Blurt

just type. it remembers.

You just type. One endless stream, newest at the bottom, no folders, no tags, no "where did I put that." The twist: as you write, Blurt is quietly reading your own past notes back to itself, and the moment you start writing something you already wrote once, it surfaces the old one right above your cursor. Update it, or ignore it. Your call. It all runs on your machine. Nothing leaves.

It is semantic, not search-by-keyword. Type "where did I put the extra key" and it pulls up the note that says "spare key is under the blue flowerpot." You never typed the same words. It just gets it.

Why I built this

I am a scratchpad person. Always have been. Every note app I have ever used ends up the same way: one giant dump, everything thrown in as it happens. Meeting notes sitting next to a gate code sitting next to someone's phone number sitting next to a half-finished thought I had at 2am. No folders, no tags, no going back to organize anything. Just a single running stream of everything my brain decided was worth keeping.

The problem was never writing things down. That part I had figured out. The problem was always later. Scrambling through old entries trying to remember the exact word I used. Finding three versions of the same phone number and having no idea which one was current. Knowing I wrote something down somewhere and still spending ten minutes looking for it like an idiot.

I built Blurt because I got tired of that. It looks like the dumbest notepad you have ever seen, and that is entirely intentional. The intelligence is underneath, invisible until you need it. It runs on your machine, it costs nothing to operate, and it never asks you to change how you think.

If this is how your brain works too, it is yours. And if you build something cool on top of it, I would genuinely love to know.

What makes it not annoying

• The peek. It surfaces what you already wrote, as you write. Quiet until useful, then exactly useful.
• Capture is dumb fast. Type, hit Enter, saved. Saving never waits on anything. No spinners, no "syncing."
• It is yours, completely. Local SQLite plus local embeddings (Ollama). No cloud, no account, no API key, no telemetry. The internet is not invited.
• It is just text. Markdown in, Markdown out. A plain scratchpad.md stays in sync next to your data at all times.
• Keyboard first. A / menu for formatting (to-do, headings, code, all of it), lists that continue themselves, URLs that auto-link. No toolbars.
• Dates that just work. Write "meeting David tomorrow" or "deadline 14 Jun" and Blurt quietly tags the real date. Search "tomorrow" or "next week" to pull those notes up. A day/month vs month/day toggle handles "6/4" your way.
• Screenshots, pasted. Cmd/Ctrl+V a screenshot straight into the pad, or drop an image on the window. It lands in a blurt-files folder next to your notes, and the note keeps a plain Markdown link to it, so your scratchpad.md still opens fine in any editor. Type a caption while it is highlighted: that is what search has to find it by later.
• Projects without folders. Write #zovery in a note and that note is part of the project. Tags are just text (they travel with scratchpad.md like everything else), but they render clickable, typing # suggests the ones you already use, and /projects lists them all so one keystroke pulls a whole project together. When it's time to revise, "read together" stitches every note carrying the tag into one chronological document you can copy anywhere.
• Secrets, not plaintext. Stash a password, key, or PIN with Cmd/Ctrl+K. It is encrypted on your machine (the key lives in your OS keychain), shown as dots, copyable in a click, and kept out of both the search index and the plain scratchpad.md. A safer place to jot a credential, not a password manager.

What it needs

Blurt does its semantic search locally through Ollama, so the thinking happens on your machine, not on a server. In practice that means any reasonably modern computer: roughly 8GB of RAM or more, on an Apple Silicon or Intel Mac, Linux, or Windows. The embedding model (nomic-embed-text) is small, about 270MB, and light. No GPU required. A GPU only speeds up indexing a large backlog; for everyday typing you will not notice it working.

Built and tested on a Mac. Linux should be fine too. Windows is untested so far: the core is cross-platform and the window should open, but the desktop niceties (adding itself to your apps, the native menu) are Mac-only for now. If you want to try it on Windows, go for it, and a pull request that makes it feel native there is welcome.

Install

Blurt needs two free things on your machine first: Ollama (its local AI brain) and Python 3.11+.

1. Ollama. Download it from ollama.com/download (or brew install ollama if you use Homebrew), then open it once so it is running.

2. pipx, which runs Blurt in its own isolated space. If you do not already have it, install it once (then open a new terminal so it is on your PATH).

With Homebrew:

brew install pipx && pipx ensurepath

Without Homebrew:

python3 -m pip install --user pipx && python3 -m pipx ensurepath

3. Blurt, with pipx:

pipx install git+https://github.com/rbsriram/blurt
blurt

blurt opens it in its own desktop window, and on macOS it adds itself to your Applications, so after the first run you just double-click it like any app. The first run also pulls the embedding model (about 270MB, once). That is it.

Other ways to install:

pip install --user git+https://github.com/rbsriram/blurt && blurt   # plain pip

# or a one-line installer (it just downloads a release and writes a launcher,
# no build step; read it first, that is why it is short):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rbsriram/blurt/main/install.sh | bash

# or from a clone:
git clone https://github.com/rbsriram/blurt && cd blurt && ./setup.sh

Your notes live in ~/.local/share/blurt/ (a SQLite file, a plain scratchpad.md, and a blurt-files/ folder for any images you paste). Press ? in the app for the keys.

The keys (short version)

Key	Does
Enter	save the note
Shift+Enter	new line (and continues a list)
/	formatting menu, at the start of a line
Cmd/Ctrl+K	store a secret (encrypted)
Cmd/Ctrl+V	paste a screenshot (or drop one on the window)
#tag	mark a project; click a tag (or /projects) to see its notes
Up	peek at matching notes, then edit one in place
Cmd/Ctrl+F	search
Cmd/Ctrl+Z	undo the last thing
Esc	back to typing (closes whatever is open)
?	the full cheatsheet

Delete a note the text-pad way: open it, clear it, press Enter.

Under the hood (for the curious)

SQLite holds the notes and their embeddings. A background worker embeds new notes without ever slowing down your typing. Search is hybrid: exact text matches the instant you save, semantic catches up a beat later. The vector index only ever holds your live notes, so deleting one removes it from search for free. The server binds to localhost, and that is the security model: it is on your computer, and it stays there. The full threat model, including one destructive test-only endpoint that stays disabled unless you opt in, is written up in docs/SECURITY.md.

Want the full map? See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md. Want every place the plan and the build disagreed, and why? See docs/DECISIONS.md. It is an honest log.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. See .github/CONTRIBUTING.md to get set up. The rule of thumb: capture stays instant, the UI stays quiet, and nothing phones home.

Built by

Sriram (@rbsriram) and Claude Code. Sriram had the idea and made every call. Claude did a lot of the typing. Good team.

MIT licensed. Take it, fork it, make it weirder.