I know everybody has their own note-taking system and there are better ways to do this, but:

Whenever I need to make quick notes during a meeting, or paste some url / code / whatever to hold it, or paste formatted text to un-format it, I used to open TextEdit.

It's the equivalent of taking a scrap piece of paper and jotting something down.

These kinds of notes I don't want in any cloud, serious note-taking app or any code editor.

But the burden of having 1 extra click on open (new document), and deciding what to do with old notes when closing (delete? save?) was too much.

So I built my own notepad which behaves like a super simple textedit, but all notes are automatically saved to a predefined folder.

- Opens with a new note when launched, or re-opened.

- Notes can be auto-named by timestamp, numbered "Note N", custom prefix or by first line of text.

- Hideable sidebar shows all notes.

- Shortcuts can create, delete, switch between notes.

Bonus points for pointing claude code to that folder to organize or work with all notes.

Again: This is a custom app I made for myself, so probably it's not useful to anyone, but anyhow:

https://tomreinert.de/en/verygoodnotepad/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/very-good-notepad/id6758906859

PS: This was built with the new Claude Code integration in xcode 26.3, worked quite well.