I take notes all day: a line jotted down in the middle of a conversation, an idea that comes to me on a walk, a note made while I'm cooking about what to buy next time.
My favorites were scattered, too. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook each keep their saved lists inside their own app. Audio I want to hear again sits in Audible, SoundCloud, or Mixcloud, and the rest waits in browser tabs. When I needed something later, I often couldn't find it. Full-text search alone wasn't enough.
What I wanted was one place for all of it, where it's easy to save things and quick to find them later. I think of everyday notes as seeds of ideas, which is where the name BijaVault comes from. I built it to solve my own frustration, and I hope it helps anyone who feels the same way.
BijaVault focuses on two things: taking notes quickly and finding the note you're looking for. To protect that focus, I left some features out on purpose.
One is importing files and documents. Supporting PDFs and other files would mean choosing, every time you save, what goes in and in what format. To keep that decision and those extra steps out of a notes app, BijaVault handles only Markdown notes and images. It will not support files in the future either. I care about keeping it simple and light, even as your notes pile up.
I also built a bulk import from Apple Notes, then dropped it. Importing more than 11 notes required changing an iPhone setting, and asking people to go through setup steps before they even start doesn't fit this app. Instead, you send the notes you want to keep one at a time using the Share button.
AI doesn't rewrite your text, either. It only adds a type, a title, and tags at the top of a note, and never touches what you wrote.
Building the app taught me that full-text search isn't enough. When I need a note, I often don't remember the exact words I wrote. The types and tags added by AI, along with summaries of shared pages, give each note more ways to be found.
A keyword search on its own brings up every similar note at once. Filtering by type and tags first, then searching the text, gets you to the one you want.
Saving has to happen where you are, or it doesn't happen at all. You can send a link or some text using the Share button, along with a line of your own, in just a few seconds from the app you're already in.
Notes are saved as plain Markdown files on your device. That keeps them out of any proprietary format, so even if you stop using the app, you can still read your notes in the Files app.
The search index lives on your device, too. A full-text index (FTS5) in SQLite means search never waits for the network. Even in Japanese, which has no spaces between words, it matches words as short as two characters.
The editor uses Milkdown, so you get what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing while the note stays a Markdown file.
AI organization runs only after you sign in and agree to it. Your note text passes through the server to be organized, but it is not stored there and is not used to train AI. If you don't sign in, your note text is not sent for AI processing.
I'll keep reading what users have to say and looking for ways to bring their requests to life where I can, while keeping BijaVault a simple Markdown notes app.