promise about what happens if you leave. It says nothing about what it’s like to open the app tomorrow morning.

So the headline is now “A simple notes app.” Which is a worryingly easy thing to say. Every app calls itself simple. What I’ve tried to do underneath is make it checkable: there’s nothing to learn, no account to make, no plugins, and it works offline. Choose a folder and you’re writing. Those are things you can test in the first minute.

“Stay yours” didn’t go away. It moved down the page, where it belongs, next to the bit about every note being an ordinary file you can open in anything else. The AI bit stayed too, because it’s the reason Apple Notes stopped working for me. Soot comes with instructions for assistants to find, read and save your notes, and they work with the plain files on your Mac.

If you’ve read this far thinking “so it’s just a notes app”, then yes. That turned out to be the hard part.