A modern fork of Notational Velocity — the fast, keyboard-driven note-taking app for macOS that does searching and creating in a single field.
Notational Velocity's last release was in 2011. That build ships ppc, i386 and x86_64 code
and has no Apple Silicon slice, so on modern Macs it runs only under Rosetta 2 — and Rosetta 2 is
being withdrawn after macOS 26 Tahoe. Kinetic Notes is that application rebuilt to run natively,
with its dead and Intel-only dependencies replaced, and nothing removed that anyone was using.
Version: 1.7 — current stable release.
1.7 adds an Updates pane to Preferences, refreshes Dark Mode with a Color Scheme override, and fixes a bug where deleting a note you had searched for blanked the list. Like 1.6 it is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized, so it opens normally on first launch and updates itself.
If you're curious, check out the changelog to see what's changed in each version.
| macOS | 13.0 Ventura or later |
| Architectures | Universal — arm64 (Apple Silicon) and x86_64 (Intel), both native |
| Runtime dependencies | Sparkle 2.9.5 (MIT), bundled, for updates. Otherwise only system frameworks; no Homebrew |
| To build | Xcode 15 or later |
Rosetta 2 is not required or used.
Download the latest release and drag Kinetic Notes.app to your Applications folder. That is the whole procedure — releases are signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so the first launch is not blocked and no right-click → Open workaround is needed.
Kinetic Notes checks for a new version once a day and can install one itself. You can also ask at any time, with Kinetic Notes → Check for Updates…
A scheduled check does not interrupt you. When a new version turns up on its own, an Update Available button appears in the toolbar and waits there. Click it when you are ready — it opens the release notes and an Install button, and the update can be skipped or postponed from there. Asking for a check yourself still answers straight away, since at that point you are waiting for an answer.
Every download is verified against a signing key built into the application before it is unpacked; a download that fails that check is discarded rather than installed. Nothing is measured — no profile of your system is sent, and no record is kept of who was offered what. The update feed lives at updates.kineticnotes.org.
Updating from 1.5 or earlier is a manual step, once. Those versions contain no updater at all, so nothing in the update feed can reach them. 1.6 is the first version able to receive an update; it cannot be delivered as one. Download it by hand and updates take care of themselves afterwards.
Kinetic Notes is maintained by a volunteer, and donations help fund ongoing development.
If this app has been useful to you, please consider making a donation. Donations are completely optional and help keep the project alive — the app is free, GPL v3, and always will be.
Thank you for supporting the project. The same link lives in the app, under Help → Support Development.
Your existing notes are safe, and Notational Velocity keeps working. Kinetic Notes is deliberately a separate application, not an upgrade in place:
- It stores notes in
~/Library/Application Support/Kinetic Notes/, not in Notational Velocity'sNotational Datafolder. - It uses its own Keychain item for encrypted databases, so changing a passphrase here can never affect the one Notational Velocity depends on.
- It has its own bundle identifier and preferences.
You can keep both installed indefinitely.
On a genuine first launch, Kinetic Notes offers to import an existing Notational Velocity notes directory, encrypted ones included. It copies, never moves, and does not write to Notational Velocity's data at any point.
Requires Xcode 15 or later.
xcodebuild -project Notation.xcodeproj -target Notation -configuration Deployment buildThe application is written to build/Deployment/Kinetic Notes.app. Confirm it came out universal:
lipo -info "build/Deployment/Kinetic Notes.app/Contents/MacOS/Kinetic Notes"That should report x86_64 arm64. To confirm it has no external dependencies:
otool -L "build/Deployment/Kinetic Notes.app/Contents/MacOS/Kinetic Notes" | grep -v /System/LibraryOnly /usr/lib entries and @rpath/Sparkle.framework/… should remain — Sparkle is bundled inside
the application, at Contents/Frameworks.
A build made this way is ad-hoc signed and is not hardened, which is deliberate: hardened runtime enforces library validation, and two ad-hoc signatures do not count as the same team, so a hardened ad-hoc build cannot load its own copy of Sparkle. Hardening is applied when a release is signed with a real Developer ID instead. See Scripts/README.md for how releases are built.
The interface files are compiled Interface Builder 3 nibs. Do not let Xcode re-save
MainMenu.nib — a modern Interface Builder will upgrade the format and may switch NSTextView
to TextKit 2, which the editor (LinkingEditor.m, MultiplePageView.m) does not use. Four nibs
(ExporterManager, FindPanel, ImporterAccessory, SavedSearches) contain only compiled
output and cannot be edited at all.
Kinetic Notes' source code is free software under the GNU General Public License v3, the same licence as Notational Velocity. The full text is in COPYING.txt.
The application icon is not covered by that licence. Images/kinetic.icns and
Images/kinetic.iconset are © 2026 jptechco, all rights reserved. The code may be forked freely;
a fork must ship its own icon.
- Notational Velocity was created by Zachary Schneirov. Kinetic Notes exists only because of his work.
- Third-party components retained from the original are credited in Acknowledgments.txt, including PTHotKeys (Quentin D. Carnicelli), RBSplitView, and ODBEditor.
- The original Notational Velocity application icon by Taylor Carrigan is not used and is not part of this repository; its licence did not permit commercial use.
Kinetic Notes ships the interface translations contributed to Notational Velocity, and is grateful to the people who wrote them:
| Language | Translator |
|---|---|
| Spanish | Iago Ramos, OpenAI |
| French | David Bosman |
| Portuguese | Daniel R. Souza |
| German | Benedikt Hopmann |
| Chinese (Simplified) | Tunghsiao Liu |
| Italian | Paolo Tramannoni |
Interested in adding another translation? Post the details in issues