Apple Notes (Exporter) Considered Useless

I'm the first to shit on Apple and their latest forced update to OS 26.2 is shit... The fact that they silently dropped 18.7.3 was a douchebag move. I saw it one day, then the next day it was gone, and I assumed they yanked it to work on it further. Nope. Just removed it. And if you want the security updates it provides, you need to upgrade to their latest and “greatest”.

My choices were, update to iOS 26 or lag behind security updates, which isn't even a real option. So, I reluctantly upgraded and now all of my devices have perceptible amounts of lag when doing even the most trivial actions. Swipe between screens? Jitter. Bring up the search bar? Janky. Using an app? Flicker.

But, it being their ecosystem (read: walled garden), they can do whatever they want and so long as I choose to use their products, I don't have much of a say in the matter.

A modicum of credit

Credit where credit is due. This upgrade did bring -something- that I appreciated.

From my Year of Deshittification, I mentioned making an Apple Notes export-to-markdown tool. I hadn't come up with a name for it yet, but I was debating between NotesMD or Doctor Notes (hence the title image of this post). As of two weeks ago, I still had to finish 1 small feature and 2 export bugs.

I was planning to do that this month, however when I logged into Apple Notes after the forced update, I saw there was a new "Export to Markdown" feature.

That's right! 22 years into the existence of Markdown and 18 years into the existence of Apple Notes, Apple has finally given us the privilege of exporting notes into that format... This is a funny feature, because I wonder if Apple actually worked on it to take market share away from other Notes-like apps, whose claim to fame is not locking you into the ecosystem (i.e. nice export functionality). That's the equivalent of a "money-back guarantee" in software, showing enough confidence that you make it easy for people to leave but you know they probably won't.

Conspiracy theory time

Alright, so why would Apple want to do this now in 2026? Putting on my tinfoil hat... Apps on the App Store can make them money, sure, but keeping human-generated textual notes in their ecosystem means LLM training sets... ... ... Just sayin'...

My zincfoil hat alternative is that there are devs at Apple who use both Notes and Markdown, and were sick of not having a nice export function - so they just YOLO'd the feature under the guise of someone in the community wanting it.

Either way, sweet deal for me. This is one less piece of software I need to maintain, whose sole purpose is to work around a glaring limitation of other software. I hate that those types of tools ever needed to exist in the first place.

So long Doctor Notes, we hardly knew ya

While learning SQLx was fun, writing a Rust tool to access the Apple Notes DB and convert a proprietary protobuf'd format to an open format is ... a choice. It's something I really, REALLY shouldn't have to write and maintain in my life.

Maybe I'll open-source and archive what I made someday, but who knows.

30 minutes with AppleScript

Alright, whatever credit I gave to Apple, I want it back so I can throw it in the trash. They gave us Markdown export, but didn't make that available to their homegrown scripting tools:

Also! The Markdown export functionality doesn't retain your folder structure, so you just get a single folder of all of your notes by title. That's incredibly lame. Yet more lame, the Apple Notes capability to link notes using >> is stripped as well. They didn't even have the decency to convert those to [Title](URL) in the export, which is absurd.

I refuse to automate this

My original thought was to use AppleScript or JXA (Javascript for Automation) to periodically export new/updated notes, and run that using my backup tool. But 30 minutes with AppleScript and JXA was enough to make me want to throw my computer out of a window.

Plan B

From just two weeks ago:

Sadly, Apple Notes is one of the best Apple products I use

That statement is both: still true, and still sad.

In lieu of automation scripts, I'm going with Plan B - ditch Apple Notes as fast as I can and go back to simple Markdown notes on my computer. If it's good enough for this website, it's good enough for ... everything else.

What about search, one might ask? Apple Notes search blows. It's slow and misses notes all the time. That's been a constant since the start, but generally my folder structure and tags mitigated that problem.

The new plan is to go back to grep (ripgrep technically), just like I use for everything else I do on my computer.

Searching for "potato" in Apple Notes over 1200 notes takes roughly 2-3 seconds and returns 25 hits. Let's try ripgrep:

% time rg potato | wc -l
    29
    rg -uu potato  0.01s user 0.09s system 387% cpu 0.024 total
    wc -l  0.00s user 0.00s system 16% cpu 0.022 total

Yeah... That's more like it. 100x faster.

The other grief I have with Apple is opening files by name, so I don't need to use my mouse. There are some half-baked shortcuts that work unreliably - seriously, try using Apple Notes on iPads and Macs exclusively using the keyboard - and I could try using Spotlight with Apple Notes indexed, which takes seconds to get to a file.

Or, I could use fzf for fuzzy-finding files and be able to find and open files faster than I can type their names.

Plan B's looking pretty good...