Small app. Nothing missing.
Parker stays out of the way on purpose — but under the quiet surface there's a real editor, real panes, real version history, and notes any AI agent can read and write. Here's all of it.
Point your AI at your notes. It just works.
Your notes are plain .md files in a folder you chose — so
Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or any agent can already read and write them.
No plugin, no API key, no integration to configure. Tell it where the folder is
and it's in.
Parker closes the loop from its side. It watches the folder, so when your agent rewrites a note the open tab reloads live and marks exactly which lines changed — a mark that waits for you instead of flashing past. It never writes over edits you haven't saved, and if you and the agent both touched the note, it says so instead of picking a winner.
- Draft a prompt here, let the agent answer into the same file
- Hand it a task list and watch the checkboxes flip as it works
- Changed lines highlighted until your next keystroke
- Git underneath, so anything an agent wrote can be rolled back
Parker's own backlog is a Parker note — written by me, edited by Claude, in the same file.
Always one keystroke away.
Parker lives in the menu bar, not in your way. Press P anywhere — in any app, on any desktop — and it's in front of you. Press it again and it's gone, already saved. Nothing to launch, nothing to close, no thought lost between the two.
- Global shortcut, and you can rebind it in Settings
- Comes to whichever Space you are on — or click its menu-bar icon
- Optional launch at login — it's just always there
- Auto-save is aggressive and always on; there is no “unsaved”
Split it the way you think.
Split right, split down, split again inside a split. Every pane keeps its own tabs and its own cursor, and you can drag a tab from one pane into another. Send a note's live Markdown preview to the side and watch it keep up as you type and scroll — to-dos, headings and code included. Done? Merge the panes back, one at a time.
- Nested splits, horizontal and vertical
- Dividers stay where you dragged them, even after a pane closes
- Live Markdown preview in a pane of its own — it follows your cursor and scroll
- Merge a pane back into its neighbor when you're done
Task lists that are still just text.
Start a line with a tag and Parker draws a checkbox. Eight states, because “done or not done” was never how work actually goes — paused is you stopping, waiting is someone else holding it, and cancelled is not the same as failed.
Add bangs for priority — /TODO!, /TODO!!, /TODO!!! —
and the box's border says how loud, yellow to red; and
turn it up and down.
Press to rotate a line, click a box to complete it, ⌥-click to step through
the states. And it's still one word of plain text in the file — greppable, diffable,
and legible to the agent working in the same note.
Try it — click a checkbox to rotate its state, exactly like the app.
Git backup, built in.
Point Parker's notes folder at a git repo and the status bar becomes a commit menu: every changed file with its +/−, a commit message already written for you, and Commit, Push, or both. The history sits right under it, with anything you haven't pushed still dotted.
It only ever commits and pushes — it never runs git init,
never touches your credentials, never rewrites history. A safety net
on top of your files, never where they live.
- Quick commit & push on one shortcut
- Sync on quit, or on a timer — 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes
- Works with any remote your machine can already push to
A real editor underneath.
Parker is built on CodeMirror 6 — the editor behind serious code tools — so a scratchpad note and a TypeScript file get the same treatment. Syntax highlighting, folding, multiple cursors, find, comment toggling, moving lines around: all there, none of it in a toolbar.
- Fold headings, blocks, or anything with children — and unfold it all
- Multiple cursors: select the next occurrence, or every one at once
- Line numbers on or off, fold arrows in the gutter
- Zoom the whole interface, not just the text
- Ligatures on or off — it's your monospace face
Find it, name it, give it a window.
O searches every note by name and content at once, shows you the matching line with the hit highlighted, and tells you how long ago you touched it. Open it in a tab, rename it in place, drag it where you want it. Folders are part of it: they come first, a search finds them by name, and stepping into one keeps the search inside.
- Folders first, with counts — step in with →, or type the name and a slash
- A new note lands in the folder you are looking at
- Open any Markdown file from the Finder, or with O — edited where it lives
- Tabs per pane, reorderable, jump straight to 1–9
- Rename without a dialog — the tab becomes the field
- Drag a tab out of the window and the note gets a window of its own — pin it, send it back
- Delete from the picker, no trip to the Finder
- Nothing is ever “unsaved”: it's on disk before you look away
Ten themes, and four of them are somewhere else.
Monochrome chrome so the app disappears, vivid syntax so the writing doesn't — then noon on the playa, the same place after dark, a phosphor tube and a drawing office. T cycles them; double-click the palette icon to go back to the default.
The whole keyboard, on one screen.
Straight from the list Parker shows you at ? — because you shouldn't have to install it to know whether it fits your hands.
Notes & tabs
- New note
- N
- Open / search
- O
- Open a file…
- O
- Note in its own window
- N
- Save now
- S
- Close tab
- W
- Go to tab
- 1–9
- Prev / next tab
- []
- Move tab
- []
- Rename tab
- R
Panes & app
- Split right
- \
- Split down
- \
- Focus pane
- []
- Merge pane
- M
- Markdown preview
- V
- Zoom in / out
- =-
- Cycle theme
- T
- Commit & push
- S
- Settings · Help
- ,?
Editing
- Rotate to-do state
- Priority up / down
- Continue task / list item
- Plain newline
- Bold / italic / code
- BIE
- Strikethrough · link
- XK
- Highlight
- H
- Toggle comment
- /
- Delete line
- K
- Fold / unfold
- []
- Move line
- Copy line
- Cursor above / below
- Select next / all
- DL
- Find · next
- FG
- Go to line
- G
- Platform
- macOS 12+ · Apple Silicon
- Download
- 7 MB, drag to Applications
- Your files
- Plain .md / .txt / code
- Accounts
- None. No telemetry.
- Built on
- Tauri · React · CodeMirror
- Themes
- Ten, plus zoom & ligatures
- License
- MIT, source on GitHub
- Price
- Free, and staying free
Free. Open source. Yours.
Parker is a free, open-source Mac app. Grab it, star it, or read every line.
v1.5.4 · macOS 12+ · Apple Silicon
Not a commercial product — a passion project, vibe-coded for my own use and shared with the world. No guarantees, no support, use at your own risk — see the terms and privacy pages.