Apple Notes MCP server

MCP Apple Notes

mcp-apple-notes is an MCP server for semantic search and connection-discovery across your own Apple Notes — hybrid search, Swanson-ABC bridges, entity threads, and cited synthesis over everything you've written.

It traverses your accumulated mass of notes: semantic + BM25 hybrid search, non-obvious bridge connections, entity threads, related-notes, and grounded synthesis across everything you've ever written in Apple Notes. Embeddings, search, BM25, clustering, and bridges run on-device; only synthesis generation calls an LLM (local via LM Studio/Ollama, or cloud via OpenAI — your choice). Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Forked from RafalWilinski/mcp-apple-notes — this fork reads the SQLite store + protobuf directly and adds bridges, entities, feed, and synthesis.

Install as a Claude Code plugin

/plugin marketplace add connerkward/ckw-skills
/plugin install apple-notes@connerkward

This registers the MCP server and bundles the apple-notes-search agent skill. Or install the MCP server manually — see Installation below (requires macOS + bun + Full Disk Access).

Other MCP Notes servers break at scale. They use JXA (AppleScript automation) to read notes one-by-one — fine for 50 notes, unusable at 500+. At 1,800 notes, JXA takes ~49 minutes just to fetch content. On macOS Sequoia it's worse: Apple silently denies Automation permission to processes without a bundle ID, so JXA-based servers fail entirely. This fork reads the SQLite database directly, decodes the protobuf blobs for real note text, and indexes 1,800 notes in under 5 seconds.

Comparison

JXA on macOS Sequoia: processes without a bundle ID are silently auto-denied Automation permission. This fork reads SQLite directly.

Features

• 🔍 Semantic search via all-MiniLM-L6-v2 on-device embeddings
• 📝 BM25 full-text search combined via Reciprocal Rank Fusion
• 🧠 Re-ranking: RRF × titleboost × recencyfactor
• 📂 Full folder hierarchy — filter by any path segment
• 🕐 Auto re-index: every search runs ~1ms change detection and, if notes changed, kicks ONE background index job (single-flight) — search itself never blocks on indexing
• ✂️ 1500-char chunking for long notes
• 🍎 Direct SQLite + protobuf decode — real note text, not garbled HTML
• 🏃‍♂️ On-device — embeddings, search, BM25, clustering, and bridges run locally with no API keys; only optional synthesis generation calls an LLM (local LM Studio/Ollama, or cloud OpenAI — your choice)

Local web app — not just search, but connections & synthesis

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.