A read-only tool for searching and reading Apple Notes, including documents, PDFs, scans, images, and other note attachments. It cannot create, edit, or delete notes.

Use it to search notes, read their contents, and locate attached files when Notes.app is running and the required macOS permissions are available.

It helps find information stored in Notes without changing the notes themselves. It also includes retry handling for unreliable Notes access.

apple-notes — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by eins78: A read-only tool for searching and reading Apple Notes…

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/eins78/agent-skills/apple-notes

Any agent

npx skills add eins78/agent-skills --skill apple-notes

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/eins78/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install eins78-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 15 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/eins78/agent-skills/apple-notes.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/eins78/agent-skills/apple-notes)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/eins78/agent-skills/apple-notes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/eins78/agent-skills/apple-notes.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,785 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00041	$0.01785
Opus 5	$0.00020	$0.00892
Sonnet 5	$0.00008	$0.00357
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00178

Measured 4d ago against content hash 09316d092625, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apple-notes scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 5 executable files (scripts/list-attachments.sh, scripts/list-folders.sh, scripts/list-notes.sh, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/apple-notes/SKILL.md · 185 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 185 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

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

Read the full file on GitHub · 185 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

4d ago First seen · 185 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 09316d092625

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apple-notes is a skill published in the GitHub repository eins78/agent-skills (2 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 1,785 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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