Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf. Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design.
Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games.
Note-taking apps have a habit of promising you organization, then handing the actual organizing back to you anyway. Obsidian gives you a blank vault and leaves every folder and link up to you. Notion's a bit different since it has a template for everything, but I've lost whole weekends tweaking those before writing a single line in them. Even Windows Notepad renders Markdown now, so there's no shortage of places to put notes.
Meanwhile, Claude Code, VS Code, and LM Studio are open on my computer almost every day. They weren't built as note-takers or readers, but each of them can read a folder of text files about as well as any note app. This got me wondering whether any of them could actually do a better job than a dedicated note-taking app. These are very different tools, so there isn't really a way to standardize testing them as note-takers, so I just tried bending each one into a note app in whatever way made sense for it.
Claude Code with an Obsidian Skill
One file of rules does most of the work
Claude Code is Anthropic's agent that works directly inside a folder on your PC. It's meant for code, but an Obsidian vault is really just a folder of plain text files, so it can read and write notes without any special setup. I added Obsidian's official skills pack which Obsidian CEO Steph Ango published so agents write notes the way Obsidian wants them, meaning wikilinks and properties instead of generic Markdown. After that, I had it write a short rules file in the vault so that anything I start with "note:" goes into today's daily note and gets filed and linked from there, and it isn't allowed to delete or move anything.
It actually looked through my folders before writing those rules, and matched the daily note format already in there rather than making up its own. From there on, all it takes is one line to capture a new note. I can give it any half-formed idea and it turns into a daily note that gets filed in seconds, and it will also link to other older notes wherever relevant. Linking is something I tend to skip in Obsidian because it can be so tedious, so having it happen fast as part of a quick note capture is ideal. And when I ask Claude to connect related notes, it will add links across them with a short reason for each, and also point out old links to notes that don't exist anymore.
It does tend to write a little more than you ask for. My one sentence came back with an explanation and suggestion I never made, so if that's not something you're very keen on, be sure to specify that in the .md file.
My local LLM with the filesystem MCP
Offline note-taking sounds perfect on paper
LM Studio can connect local models to MCP servers, and the filesystem server gives a model tools to read and edit files in folders you approve. I mostly run it with Qwen 3.5 9B at Q4_K_M on my RTX 3070, which only has 8GB of VRAM (the 4B variant is also one of my go-tos for quick note and document work). The appeal is pretty simple: your whole workflow remains local and you still get the AI reasoning layer on top.
Although you get a system prompt, there's no rules file to lean on here, so whatever I want to do for my notes has to be included in my prompts themselves. When I wanted to add a line under a new heading at the end of one of my notes, its first attempt was a guess of how the file ended and it got it wrong. But it re-read the file then fixed it - however, the same thing happened later when I tried linking two related files. Search is where it struggled the most. I asked for anything about onboarding and it only matched the file names instead of the contents, which was rather disappointing.
I've been using this filesystem MCP for a while and it's served me well up until now, and I think it might be because there's just too much content in my vault for it to shuffle through. It handles smaller directories fine, but just this one small demonstration used over 20k of my 30k context window. So it's going to come down to what you can actually run on your PC, which means it might not be suitable for large note stacks.
VS Code doubles as a notes app
It's an editor, after all
VS Code isn't primarily a writing tool, but it is a text editor, meaning it can be molded into a note-taking tool very easily. It doesn't care if your folder is full of notes or code, it handles it the same way, either way. Also, I didn't add any AI on top here and just use the raw editor.
Finding things in my folders is probably what it's best at. Ctrl + P quickly pulls up any note from any part of its name, and searching a whole vault lists every note that mentions the keyword. For reading, it has the rendered preview so you don't have to read the raw syntax directly. Also, source control (Git) is a nice-to-have for notes - if you change just one tiny number or letter, it will highlight the change.
Capturing notes is a different story though. There's no quick capture or daily note function, so a new note means creating a new file you have to name and sort. Wikilinks also just show as plain text. So it's a bit of a give-and-take with VS Code.
They're all fine for capture, but only one excels at organizing
I thought VS Code would come out on top here, since it behaves the most like a note app of the three. It's still where I'd go to read and dig through notes. The local model has privacy going for it, but it runs out of context long before the day's done. So the crown goes to Claude Code. It does take extra steps to bring up the editor artifact with formatting options, so it does make me feel a little disconnected from my notes having to primarily rely on prompts. But nothing matches its admin abilities, and a notes tool that makes the organization part easy is the tool you end up sticking with.
LM Studio
