Apple Notes

Apple Notes (Read Only)

Read notes via Notes.app AppleScript, and list their attachments by reading the Notes database. No creating, updating, or deleting notes.

Prerequisites

• Notes.app running and synced
• Automation permissions granted (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation → Terminal/Claude Code → Notes)
• If first access attempt times out, ask user to check for macOS permission dialog
• list-attachments.sh does not use AppleScript — it reads the Notes database directly, so it needs Full Disk Access for the terminal instead of Automation. It keeps working when the AppleScript bridge is wedged.

Reliability: always wrap osascript with timeout + retry

Notes.app's AppleScript bridge hangs intermittently. AppleScript-internal with timeout of N seconds does NOT kill a wedged osascript process — wrap with shell-level timeout and retry.

notes_query() {
  local script="$1" attempt
  for attempt in 1 2 3; do
    result=$(timeout 15 osascript -e "$script" 2>&1) && { echo "$result"; return 0; }
    sleep 2
  done
  echo "ERROR: Notes query failed after 3 attempts" >&2
  return 1
}

Reasonable defaults: 15s timeout, 3 retries, 2s sleep. Bump to 30s for full-text search across many notes. If all retries fail, report and move on.

Scripts

List folders

${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/list-folders.sh              # All folders across all accounts
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/list-folders.sh iCloud       # Only iCloud folders

List notes in a folder

${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/list-notes.sh                        # iCloud/Notes (default)
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/list-notes.sh "Shopping"             # iCloud/Shopping
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/list-notes.sh "Notes" "Gmail"        # Gmail/Notes

Output: note name | modification date (one per line)

Read a note

${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/read-note.sh "Shopping List"             # Search all accounts
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/read-note.sh "Meeting Notes" "iCloud"    # Specific account

Returns metadata header + HTML body.

List attachments on a note

${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/list-attachments.sh "Recipe Ideas"           # what is attached
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/list-attachments.sh "Recipe Ideas" --paths   # + on-disk file paths

Output: [note] type | title | identifying text, one per line.

Read this before concluding a note doesn't contain something. See below.

Search notes by name

${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/search-notes.sh "recipe"                 # Search all accounts
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/search-notes.sh "recipe" "iCloud"        # Specific account

Output: note name | account/folder | modification date (one per line)

Direct Commands

For quick one-off access without scripts:

# List all iCloud folders
osascript -e 'tell application "Notes" to get name of every folder of account "iCloud"'

# List all note names in a folder
osascript -e 'tell application "Notes" to get name of every note in folder "Notes" of account "iCloud"'

# Read a note body (returns HTML)
osascript -e 'tell application "Notes" to get body of note "Note Name"'

# Count all notes
osascript -e 'tell application "Notes" to count every note'

A note's body is not its contents

A note body does not include its attachments. PDFs, scans and images are separate rows in the Notes database, linked back to the note — so reading the body, by AppleScript or any other route, cannot see them. Every other script in this skill reads bodies. That means:

A body search returning nothing is evidence about the search, not about the note. If someone says a document is on a note and you can't find it, list the attachments before concluding it isn't there. Never substitute a similar file found somewhere else — a plausible substitute is worse than an empty result, because nothing downstream can tell it was the wrong one.

Two properties make this trap easy to fall into:

• Scanned documents are all titled literally PDF. Anything scanned in the app (com.apple.paper.doc.pdf) has the title PDF and no filename — measured at 17 of 17 in one real library. A note with four scanned recipes shows four identical rows. Filtering attachments by title finds nothing while looking thorough.
• Ordinary attachments do carry real titles (Trailer-Manual-EN.pdf), so partial success here is misleading: the file-picker attachments look fine and only the scanned ones are anonymous.

list-attachments.sh solves this by printing each attachment's OCR/summary text, so the distinguishing first line is usually a column lookup rather than a PDF extraction.

Which attachments carry that text is not uniform, and the two gaps cover for each other. Measured across one real library:

Notes recognises text in what it renders itself — scans and photos — and never in a PDF file you attached. So identify a scanned document by its OCR text and a file PDF by its name, and treat an empty text column as normal rather than as "nothing here". When it is empty and the name is unhelpful, fall back to extracting the file:

# 1. What is actually attached?
list-attachments.sh "Recipe Ideas"
#    -> paper.doc.pdf | PDF | Tomato Soup / A simple weeknight soup with…

# 2. Get the file, then read it properly.
list-attachments.sh "Recipe Ideas" --paths
pdftotext -layout "<the path>" -

Where attachments live on disk

Under ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes/Accounts/<account>/:

⚠️ The Media path is keyed by the linked media row's identifier, not the attachment's, and the real filename lives on that row too — the attachment row's own ZFILENAME is always null. Joining the wrong row silently yields no path.

A missing file is normal and does not mean the attachment is missing: iCloud downloads lazily, so the row can exist while the bytes have not arrived.

Notes

• Note bodies are returned as HTML — use for display or pipe through a converter for plain text
• Note names are case-sensitive in AppleScript queries
• Searching large numbers of notes can be slow — scope to a specific account when possible
• The whose name contains filter is case-insensitive
• Notes.app must be running — scripts will launch it if needed, but sync may take a moment