Why We Built Stik: The Case for Instant, Local-First Note Capture on Mac
Most note apps want to be your second brain. Stik just wants to catch the thought before it escapes. Here's why we built a free, open-source, capture-first note app for macOS with on-device AI.
The problem we kept running into
You know that moment. You're deep in a coding session, totally in the zone, and then a thought hits you: "remember to update the API rate limiting before the demo." Now you have two choices. You can lose the thought and hope it comes back later (it won't). Or you can break your flow, open a note app, wait for it to load, find the right notebook, and type it out.
Most people just lose the thought. And honestly, can you blame them? By the time you've opened Notion, navigated to the right page, and started typing, the idea is half-gone and your focus is completely shattered.
That's the exact problem Stik was built to solve. Not knowledge management. Not building a "second brain." Just the fastest possible path from thought to saved note.
Why existing tools didn't work for us
Before building Stik, we tried pretty much every note app on macOS. Each one got something right, but none nailed the quick capture experience:
Apple Quick Note is convenient and free, but it stores notes in a proprietary database. You can't grep your notes, version them with git, or open them in VS Code. And it requires iCloud, which means your notes live on Apple's servers.
SideNotes is beautifully designed, but costs $9.99 and stores notes in its own format. No markdown files, no portability. If the app ever goes away, so does your workflow.
Drafts is powerful and well-loved, but it's complex. At $4.99/month it's designed as a text processing hub with actions, automations, and integrations. That's overkill when all you need is to jot down a thought in two seconds.
Obsidian and Notion are fantastic knowledge bases, but opening them for a quick note feels like driving a semi-truck to the corner store. They're built for organizing and connecting ideas, not for capturing fleeting thoughts.
What we actually wanted
We sat down and listed exactly what our ideal capture tool would look like:
- A global keyboard shortcut that works from any application, instantly
- A lightweight floating window that appears like a post-it, not a full app taking over the screen
- Notes saved as plain markdown files, in a folder we control
- No account creation, no cloud dependency, no sync setup required
- AI-powered search that understands what your notes mean, not just the exact words you typed
- Native performance with zero perceptible delay
- Free and open source, because note capture shouldn't cost money
Nothing like this existed. So we built it.
Why local-first matters so much
Your thoughts are personal. Your quick notes (debugging hypotheses, meeting action items, half-formed ideas) don't belong on someone else's server.
With Stik, every note is a plain .md file saved to ~/Documents/Stik/ on your Mac. No proprietary format, no database, no vendor lock-in.
Want to back up your notes? They're already files. Use Time Machine, rsync, or git. Want to search them from the terminal? grep works perfectly. Want to edit them in VS Code or Neovim? They're right there. Want to sync across Macs? Just point the folder to iCloud Drive or Dropbox.
This is what local-first means: you own your data, completely, from day one. If Stik disappeared tomorrow, you'd still have every single note, perfectly readable, in a folder on your Mac.
On-device AI that never phones home
Stik's AI features (semantic search and smart folder suggestions) run entirely on your Mac using Apple's NaturalLanguage framework. Every note gets a 512-dimension embedding vector computed locally on your machine.
In practice, this means when you search for "authentication," Stik finds your note about "login security" even if the word "authentication" never appears anywhere in that note. It understands meaning, not just keywords.
No API keys. No tokens. No data sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, or anyone else. Your notes stay on your machine. The AI stays on your machine. That's the deal.
Why we chose Rust and Tauri
Speed matters for a capture app. If there's even a slight delay between pressing ⌘⇧S and seeing the floating note, the experience falls apart. Electron apps carry hundreds of megabytes of Chromium overhead and take noticeable time to spin up. That wasn't going to work.
Tauri paired with Rust gives us native macOS performance in a fraction of the binary size. Stik launches instantly because it's not loading a browser engine. It uses minimal memory because Rust doesn't have garbage collection overhead. It's the right tool for an app that needs to appear and disappear in milliseconds.
Give it a try
Stik is free and open source under the MIT license.
Download Stik for Mac from GitHub, or browse the source code if you want to see how it works under the hood.
Got ideas, found a bug, or just want to say hi? Open an issue on GitHub or come hang out in the Stik Discord community. We'd love to hear from you.