dropnote

Sometimes you just need a fragment of text to land in a scratchpad — a line you copied out of a terminal, a half-formed thought, a snippet you do not want to lose while you switch windows. dropnote performs that one small hand-off: it takes a short plaintext fragment and drops it into the noglow desktop scratchpad's target slot (the slot is chosen in the app's own settings) by launching the local noglow app.

The text never travels as a command-line string. dropnote writes it, byte-for-byte as UTF-8, to a uniquely-named temporary file (noglow-drop-<unique>.txt in the OS temp directory) and spawns the app with a single argument, --drop-file <path>. Because only the path sits on argv, newlines, quotes, $ and backticks all survive exactly as written, and the fragment itself stays out of the process list. The spawn is fire-and-forget: dropnote reports success as soon as the app process has been launched, and it leaves the temp file in place — the app reads it and deletes it.

Fragments are capped at 1500 characters. A missing or non-string text, an empty fragment, and an over-long fragment are all errors with fixed messages, as are a temp file that cannot be written and a binary that cannot be launched.

Which binary gets launched is resolved in a fixed order: the NOGLOW_BIN environment variable when it is set and non-empty, otherwise the platform default — /Applications/noglow.app/Contents/MacOS/noglow on macOS and %LOCALAPPDATA%\noglow\noglow.exe on Windows. On Linux the bare name noglow is used and resolved through PATH. The noglow desktop app must be installed for a drop to work; without it, the launch error names the path that was tried and points at NOGLOW_BIN.

On success a drop reports dropped (true), characters (the fragment's length), tempFile (the temp file's path), and binary (the resolved binary that was spawned), in that order.

CLI

npx @reneturcios/dropnote drop '{"text":"a fragment to keep"}'
npx @reneturcios/dropnote --version

The drop command takes the full arguments object as one JSON string and prints the result as JSON:

{
  "dropped": true,
  "characters": 18,
  "tempFile": "/tmp/noglow-drop-3f2a1c9e-4b7d-8e5a-9c0d-1a2b3c4d5e6f.txt",
  "binary": "noglow"
}

Exit codes: 0 on success, 1 on a runtime error (including an unparseable JSON argument or a failed drop), 2 on a usage error.

Related MCP server: MCP Notes Server

MCP server

npx -y @reneturcios/dropnote mcp

MCP client config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dropnote": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@reneturcios/dropnote", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

• drop — Drop a short text fragment (up to 1500 characters) into the noglow scratchpad's target slot via the local noglow app. Fires only on an explicit user request.

  • text (string, required) — the fragment to drop; newlines and formatting are preserved

  Returns {dropped, characters, tempFile, binary}. Errors are returned as error results carrying one of the fixed messages: text is required, text must not be empty, text exceeds the 1500-character limit (got N), failed to write drop file: <message>, or failed to launch noglow binary at <path>: <message> (set NOGLOW_BIN to override the binary path).

Docker

docker run -i ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/dropnote
docker run --rm ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/dropnote drop '{"text":"a fragment to keep"}'

Note that a containerised drop launches a noglow binary inside the container; point NOGLOW_BIN at a binary available there, or prefer the local install.

Development

npm install
npm run build   # tsc -> dist/
npm test        # tsx --test test/*.test.ts (fake executor plus a stand-in script; no real app)
npm run dev     # run the CLI from source

License

MIT — Copyright (c) 2026 Rene Turcios