Better Notes

A personal knowledge management system designed for daily journaling, meeting notes, and capturing ideas. Built with MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration for Claude, full-text search, git sync, and git activity tracking across your projects.

Use it to:

• Capture daily notes, meeting summaries, and ideas through Claude conversations
• Track mentions of people (@hannah) and topics (#project) automatically
• Search across all your notes with natural language queries
• Monitor git activity across multiple repositories
• Generate daily summaries combining notes and code commits

Features

• MCP Integration: Use Claude to create, search, and manage notes naturally
• Full-Text Search: SQLite-powered search across all notes
• Git Auto-Sync: Automatic commits and pushes with smart debouncing
• Git Activity Tracking: Monitor commits across multiple repositories
• Daily Summaries: Generate summaries combining notes and git activity
• Entity Extraction: Automatically tracks @mentions for people
• Background Daemon: File watching and syncing runs in the background
• Human-Readable Storage: Markdown files organized by date

Installation

npm install -g @better-notes/cli

Quick Start

1. Initialize:

   better-notes init
   

2. Start the daemon (optional, for file watching and git sync):

   better-notes daemon start
   

3. Add to Claude Code (one-liner):

   claude mcp add-json better-notes '{"command":"npx","args":["@better-notes/cli","serve"]}' --scope user
   

   Or if globally installed:

   claude mcp add-json better-notes '{"command":"better-notes","args":["serve"]}' --scope user
   

   Note: The --scope user flag makes the MCP server available globally across all projects. Omit it for project-local configuration.

4. Or configure Claude Desktop manually:

   {
     "mcpServers": {
       "better-notes": {
         "command": "better-notes",
         "args": ["serve"]
       }
     }
   }
   

CLI Commands

Setup & Configuration

# Interactive setup
better-notes init

# Show configuration
better-notes config

Daemon Management

# Start background daemon
better-notes daemon start

# Stop daemon
better-notes daemon stop

# Check status
better-notes daemon status

# Run in foreground
better-notes daemon start --foreground

Note Management

# Create a note
better-notes note create --title "Meeting with team" --content "Discussed roadmap"

# View today's note
better-notes note today

# List recent notes
better-notes note recent --days 7

Search

# Full-text search
better-notes search "project timeline"

# Search with filters
better-notes search "@hannah past week"

Index Management

# Rebuild search index
better-notes index rebuild

# Show index stats
better-notes index stats

Git Sync

# Manually sync notes with git (pull, commit, push)
better-notes sync

Git Project Tracking

# List tracked git projects
better-notes projects --list

# Scan a directory and select repos to track
better-notes projects --add ~/Projects

# Interactively remove tracked projects
better-notes projects --remove

Daily Activity & Summaries

# View git commits across tracked projects for today
better-notes changes

# View git commits for a specific date
better-notes changes --date 2026-01-15

# Create a daily summary note (notes + git activity)
better-notes summarize

# Summarize a specific date
better-notes summarize --date 2026-01-15

Service Installation

# Show instructions for systemd/launchd
better-notes install-service

MCP Tools

When used with Claude, the following tools are available:

Tool	Description
create_note	Create a new note entry
append_note	Append to today's note
search_notes	Natural language search with filters
search_by_person	Find notes mentioning a person
search_by_topic	Full-text topic search
get_daily_summary	Get summary for a day
list_recent_notes	List notes from past N days
get_note	Get full note content
list_categories	List available categories
list_tags	List all tags
list_people	List mentioned people
search_by_category	Filter by category
search_by_tag	Filter by tag
get_git_changes	View git commits across tracked projects
summarize_day	Generate a daily summary with notes and git activity

File Structure

Notes are stored in markdown format:

~/notes/
├── 2026/
│   ├── 01/
│   │   ├── 2026-01-15.md
│   │   └── 2026-01-16.md
│   └── 02/
│       └── ...
├── .index/
│   ├── notes.db      # SQLite search index
│   ├── daemon.pid    # Daemon PID file
│   └── daemon.log    # Daemon log
└── .gitignore

Note Format

Notes use YAML frontmatter:

---
title: Notes for 2026-01-15
created: 2026-01-15T09:00:00.000Z
updated: 2026-01-15T14:30:00.000Z
tags:
  - project
  - meeting
mentions:
  - hannah
  - bob
---

## 09:00 - Morning standup

Discussed sprint progress with @hannah and @bob.

Tags: #meeting #standup

## 14:30 - Project review

Reviewed Q1 roadmap. Key decisions:
- Launch feature X by Feb
- Prioritize performance work

Tags: #project #planning

Configuration

Config file: ~/.better-notes.json

{
  "notesDirectory": "~/notes",
  "categories": ["work", "meeting", "personal", "idea", "task"],
  "defaultCategory": "personal",
  "gitSync": {
    "enabled": true,
    "debounceSeconds": 30,
    "autoCommit": true,
    "autoPush": true
  },
  "daemon": {
    "enabled": true,
    "watchFiles": true
  },
  "search": {
    "enableEntityExtraction": true,
    "maxResults": 20
  },
  "gitProjects": [
    { "name": "my-app", "path": "~/Projects/my-app" },
    { "name": "api-server", "path": "~/Projects/api-server" }
  ]
}

License

MIT