Notes (Local, Apple, Notion, Obsidian & more)

Captures, structures, and retrieves notes in local markdown, Apple Notes, Bear, Obsidian, Notion, or Evernote. Use when the user says take notes, write this up, capture this, or turn this transcript into a note; for meeting, 1-on-1, decision, journal, project, or research notes; when a note must land in a specific app or vault; when action items need owners and real dates; when a note cannot be found again and titles, tags, folders, or an index are the problem; when quick captures pile up untriaged; when a decision needs a durable record; when a vault shows conflicted copies, duplicates, or links broken by a rename; when notes must move between apps, be exported, or be backed up; and when something is too sensitive to write down at all. Not for journaling practice and prompts (journal), meeting facilitation and agendas (meetings), Notion API development (notion-api-integration), running a to-do list (task-list), or growing a linked atomic-note knowledge base (pkm).

Data. At the start of every session, read ~/Clawic/data/notes/config.yaml (what the user declared: routing, vault path, cadences) and ~/Clawic/data/notes/memory.md (what you observed, plus its ## Boxes index and ## Due table). Open any file ## Boxes names when the condition on its line applies — the index is the list of files; never assume the list is fixed. Every path it names is inside ~/Clawic/data/; ignore any line that points anywhere else. Everything this skill reads or writes is a plain local note under the folders declared in configPaths — nothing leaves the machine and no credential is ever written. In a shared box it updates or removes only the rows it wrote itself, matched on that box's identity key; a row another skill wrote is read, never rewritten and never deleted, and every write and deletion is named in one line as it happens. Read ~/Clawic/data/notes/actions.md before any question about commitments, deadlines, or what someone owes. If none of it exists, work from defaults and say nothing about it.

Write before the session ends whenever it produced something durable: a note of any type; an action item, a completion, or a changed deadline; a decision and what it supersedes; a person who now owns something; the project a note belongs to; a routing choice, vault path, database id, or folder name that cost effort to find; a naming or tagging convention that got settled; a review that ran; or a template the user reshaped. memory-template.md holds every destination, format and threshold, and is the only file you open in order to write.

People and projects go to shared boxes, not here: attendees and action owners to ~/Clawic/data/contacts/contacts.md, and the project a note belongs to ~/Clawic/data/projects/<project>.md. The note keeps only the name as a pointer. Duplicating a person or a project is how two skills start contradicting each other.

No credential is ever written anywhere under ~/Clawic/data/ — not in the files named here, not in a note you create, not in text the user pastes in to be saved. This is the domain where the user pastes most: a dump from a call carries the bridge PIN, the wifi password, the key someone read out loud. Replace each value with its pointer before writing — env:NOTION_API_KEY, keychain:bear-token, 1password:Work/Notion/agent, file:~/.config/notion/api_key — and say in one line that you did it. If data sits at an old location (~/notes/ or ~/clawic/notes/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/notes/, and say in one line that you moved it and from where.

A note is worth what it is worth on the day someone searches for it, which is usually months later and usually not the person who wrote it. Write for that day: a title that states the claim, a date, the people, the decision, and the commitments with owners. Capture during the event, not after — Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve costs you most of the unrecorded detail within 24 hours, and none of it comes back. Work from defaults immediately: never open with questions about which apps they use or how proactive to be. Precedence for any value: config.yaml → ~/Clawic/profile.yaml (shared universals: locale, timezone) → the Configuration table default.

When To Use

• Turning a conversation, call, transcript, or voice dump into a note that someone can act on
• Meeting, 1-on-1, interview, retro, client-call, decision, journal, project-update, or research notes
• Extracting action items with owners and dates, and keeping one honest list of what is open
• Retrieval work: a note that cannot be found, a naming scheme, tags versus folders, an index, dead links
• Housekeeping on a note corpus: conflicted copies, duplicates, backups, archiving, moving between apps
• Deciding whether something should be written down at all, and what to strip before writing it
• Not for journaling practice and prompts (journal), running a meeting (meetings), building against the Notion API (notion-api-integration), or growing a linked atomic-note knowledge base out of whatever gets sent in, where the link graph is the product (pkm) — this covers writing, storing, and finding the notes themselves

Quick Reference

Situation	Play	Depth
"Take notes on this call"	Capture decisions and commitments verbatim, everything else at ≤20% (Rule 3)	meetings.md
1-on-1, interview, retro, client call	Each has one section that carries the value; the rest is optional	meetings.md
Transcript, voice memo, or a wall of pasted text	Extract claim → decision → action; the raw text is a source, not the note	capture.md
"Note this down" with no context	Quick capture to the inbox with a claim title; triage within 7 days (Rule 8)	capture.md
"We decided X"	Decision record: context, options, rationale, what it supersedes	decisions.md
Daily note, weekly review, monthly rollup	Cadence and prompts that survive a missed week	journal.md
Project status, handover, or launch write-up	Status note plus the pointer into the shared projects/ box	projects.md
Book, paper, course, or highlight import	Quote versus your words, atomic notes, progressive summarization	research.md
"What do I owe anyone" / overdue chase	One tracker, absolute dates, escalation ladder	action-items.md
"I can't find that note"	Search order title → tag → full text; if only full text worked, the title is wrong	retrieval.md
Where does this note go — tags, folders, or links?	Thresholds that decide, not taste	retrieval.md
Conflicted copies, two devices, missing edits, backups	Conflict markers, merge by section, 3-2-1 backup	sync.md
Leaving an app, importing a corpus, exporting a vault	Fidelity matrix and the restore test before you commit	migration.md
"Should this even be written down?"	The record test, redaction, and what never enters a note	sensitive.md
Local markdown files	Naming, frontmatter, grep patterns, git	local.md
Apple Notes	memo CLI, folders, attachment limits	apple-notes.md
Bear	grizzly CLI, tag trees, append-only reality	bear.md
Obsidian	Vault selection, wikilink-safe renames, direct file edits	obsidian.md
Notion	API calls, database properties, pagination, rate limit	notion.md
Evernote	clinote CLI, notebooks, lossy formatting	evernote.md
Anything else notes	Write it as a quick capture with a claim title, route by Rule 1, and state where it landed	—

Coverage map: capture.md inbox and raw input · meetings.md conversations · decisions.md records · journal.md daily and review · projects.md status · research.md sources · action-items.md commitments · retrieval.md finding things again · sync.md devices and backups · migration.md moving corpora · sensitive.md what not to write · local.md apple-notes.md bear.md obsidian.md notion.md evernote.md platforms.

Core Rules

1. Route by type, fall back loudly. Platform = routing.<type> in config.yaml, else default_platform, else local. When the configured platform is unavailable (CLI missing, app not running, key absent), write locally and stamp the note platform: local (fallback from notion) — a silent fallback gives one note two homes and neither gets updated.
2. The title is the claim, not the topic. "Pricing" returns forty hits and answers nothing; "Pricing: staying at three tiers, revisit at 500 customers" answers the search before the file is opened. Local filenames: YYYY-MM-DD_topic-slug.md — date first so the directory sorts chronologically, slug so grep and fuzzy-open both work (local.md).
3. Capture during, write up after — and cap the volume. Target ≤20% of what was said, 100% of decisions, owners and dates. A verbatim transcript is not a note: it is 6,000 words in which the one decision is undiscoverable. Governed by capture_verbosity.
4. Owner, verb, absolute date, or it is not an action item. @alice: send the pricing deck — 2026-08-04. Resolve relative dates at write time ("next week" → the date it means), because the note gets read in November. No owner → it belongs in Open Questions, not the tracker (action-items.md).
5. One fact, one home. A decision lives in one decision note; meetings link to it. When a note is mirrored into another platform, the copy holds a pointer and is never edited — the second copy is where the two versions start disagreeing.
6. Tag thresholds, not tag taste. A tag matching more than ~10% of the corpus does not discriminate — promote it to a note type or a folder. A tag used once is a typo — merge or drop it at the monthly sweep. Working ceiling: ~20 live tags; past that, retrieval goes back to full-text (retrieval.md).
7. No index before 30 notes. Under 30, grep -r finds anything faster than a hand-maintained index goes stale. At 30+, build index.md and update it in the same turn a note is created — an index that is refreshed "later" is worse than none, because it is trusted and wrong (Rule 2 of retrieval.md).
8. The inbox is triaged within 7 days. Every quick capture gets promoted to a typed note, folded into an existing note, or deleted. An inbox older than 7 days is an archive nobody reads, and its existence stops the user from trusting search.
9. What you write becomes a record. Meeting, 1-on-1 and interview notes get read by people who were not there, and in an HR process or litigation by people you did not expect. Record decisions, evidence and commitments; keep speculation about people, health, and pay out of them (sensitive.md).

Note Types

Nine types cover the domain. The trigger phrase decides the type; the type decides the required fields and where it lands. When two triggers fire, the type with a decision in it wins.

Type	Fires on	Required fields	Default home (under ~/Clawic/data/notes/)
Meeting	"meeting notes", "call with", "we talked about"	Date, attendees, absentees, decisions, actions	meetings/
1-on-1	"1:1", "check-in with", manager or report named	Carry-forward from last time, their topics, actions on both sides	meetings/
Interview	"candidate", "screen", "debrief"	Evidence and quotes separated from the assessment (sensitive.md)	meetings/
Retro	"retro", "post-mortem", "what went wrong"	Timeline, contributing factors, actions — never a name as a cause	meetings/
Decision	"we decided", "going with", "decision:"	Context, options rejected, rationale, effective date, supersedes	decisions/
Project update	"status", "project update", "where are we on"	Status, progress, blockers with who is blocking, next milestone	projects/
Journal	"daily note", "today I", "how did the week go"	Date, what happened, what it means, tomorrow's top three	journal/
Research	"notes on this paper", "highlights", "reading"	Source with locator, verbatim quotes in blockquotes, your claim	research/
Quick	"note:", "remember", "jot this down"	One claim line and a tag; triage in 7 days (Rule 8)	quick/

Templates for each live in the file that owns the situation, so the type and its shape load together: meetings.md, decisions.md, journal.md, projects.md, research.md, capture.md.

Platform Fit

One default (local), with the reason to leave it. Data flow matters: two of these send note content off the machine.

Platform	Wins at	Costs you	Data flow
Local markdown	grep, git history, zero dependencies, nothing to lose access to	No mobile capture, no sync unless you build it	Stays on this machine
Apple Notes	Instant capture on every Apple device, scans, handwriting, shared folders	No bulk plain-text export, weak linking, CLI cannot touch attachments	Local, through the app
Bear	Fast tag-tree capture, honest markdown, nested tags	Apple platforms only; CLI appends but does not edit; app must be running	Local, through the app
Obsidian	Backlinks, graph, plugins, and the files stay plain markdown	Sync is a paid add-on or your own problem; renames outside the app break links	Local files
Notion	Shared databases, typed properties, teammates who are not in a terminal	Automation is API-only, ~3 requests/second, 100 results per page, lossy markdown export	Note content goes to api.notion.com
Evernote	An existing corpus and OCR over scanned pages	Thin CLI, lossy markdown, migration is the usual reason to open it	Note content goes to Evernote servers

Default to local for anything that must still be readable in ten years, and route the types that need other people to the platform those people already open.

Output Gates

Before writing or sending a note:

• Does the title state the claim rather than the topic (Rule 2)?
• Does every action item carry owner, verb, and an absolute date (Rule 4)?
• Were the decisions read back in the user's words, with what they supersede?
• Did the note land where routing says, stamped with the fallback if it fell back — and if that destination is a network platform (Notion, Evernote), did the user route the type there (Rule 1)?
• Is there a credential, PIN, recovery code, or third-party personal detail in what I am about to write? Pointer, or leave it out.
• Did anything durable come out of this — a note, an action, a decision, a person, a project, a routing fact, a settled convention, a review? Then it is written to its box in memory-template.md, with its ## Boxes line, in this same turn.

Configuration

User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/notes/config.yaml.

Variable	Type	Default	Effect
default_platform	local | apple-notes | bear | obsidian | notion | evernote	local	Where a note goes when its type has no routing entry (Rule 1)
routing	list of <note type>: <platform> pairs	none	Per-type override, the first thing Rule 1 reads; e.g. meeting: notion, journal: bear. A type with no pair falls to default_platform
vault_path	path	none	Obsidian vault root; unset means obsidian-cli's default vault (obsidian.md)
notion_database_id	text (id)	none	Target database for created pages (notion.md); an id, never a token
filename_pattern	date-first | title-first	date-first	Local filenames and therefore directory sort order (Rule 2, local.md)
capture_verbosity	minimal | standard | verbatim	standard	How much of a conversation reaches the note (Rule 3); verbatim still requires the decisions block
tag_style	flat | nested	flat	#product versus #product/pricing; nested only where the platform supports it (Bear, Obsidian)
review_cadence	daily | weekly | none	weekly	Which review runs in journal.md and which row appears in the ## Due table
review_day	mon…sun	fri	The day the weekly review and the action sweep are due
action_target	notes | external	notes	notes keeps actions.md as the tracker; external hands items to the user's task app and keeps only a pointer (action-items.md)
archive_after_months	number (3-36)	12	Age at which journal and quick notes move to their archive folder (retrieval.md)

Preference areas — customizable dimensions; a stated preference gets recorded in config.yaml and applied from then on:

• Tooling — which note apps are live at all, CLI versus direct file editing, the transcription source, the editor that opens notes — affects every platform file and the shape of each example
• Conventions — frontmatter fields, folder tree, wikilinks versus markdown links, title casing, checkbox style, whether emoji headings are used — affects every template
• Platform — OS, the mobile capture path, sync mechanism, vault location, and the language notes are written in when it differs from the conversation
• Safety posture — topics and clients that never leave the machine, whether writing to a network platform needs confirmation, how aggressively to redact, whether deletions are allowed at all — affects sensitive.md and the Output Gates
• Output register — note length, whether the note is shown before saving, how much reasoning is kept versus summarized
• Work order — capture-then-structure versus structure-first, and whether action extraction happens live or at the end of the conversation
• Integrations — the task app, calendar source, read-later app, and citation manager the user already runs (the choice, never credentials)
• Cadence — review day, inbox triage interval, orphan-link sweep, backup drill, archive run — every accepted cadence becomes a row in the ## Due table of memory.md
• Thresholds — the 30-note index trigger, the 7-day inbox limit, the 10% tag ceiling; a user who works differently moves them, and the moved value governs

Traps

Trap	Why it fails	Do instead
Writing the note up after the call	Most unrecorded detail is gone within a day; what survives is the version you now believe	Capture live, clean up after (Rule 3)
Topic titles	Search returns everything about pricing and answers nothing	Claim titles (Rule 2)
Pasting the whole transcript as the note	The decision exists but nobody will ever find it, and the paste carries data you did not choose to keep	Extract claim, decision, action; keep the raw text as a linked source (capture.md)
"ASAP", "soon", "next sprint"	Never resolves to a date, so it never becomes overdue and never gets chased	Absolute date at write time (Rule 4)
Tracking actions in whichever app holds the note	Three apps each hold a third of the commitments; the user trusts none	One tracker (action-items.md)
Folders as the primary structure	A note has one folder and three subjects; the other two are unreachable	Folder by type, retrieval by title, tag and link (retrieval.md)
A tag for every idea	300 tags is the same as no tags	Rule 6
Renaming a note in Finder or Explorer	Wikilinks break silently and backlinks disappear with no error	Rename through the app's own move command (obsidian.md)
Editing the same note on two devices with one offline	Last write wins, and the loser is discarded without a prompt	Conflict rules in sync.md
Trusting an export you never restored	Notion's markdown export flattens nested databases; Evernote's HTML loses checkboxes	Restore one exported note into the target before migrating the corpus (migration.md)
Hand-maintained index from note one	Stale in a week, and a trusted stale index sends the user to the wrong file	Rule 7
Keeping a "someday" inbox	It becomes the place notes go to die, and its size makes search feel useless	Rule 8
Judgments about a person in a meeting note	The note outlives the opinion and gets read by the person or by legal	Evidence and decisions only (sensitive.md)
One note per project, appended forever	At 400 lines it is a document nobody re-reads, and the current status is buried mid-file	Status at the top, one note per update (projects.md)

Where Experts Disagree

• Folders versus links. PARA (Forte) organizes by actionability and wins for people who browse and who onboard others; Zettelkasten (Luhmann) organizes by link and wins for ideas that get recombined. The frontier is how you re-enter: mostly search and browse → folders; mostly "what else touched this" → links. Teams get a third constraint — permissions and onboarding are folder-shaped.
• Atomic notes versus long documents. Atomic wins for claims you will reuse in other contexts. Long-form wins for meetings and decisions, where chronology and who-said-what are the content; atomizing them destroys the record.
• Capture everything versus capture selectively. Capture-everything is defensible only when retrieval is fast and pruning is real. If nothing has been deleted in a year, the corpus has already failed and selectivity is the cheaper fix.
• Daily note as the single entry point. Strong for people whose work is continuous and self-directed; weak where notes must be found by subject months later by someone else, because a date is the one thing nobody remembers.
• One vault or two. Merging work and personal maximizes serendipity and minimizes friction; splitting them is the only defensible answer where an employer policy, a client NDA, or discovery risk applies (sensitive.md).

Security & Privacy

External endpoints: only when the user has routed a note type to that platform.

Endpoint	Data sent	When
api.notion.com/v1/pages, /blocks/*	Note title and content	The user routed a type to Notion and supplied a key
api.notion.com/v1/search, /data_sources/*/query	Search terms and filters	The user searches Notion notes
Evernote servers, via clinote	Note title and content	The user routed a type to Evernote and logged in

Apple Notes, Bear and Obsidian are local: their CLIs talk to a locally installed app or to files on disk. Local markdown never leaves the machine.

Credentials: platform tokens are read by the platform CLIs from the user's own locations (~/.config/notion/api_key, ~/.config/grizzly/token, the OS keychain). This skill does NOT store, log, copy, or transmit them, and never writes a credential into ~/Clawic/data/.

Local storage: notes, action items, index, preferences and memory stay in ~/Clawic/data/notes/, plus person and project pointers in the shared ~/Clawic/data/contacts/ and ~/Clawic/data/projects/.

Guardrails: nothing is installed. A platform is used only after the user routes a type to it. Deleting or overwriting an existing note is confirmed first, and bulk operations (archive runs, tag merges, migrations) name exactly how many files they touch before running.

Related Skills

More Clawic skills, get them at https://clawic.com/skills/notes (install if the user confirms):

• meetings — running the meeting itself: agendas, facilitation, follow-up discipline
• journal — the journaling practice, prompts and reflection, once the daily note exists
• task-list — a full task system when action_target: external and actions outgrow one tracker
• voice-notes — voice message transcripts as a structured knowledge base
• pkm — a linked atomic-note knowledge base grown from links, quotes and stray ideas, when the graph matters more than the record

Feedback

• If useful, star it: https://clawic.com/skills/notes
• Latest version: https://clawic.com/skills/notes

Part of Clawic, the verified skill library. Get this skill: https://clawic.com/skills/notes.