Notes

Orchard gives your AI client read/write access to Apple Notes, including fast local search and image handling, so capturing and finding notes doesn’t mean switching to the Notes app. Notes is a Pro feature.

What you can do

“Create a note titled ‘Trip Packing List’ with a checklist of items.”
“Search my notes for anything mentioning ‘Q3 roadmap’.”
“Get the full content of my ‘Weekly Standup’ note.”
“Update my ‘Grocery List’ note to add milk and eggs.”
“Open my ‘Tax Documents 2025’ note in the Notes app, I need to add a photo.”

Available tools

Tool	Description
`notes_create`	Create a note from HTML content, with an optional title.
`notes_update`	Replace a note’s content. Fails if the note has attachments.
`notes_search`	Search notes by title or content, or list all notes.
`notes_get_content`	Get a note’s content (HTML or plain text) plus attachment metadata.
`notes_open`	Open a note in the Notes app for manual editing.

Note content is HTML, not Markdown: wrap the title in <h1>, use <p> for paragraphs, <br/> for line breaks, and <a href="url">text</a> for links. For example:

<h1>Trip Packing List</h1><br/><p>Passport</p><br/><p>Chargers</p>

No attachment support

notes_create and notes_update cannot add file attachments (PDFs, images, videos); add those manually in the Notes app instead. Inline images embedded in the note’s HTML are the exception: they read back and write correctly, as long as they stay a reasonable size (see below).

Notes with attachments refuse updates

notes_update checks whether the target note has attachments before writing. If it does, the update is rejected with an error rather than silently deleting the attachments. Use notes_open to open the note in the Notes app and edit it by hand instead.

Required permissions

Notes needs two permissions:

Full Disk Access — for fast note search.
Automation (control of the Notes app) — for creating, updating, opening notes, and as a backup for search.

If notes_search fails, the error message tells you to check both permissions in System Settings > Privacy & Security.

Orchard's Full Disk Access guide window with step-by-step instructions

CLI usage

The orchard notes command exposes five subcommands: search, create, update, get, open.

orchard notes create --content "<h1>Trip Packing List</h1><br/><p>Passport</p>"

orchard notes search --query "roadmap" --limit 10

orchard notes get --note-id "x-coredata://.../ICNote/p123" --format plain

orchard notes update --note-id "x-coredata://.../ICNote/p123" --content "<h1>Updated</h1><br/><p>New content</p>"

orchard notes open --note-id "x-coredata://.../ICNote/p123"

Every subcommand accepts --json for machine-readable output. Run orchard notes <subcommand> --help for the full flag list, or orchard help notes <subcommand> for the same information. See the CLI Reference.

Tips & limitations

orchard notes create --folder "Work" puts the new note straight into that folder. The folder must already exist in Notes; otherwise the command errors out instead of creating a stray note, so create it first.
Keep embedded images to a reasonable size, since a very large embedded image may not embed reliably.
If you don’t know a note’s ID, call notes_search first: every result includes an id field you pass as note_id to update, get, and open.