Captain's Log

Firstly I wanted to put a huge thanks and welcome to @Pan Kacper, Antinote's new co-developer, for all his contributions to this update. I gave him a list of things I've been stuck on for months, and he fixed them all. He is a genius. I think he's also got some vimprovements in mind for the future.

Oh - and I've set an ambitious goal for an iOS compaion by the end of the year. It will not be exactly the same as macOS - join us on Discord to help us define the direction.

This update ended up being far too big, so instead of the usual Feature / Improvement / Bug, I've broken it down to major use cases so you can find the updates that are relevant to you.

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For everyone

Full-screen Timer alerts + named timers

When your timer goes off, you now have the option to see a full-screen alert. For pomodoro timers, a full-screen alert will show up during break times, with an option to skip, and will keep track of your non-skip streaks.

You can also name timers now with: timer 5: Laundry

There is also an option to show the timer in the menu bar:

Simple markdown

You can now create headers, comments, bold, italics, and use backticks in notes. This is particularly useful in Lists to differentiate parts of a list:

Big performance improvements

Thanks to @Pan Kacper, there have been huge (50%+!!) performance updates, particularly for very long regular (non list/math) notes. Don't write really long notes in Antinote. But if you have to do a big find and replace, or want to hold on to a large code snippet, you can do that now!

Also - the dot background was creating a lot of lag and @Pan Kacper fixed that too. Smooth as butter now.

Auto-archive notes

Antinote will now backup the entire database of notes every 3 hours, for the last 36 hours (change in settings). This means that in the event of any major crash, you can simply rename a backup and it'll restore all your notes.

• Go to Settings > Notes to adjust frequency and quantity, as well as the folder location of the backups.

Usage tracking off for everyone

After 3 months, I haven't looked at the usage data once, so it has been turned off for everyone. Feature prioritization will be driven by the community and my feelngs.

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For the visual lovers

Theme Maker

https://antinote.io/theme-maker

Community-created themes: https://github.com/johnsonfung/antinote-extensions/tree/main/themes-community

Don't know how to use GitHub? Community themes can also be uploaded/downloaded from our Discord.

You can now create and import community themes into Antinote.

• Create a theme and download the JSON file.
• Settings > Visuals and scroll down to "Custom Themes" to open your folder.
• Put your JSON file in that folder, click 'Reload Custom Themes' and you'll be able to select your theme.

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For math people

Skip lines from being calculated with comments

Start a line with // (or press ⌘/ on an existing line) to turn that line into a comment. Commented lines will not be added to sums, averages, counts or be calculated in math notes.

Updated supported currency list

Now includes 50+ more currencies like SOL, MYR, NIS, etc.

Little things

• Clicking any answer will copy the answer to clipboard
• Any math statement with a currency sign will lead to a currency sign in the answer
• You can now do percentage calculations like:
  • 100 + 15% = 115
  • 25% of 1000 = 250
• Put two currencies to get the rate:
  • USD to CAD = 1.39 CAD

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For productivity wonks

Find and Replace

You can now do find and replace via ⌘+Shift+F:

• In the find field:
  • Enter - next result.
  • Shift+Enter - previous result.
  • Tab - open replace shelf (tab again to go to replace field)
• In the replace field:
  • Enter - replace
  • Shift+Enter - replace all
• You can do Regex replacements

Little things

• ⌘C will copy the whole note if nothing is selected.
• ⌘C will copy the contents within backticks if nothing is selected.
• ⌘/ will toggle commenting on lines
• Tab and shift-tab will indent lines
• Settings > Text Editing > Enable MacOS Text Replacements

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For the nerds

Code blocks and keyword

• Keyword: You can now use the keyword code: py followed by your language, and Antinote will do syntax highlighting in that note.
• Code Block: You can also use triple backticks ```py to open a code block with specific syntax highlighting
• With nothing selected, if your cursor is inside a code block, ⌘C will copy the code block contents.
• Inside code blocks and a "code" note, the following is disabled: indent stripping, all hyperlink features.
• In Settings > Misc:
  • Choose your syntax highlighting theme
  • Choose the default language if none is supplied
• Antinote leverages the Highlightr library.

Homebrew

https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/antinote

Thank you to Nick from popclip.app for adding it so quickly!

Custom Export via URL Schemes

Settings > Export now has a custom export to put any kind of URL Scheme you want. For example:

• Append to existing Obsidian note: obsidian://new?vault=my%20vault&name={TITLE}&append={CONTENT}
• Notebooks: notebooks://addnote/{CONTENT}&title={TITLE}
• Any Apple Shortcut: shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=sendToChatGPT&input=text&text={CONTENT} shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=createEvent&input=text&text={CONTENT}&date={TITLE}

antinote:// URL Schemes

You can now programmatically get Anitnote to:

• Create a new note (with content)
• Append to current note
• Overwrite the current note
• Search for a note (will return UUID)
• Promote a note to top (via UUID)
• Toggle hotkey
• Toggle pin
• Reload from SQLite.db (in the case where you are making direct edits to the SQLite.db)

See docs in the User Manual

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Upcoming

• JS Extensions so you can trigger text transformations to your liking
• Optional iCloud Sync
• End of 2025 - iOS

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Ideas being tinkered with

• Motions
• Image attachements

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Other scratchpad apps you should check out:

• Scrap Note - a free/open source scrapnotes app that leverages SoulverCore to do calculations.