I use Obsidian every day, intensively. It’s my external brain, my place to note everything, organise everything. But I eventually ran into a dumb problem: when an idea pops up or a task surfaces while I’m working or in the middle of a conversation, by the time I’ve opened Obsidian, navigated to the right note and started typing, the momentum is gone. Sometimes the idea too. So I built a small tool to fix that.

The problem: the friction of quick capture

As a heavy Obsidian user, my vault is structured, organised, alive. And that’s precisely what makes quick capture complicated. To jot something down fast, I need to: switch to Obsidian, wait for it to come to the foreground, find the right note or create one, then type. That’s four or five actions for something that should take one.

When I’m coding, reading an article, or in the middle of a conversation, I don’t want to break that flow. I just want to note something — and immediately get back to what I was doing. None of the existing tools answered that need in such a direct and local way. So I built it myself.

What the app actually does

The idea is simple: an icon in the macOS menu bar, always there, never intrusive. One click, and I have access to two essential actions — create a quick note or add a task with an optional due date. Everything lands directly in my Obsidian daily note, in YYYY-MM-DD - Note.md format, without me ever having to open Obsidian.

The menu also shows today’s tasks and overdue ones, giving me an immediate overview of what’s on my plate without leaving my work context. I can even complete a task directly from the menu. For recurring tasks, the app automatically handles the next occurrence as soon as I check one off — a small detail that saves a lot of time on routines.

What matters just as much to me is that the tool adapts to any vault structure. It imposes nothing. In settings, I simply configure the Obsidian vault I want to use and the target folder where my quick notes will be created. Whether my vault is organised by projects, by dates, or in a completely unconventional way, it just works.

The generated tasks are also compatible with the Tasks and Dataview plugins. In practice, that means everything I capture from the menu bar integrates naturally into my existing dashboards and aggregated views — no friction, no manual formatting.

How it came to be: unapologetic vibe coding

I won’t kid myself: this project was born out of a personal need, coded on instinct, in vibe coding mode. No detailed spec, no ambitious roadmap — just the desire to fix something that was annoying me, with the tools I had at hand.

The app is written in Swift with AppKit, making it a true native macOS app — lightweight and fast. All data stays local, directly in my Obsidian vault — no third-party service, no cloud sync, nothing leaving my machine. That’s deliberate: I wanted something simple, reliable, and that stays under my control.

It’s not on the App Store. I haven’t gone through the process, and it’s not on the agenda. It’s a personal tool first and foremost — humble, utilitarian, doing exactly what I need, nothing more.

Installing it in 30 seconds

Installation is intentionally straightforward. The fastest way is via the automatic install script:

bash <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blamouche/obsidian-quick-note-task/main/scripts/install_latest.sh)

Otherwise, the DMG is available directly on the GitHub Releases page. Download it, drag the app to /Applications, and since it’s not signed through the App Store, run this command once to lift the macOS quarantine:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/ObsidianQuickNoteTask.app"

Then open the app, go to settings, point it to your Obsidian vault and target folder — and that’s it. The icon appears in the menu bar, ready to go.

This project was never meant to become a product. It’s a tool I built for myself, that answers a specific need, and runs quietly in the background without me having to think about it. If you use Obsidian on a Mac and recognise yourself in this friction problem, it’s there, available on GitHub, free to use or draw inspiration from.