Your markdown vault, one keystroke away.
⌃⌘⇧K opens your notes over whatever app you are in
A complete markdown editor,
available from every application.
TypeFire Notes provides the full feature set of a dedicated markdown application, operating directly on the vault you already own. It adds a capability no markdown application has: three system-wide shortcuts that make the same library searchable, capturable and insertable from inside Mail, Slack, Xcode or Figma.
In the application
- A live markdown editor
- Wikilinks and backlinks
- Daily notes
- Nested tags and folders
- Outline, focus mode, find in note
- AI on a note
- Images, including Obsidian embeds
- Version historyPro
Everywhere else
- ⌃⌘⇧K
Search the vault from any application
- ⌃⌘⇧N
Capture a note without opening TypeFire
- ⌃⌘⇧D
Open today's daily note directly
Enter inserts the note into the document in front of you. Escape dismisses the overlay and restores the cursor to its original position.
Live markdown, lossless on save.
Formatting renders as you type, in the manner of Obsidian's live preview. There is no view and edit mode to switch between, and no point at which the rendered document and the file on disk diverge.
Inline rendering, with no re-serialisation
Headings, bold, lists, links and images render in place as you type, while the buffer holds raw markdown throughout. Editors that render as you type commonly rewrite the file in their own dialect on save: bullet characters normalise, underscores become asterisks, and callouts, embeds and footnotes are discarded because the document model cannot represent them. TypeFire performs no such round trip.
Task lists, highlights and tables
Typing a bracket pair produces a checkbox you click, and ticking it strikes the line through. Text wrapped in double equals signs highlights. Both use Obsidian's own syntax deliberately, so a list or a highlight written here reads the same way when the vault is opened elsewhere. Markdown tables insert pre-aligned and set their rows in a tabular font so columns line up as you type.
Outline, focus mode and in-note search
Navigate a long note by heading, write against a cleared screen with Escape to return, and search within the open note. Word and character counts sit in the status bar alongside the cursor position.
AI with explicit output placement
Summarise, outline, continue, rewrite or extract tasks, applied to a selection or the whole note. The result is placed where you specify: at the top, at the bottom, into a new note, or over the existing text. A dedicated undo reverts it.
Version history, and sync that keeps up
Every save writes a snapshot, and restoring an earlier version commits the current text to history first, so the restore is itself reversible. Snapshots are stored outside the vault. Sync pushes a note the moment you write it and picks up a change from your other Mac as it arrives, rather than waiting for the next launch, with a Sync now button and a last-synced line when you want to watch it work. Both are Pro.
Engineered for a vault another app already owns.
Running alongside Obsidian is a claim most applications in this category make. These are the four mechanisms that implement it, each built on the assumption that the target folder is a working library rather than a test directory.
External edit detection
When another application writes to a file after you opened it, TypeFire surfaces the conflict and asks whether to keep your version or load the one on disk. Neither side is overwritten silently.
Daily-note format detection
During setup TypeFire locates your existing daily notes folder and the date format in use, then adopts both. No convention is imposed and no parallel journal is created alongside the one you already keep.
Link integrity across renames
Renaming a note retargets every reference to it across the vault and preserves the original link syntax. Obsidian's ![[embed]] form for images is parsed and rendered rather than stripped.
Enforced vault boundaries
A folder overlapping your snippet vault is rejected with the reason given. Files TypeFire previously wrote as snippets are identified and left as snippets. Deletions move to the Trash and remain recoverable.
Verified against an adversarial vault
The test vault contained CRLF line endings, byte order marks, unicode and dotted filenames, plugin frontmatter and a 60,000 word note. It was listed and opened on a release build, with every file checksummed independently before and after the run.
- 10,012files
- in the test vault
- 0modified
- sha256 before and after
- 0added
- no dotfiles, no index folder
- 214ms
- to list 10,000 notes
The rest of the feature set.
Capture, organisation and the conversions between surfaces cover how a vault is used day to day. A graph view is deliberately absent: it presents well in a demonstration and sees little sustained use, so development went into backlinks instead.
Quick capture from any application
A thought is written to your vault without switching windows or opening TypeFire. Capture is the gap that leads people to run a second app alongside Obsidian and then maintain two inboxes that never reconcile.
Nested tags and folder collections
Tags let a note belong to several contexts without duplication, which a folder hierarchy cannot do. Your existing folder structure is preserved exactly as other applications see it.
Pinned, favourites, recent, untagged
Standing views in the sidebar, with sorting by modified date, creation date, title or length. Any folder exports to a .zip archive.
Text expansion inside the editor
Snippet abbreviations expand within a note exactly as they do in Mail or Slack. No other note application includes a text expander, and no other text expander includes notes.
zsigyour whole sign-off, inside a noteConversion between all three surfaces
A clipboard item becomes a note. A note becomes a snippet with an abbreviation, and the original note remains in place. The loop closes only because a single application holds notes, clips and snippets together.
Images and embeds
Standard markdown paths, vault-root paths and Obsidian's embed syntax all render. Added files are copied into the vault rather than referenced from their original location.
Notes, snippets and clips share one overlay.
A single overlay carries all three surfaces. Retrieve a note, a clipboard item from an hour ago, or a snippet, without leaving the document in front of you.
Notes
Your markdown vault, searchable from anywhere and pasted without switching windows.
Clips
Everything you copied, including the words inside screenshots. Any clip can become a snippet.
Snippets
Abbreviations that expand in any Mac app or website, including inside a note you are writing.
Where the files are
Notes are plain markdown in a directory you select. There is no proprietary store to export from and no server holding a copy.
- Your notes
- A .md file each, readable in any editor. Discontinuing TypeFire leaves the library intact.
- Synchronisation
- Between your own Macs over your own iCloud Drive, pushed the moment you write rather than at the next launch, so a change is usually on the other Mac seconds later. Nothing is stored server-side.
- Version snapshots
- In TypeFire's application support directory, never inside the folder you selected.
- AI
- Apple Intelligence, Ollama and LM Studio run on the machine. Claude, OpenAI and Gemini receive the note text directly, with no intermediary server.
Eighteen dollars. Once.
TypeFire Pro is a single payment that unlocks unlimited clips, Selection Prompts, Prompt Chains, notes sync and note version history. There is no subscription and no per-seat pricing.
Free tier, then one payment
No free tier at all
One time
No free tier
One time
Lifetime, or $3.99/mo
Subscription, forever
Notes is free, all of it. Pro adds notes sync, version history and the clipboard features for $18 once, which is less than four months of Obsidian Sync.
Questions about TypeFire Notes
Vault safety, what it costs, and how it sits alongside Obsidian.
Still not answered?
Yes. TypeFire Notes points at a folder of markdown files you already have, including a real Obsidian vault, and reads it in place.
There is no import step, no copy, and no conversion, so the same files stay open in Obsidian at the same time. A 10,012 file test vault containing CRLF line endings, byte order marks, unicode filenames, plugin frontmatter and a 60,000 word note was listed and opened with zero files modified, verified by sha256 checksums taken independently before and after.
Only the notes you actually edit, and only in the parts you changed.
TypeFire's editor keeps the raw markdown in the buffer rather than converting it to a rich text model, so saving a note does not rewrite the rest of the file. Callouts, embeds, footnotes, raw HTML and your own choice of bullet character and emphasis style all survive a round trip untouched.
Press Control Command Shift K anywhere on your Mac.
A Spotlight style overlay appears on top of whatever you are doing, searches every note in your vault, and pressing Enter puts that note's text into the document you were already typing in. Escape returns you to exactly where you were, with the cursor preserved.
Notes is free. That includes the vault, the global overlay, quick capture, daily notes, wikilinks, backlinks, the live markdown editor, and AI on your notes.
TypeFire Pro is a one time $18 purchase covering up to three Macs, and it adds notes sync, note version history, unlimited clipboard history, Selection Prompts and Prompt Chains.
No, and it is not meant to. TypeFire is a layer on the same files.
Obsidian keeps its plugin ecosystem, its community, its graph view and its mobile apps, and TypeFire gives the vault a global hotkey, instant capture and text expansion inside your notes. Most people run both against one folder.
A 10,000 note vault lists in 214 milliseconds on a release build, measured against a two second budget.
The list is windowed and search runs in two tiers, so typing stays responsive at that size.
Yes. Typing two opening square brackets autocompletes a link to another note, and every note shows the notes that link to it in a backlinks strip.
Renaming a note retargets every reference to it across the vault and preserves whichever link style the original author used. There is deliberately no graph view: the research is consistent that it demos well and goes unused, so backlinks were built instead.
Yes, and this is the thing no other note app does.
Type an abbreviation inside a note and it expands exactly as it would in Mail or Slack. It also runs the other way: a paragraph you keep rewriting in your notes can be promoted to a snippet in one click and is then available in every application on your Mac.
Open the vault you already have.
Select your markdown folder and TypeFire reads it in place. Free to download, and no file is rewritten unless you edit it.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌃⌘⇧V your clips⌃⌘⇧T your snippets