StickiesNative

A native macOS client for Stickies - a two-pane SwiftUI editor for browsing, writing, and syncing notes stored on the Stickies web app, with rich text, drag-and-drop images, and autosave.

Features

• Two-pane window (NavigationSplitView) - a searchable note list on the left, a rich text editor on the right.
• Live search across note title and folder name.
• Rich text editing via an NSTextView bridge: bold, italic, underline, left/center/right alignment, bullet lists, a markdown-table insert, and a font-size menu (12-32pt).
• Autosave - edits save automatically 3 seconds after you stop typing, plus a manual save with Cmd+S; a "Saving..." / "Unsaved" indicator sits in the editor title bar.
• Drag-and-drop or pasted images are uploaded to the Stickies backend's Google Drive endpoint and swapped inline for an <img> tag before the note saves.
• New Note sheet (title + folder name).
• Light / Dark / Auto theme, toggled from the sidebar icon or the app's Theme menu, persisted with @AppStorage.
• Folder color dot and last-updated timestamp shown per note.

How it works

StickiesNative holds no local note database - it's a thin client over the Stickies web app's REST API. Every note lives on a Stickies server; the app fetches, edits, and writes it back as HTML.

File	Role
App.swift	Entry point - owns AppState (notes, search, loading, selection) and sets the API token on launch
Views/ContentView.swift	The split-view shell (sidebar + editor)
Views/SidebarView.swift	Search field, note list, new-note sheet, refresh, theme toggle
Views/EditorView.swift	Per-note title bar, autosave timer, image-upload pipeline, and the NSTextView-backed editor
Views/ToolbarView.swift	Formatting commands, applied to the focused NSTextView via NSFontManager and paragraph styles
Models/Note.swift	The Note model plus folder-color and date-display helpers
Models/APIClient.swift	The only networking code - Bearer-token requests to the Stickies REST API
Config.swift	Reads STICKIES_API_KEY (env var or ~/.stickies-native.env) and the Stickies base URL

Sync flow: on launch the app sets the API token and calls GET /api/stickies/ext to list notes, then GET /api/stickies/ext?id= to lazy-load a note's content when it's selected. Edits are written back with PATCH /api/stickies/ext; new notes with POST /api/stickies/ext. Any image dropped or pasted into the editor is uploaded with POST /api/stickies/gdrive, and the returned URL replaces the image inline as <img src="..." style="max-width:100%"> - notes are stored as HTML, the same format the Stickies web app itself uses.

Auth is a single bearer API key, not a sign-in screen - there is no OAuth flow wired up in the current app.

Tech stack

Layer	Choice
Language	Swift 6
UI	SwiftUI (windows, split view, sidebar, forms) + AppKit (NSTextView rich-text editing, NSFontManager)
Networking	URLSession - Bearer-token REST calls and multipart image upload
Build	Swift Package Manager (Package.swift, swift-tools-version 6.0) plus a standalone swiftc build script
Target	macOS 14+ (Sonoma), arm64
Local storage	None for notes - only the theme preference is persisted, via @AppStorage
License	MIT

Getting started

StickiesNative needs a running Stickies backend to talk to (defaults to http://localhost:4444 in Config.swift) and an API key for it.

Create ~/.stickies-native.env:

STICKIES_API_KEY=sk_ext_your_api_key_here

(or export STICKIES_API_KEY as an environment variable instead.)

Build

Two ways to build, no external package dependencies:

Swift Package Manager / Xcode

swift build
swift run
# or: open Package.swift to work on it in Xcode

Standalone script (invokes swiftc against the Command Line Tools SDK directly and stages a .app bundle)

./build.sh          # produces ./StickiesNative and ./StickiesNative.app
./build.sh --run    # build and launch

build.sh also writes the Info.plist for the bundle (com.bheng.stickies-native, minimum macOS 14.0).

License

MIT - see LICENSE.