Notesy

Your Obsidian vault, on your wrist. Free and MIT open source.

Install · User guide · Troubleshooting · Privacy · Release preparation

Notesy 1.4.8 is released alongside Organik Apps Pebble Connector. Install from the Pebble store or download the 1.4.8 public beta. See release status for validation details.

Browse an Obsidian vault, read notes and capture dictation on Pebble Time and Time 2. Version 1.4.8 · public beta. Choose the vault in Organik Apps Pebble Connector. No Obsidian plugin or dedicated notes folder is required. Ordinary Markdown notes created in Obsidian appear alongside watch-created notes. No personal vault, account, network address or credential is embedded in the shared app.

PDF and image previews

Open and pin PDFs from the vault browser, or scroll through numbered pages embedded in notes. Obsidian #page=3 embeds show that page. Choose Natural, High contrast or Original under phone settings → Themes → Photos and drawings. PDF and Excalidraw previews use the clean-line treatment. Photos, drawings and PDF pages fill the reader width while preserving proportions; portrait previews scroll vertically. Whole-page PDF previews are read-only and have no zoom; fine print may be too small. Limits: 20 MB and 1,000 pages per PDF.

Watch controls

Gesture	Main / folder view	Open note
Up / Down press	Move through entries	Scroll text
Select press	Open folder or note; select New note for Quick Dictate / Stitch	Actions menu
Up long press	Pin / unpin selected item	Pin / unpin note
Select long press	Actions menu	Quick Dictate (append)
Down long press	Quick Dictate (new note)	No action
Back press	Previous location; exit at root	Return to browser
Back double press	Actions menu	Actions menu
Back long press	Exit app (watch OS)	Exit app (watch OS)

Single presses on Up and Down always navigate lists or scroll notes, even with older saved shortcuts. Phone Settings → Button shortcuts lets users assign Select press and all three long presses separately for each view: normal navigation, Quick Dictate or Stitch for a new note or append, delete, pin/unpin, actions, no action, refresh or dictate to search. Double-pressing Back always opens Actions. There are no Back or Next/Previous page menu entries.

The main page shows pins first, then folders, then root notes. In 1.4.8, Actions → Sort notes and phone Vault settings offer name, modified date, created date or scoped tag browsing. Return to top is available in Actions and as a configurable shortcut. See browsing and sorting; install the matching Connector service before this watch build. Nested folders open with Select. Lists keep 15 entries on the watch; moving beyond either edge loads the adjacent batch automatically. Folder listings are stable while paging, even if files change in Obsidian. Use Refresh in Actions to see changes; listings expire after 30 minutes. Notes scroll normally and fetch more text at the edge of the loaded chunk.

Why two dictation options? Pebble limits each recording to 15 seconds, and Notesy cannot extend that system limit. Quick Dictate is for one short thought. Stitch is for longer notes: it joins multiple recordings of up to 15 seconds into the same note. Both work for new notes and appending. Stitch saves each accepted section before listening again; Back finishes, keeping earlier sections. Both modes also work for Append, and connection failures stop recording while retaining the pending section. See the dictation guide.

New notes save in the folder being viewed. When assigned in note view, it saves alongside the open note. Append targets the selected or open note. Delete note immediately moves that note into .trash inside its containing folder, without a second confirmation. Folders cannot be deleted from the watch. Finder’s Command-Shift-Period reveals .trash for recovery.

Pins are stored by the Mac connector per vault and survive restarts. A pinned root item appears only once. Nested pins open directly from the main page. A renamed or moved item needs to be pinned again at its new location; missing pins are hidden.

Dictate to search

Open Actions → Dictate to search, speak a short term, then select a result to read it. Search works across the vault, including folders you have not opened. Titles and folder names use accent-insensitive fuzzy matching; matching words in note text rank below title matches. Results show the containing folder and load more automatically as you scroll. Back returns to the previous browser location. Search again repeats dictation without saving a note. You can assign search to any short or long press in either view using phone Settings.

Search returns up to 100 ranked matches. Scans stop after 60,000 entries or roughly 7.5 seconds; limited scans are labeled Partial matches. Body search skips files above 1 MB. Search results remain stable for 30 minutes; Search again or Refresh performs a new scan. The Mac must be awake.

Hidden folders, tasks and pictures

Phone Settings → Hidden folders → Load folders shows a folder tree. Select any folders to hide, expand subfolders as needed, then Apply hidden folders. Hidden choices apply to browsing, pins and search, including descendants; reopen Notesy or refresh its list afterward. Files are not moved. Pictures in hidden attachment folders can still appear in visible notes.

Notesy 1.4.8 includes selectable note links and richer Markdown. See note links and Markdown for behavior and supported syntax. Requires Organik Apps Pebble Connector 0.8.1 or later.

Notes scroll as continuous documents, including paragraphs, pictures and drawings. Only linked notes and task checkboxes can be selected. Select a checkbox to check or uncheck it in Obsidian; only the marker changes. Reopen the note first if Obsidian edited it since loading. Keep Select as Normal navigation to activate tasks and links. Task changes require the Mac connection and report saved only after acknowledgement.

Images load automatically as they enter the viewport; scroll away and back to retry a failed preview. Local PNG, JPEG, GIF (first frame), WebP, HEIC, TIFF, BMP and SVG files are converted by macOS into Pebble's 64-color palette, up to 120 × 100 on Time or 176 × 150 on Time 2. Pictures are scaled to fit, so small text in large images may be difficult to read. Wikilinks, Markdown image links and short unique attachment names work. Remote web images and non-image embeds are not downloaded.

Native .excalidraw files and Obsidian drawings (including ordinary .md filenames marked with excalidraw-plugin in frontmatter and compressed JSON) render locally using Excalidraw's export library. Drawings and their embedded raster images stay on your Mac. Source drawings are never rewritten; use New note alongside a drawing for dictation.

Setup and upgrades

Download Organik Apps Pebble Connector. Keep an always-on Mac awake with the Connector running for reading and delivery.

Choose your vault in the Mac connector, start Notesy, start its private connection, and select Connect phone. Scan the one-time QR code. On the phone, copy the pairing details into Pebble → Notesy → Settings, test, and save. Install dist/Notesy-1.4.8.pbw on the watch. The connector requires macOS 14+ and bundles its runtime. Keep Tailscale connected on both devices.

For an existing Notesy installation, update both the connector and watch app, then reopen Notesy. The phone learns vault browsing support using its existing pairing. Old queued captures retain their original dedicated folder through the legacy API; existing files are not moved. New captures record their folder and vault when dictated, so navigating elsewhere cannot redirect pending text. A watch draft remains until the phone stores it; the phone retains up to 20 pending captures across restarts. Only a confirmed Mac receipt produces Saved to vault. Phone Settings exposes pending text for recovery after an intentional destination change.

Appearance and filenames

Appearance uses Pome’s five presets and custom background, text and selection colors. Time 2 includes Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Montserrat and Poppins at 14, 18, 22, 26 and 30 pixels. Pebble Time uses Pome’s system-font options and supported sizes. The chosen font applies to browser entries, actions and reading; hints remain small. Selected long menu titles scroll after a brief pause, including search results and Actions. Phone Settings → Appearance → Long menu titles offers Off, Slow, Normal (default), Fast and Very fast; unselected and short titles stay still. See resources/fonts/licenses.

New files use the Mac’s local date, readable time and first sentence: 2026-09-09 - 5.32pm - This is the dictated note.md. The watch displays 5:32pm. Collisions get (2), (3), etc. Existing filenames are preserved. Delivery IDs stay in metadata and receipts; invisible append markers prevent duplicate retries.

Limits

• Dictation needs a microphone-equipped Pebble and the paired phone’s working transcription service. Captures are limited to 767 UTF-8 bytes; longer text is rejected, never truncated.
• The Mac must be awake for reading and delivery. Pending captures retry while the phone runs Notesy, including when reopened; this is not continuous iPhone background execution.
• Regular Markdown notes and drawing source files up to 1 MB are supported. Image attachments have a 20 MB file / 32 megapixel decode limit. Drawings allow up to 10,000 elements; very complex scenes may time out. Plugin-generated views and custom task status symbols are not interactive. Font glyph coverage varies.
• Hidden paths and symbolic links are excluded. Browsing does not recursively scan the vault: visited folders and search results are indexed. A folder can contain up to 60,000 visible entries; navigation history supports 24 opened folders. Both directions of paging use bounded watch memory.
• A missing append target leaves the captured text queued for recovery; it never creates a replacement note. Pins refer to file paths, not Obsidian rename tracking.

Development

npm ci --prefix renderer
node renderer/build.mjs
swiftc -gnone -framework AppKit -framework WebKit renderer/ImageHelper.swift -o renderer/dist/notesy-image-helper
npm test
npm run check
npm run package

Native C handles the watch UI, buttons and draft persistence. PebbleKit JS handles settings, transport and durable delivery. gateway/server.js hosts the loopback API; gateway/browser.js implements vault navigation, pins and explicit destinations while the v1 API remains compatible with old queued notes. The Mac build bundles the server modules, isolated image helper, Excalidraw renderer and fonts. Renderer versions and dependency overrides are pinned in renderer/package-lock.json. The renderer blocks HTTP(S) requests and only receives the selected local image or drawing.

Use build/StoneNotes.pbw for debugging and dist/Notesy-1.4.8.pbw for distribution; the latter omits SDK source maps. tests/watch-emulator.py exercises the compiled C app against the disposable vault in tests/emulator-fixture.js; it requires a fixture PBW with inert phone JS, never a physical watch. Phone transport and settings have separate automated tests. See PRIVACY.md for data handling.

To run the emulator checks with the Python environment that contains pebble_tool:

python3 scripts/emulator-fixture.py
pebble install --emulator emery build/Notesy-fixture.pbw
python tests/watch-emulator.py
WATCH_TEST_DICTATION_ONLY=1 python tests/watch-emulator.py
WATCH_TEST_STITCH_ONLY=1 python tests/watch-emulator.py
WATCH_TEST_STITCH_STOP_ONLY=1 python tests/watch-emulator.py
WATCH_TEST_SEARCH_ONLY=1 python tests/watch-emulator.py
WATCH_TEST_RICH_ONLY=1 python tests/watch-emulator.py

Use only the emulator fixture for those commands. The dictation check supplies simulated transcripts through the SDK voice protocol; it does not verify a real microphone or phone speech service. Normal watch installations must use dist/Notesy-1.4.8.pbw.

Notesy was previously named StoneNotes. Its watch UUID, saved settings, queues, pins and pairing remain compatible. Internal storage keys and the wire service ID keep their original names; existing notes are not renamed or rewritten.

Beta testing status

The release passes automated tests and Basalt/Emery builds. Native and earlier emulator checks cover scrolling, links, tasks, formatting, Double Back and menu startup. This exact 1.4.8 package was installed successfully. The earlier task-text fix received positive watch feedback; physical acceptance of full-width media remains pending. Broader PDF/image visual acceptance remains pending. Fresh Mac/phone setup and end-to-end hardware acceptance remain pending. See release status.

Thank you

Thank you to ChatGPT and Codex, especially ChatGPT 5.6 Sol and ChatGPT 6 Astra, and to the people at OpenAI who build these tools, for allowing a nerd with an idea to make cool stuff.

We also thank the developers and communities behind the apps, libraries, fonts and tools we build on. Full acknowledgments.

Consistent phone settings

The Pome-style tabbed settings and theme editor are described in Phone settings.