Markdown notes on an external drive, or in several folders

Most note apps want everything in one place: one vault, one library, one folder. Real life is messier. Work notes sit in a folder your company backs up. A research archive lives on an external SSD because it's huge. A shared folder of meeting notes is in Dropbox. Copying them all into one place means two copies of everything, and one of them is always out of date.

With plain Markdown files there's a better way: leave each folder where it is, and show them together.

Why keep notes in more than one folder

• Space. Years of notes with pictures and PDFs can outgrow a laptop's disk. An external drive holds the archive, and the laptop holds what you're working on now.
• Ownership. A work folder belongs to work: its backups, its rules, maybe its Git repository. Personal notes stay out of it.
• Sharing. A synced folder shared with a colleague is the simplest way to share notes as files. It doesn't have to be your whole library.
• Old projects. A finished project can stay exactly where it was, and still be searchable.

Folders from anywhere in Coffee

Coffee lets you add a folder from anywhere on your Mac, an external drive included, beside your notes folder:

1. Open the sidebar and press + beside Folders.
2. Choose the folder. Its notes appear straight away, under the folder's name.

From then on those notes are part of the library:

• Search finds them, along with everything else.
• Links work across folders. A [[link]] from a note on your laptop opens a note on the external drive, and backlinks show both ways.
• Tags in them join the rest under Tags.
• The graph shows them, coloured as their own group.
• New notes made from a link in one of them go in the same folder, so they stay together.

The files stay where they are. Coffee reads and writes them in place and never copies them into your notes folder.

When the drive is unplugged

Unplug the drive and its folder stays in the sidebar, greyed out and marked Offline. Its notes leave search for the time being, so you don't land on notes you can't open. Plug it back in and they return on their own, with nothing to redo. Moving the folder back to where it was works the same way when you come back to Coffee.

To stop showing a folder, right-click it and choose Remove from Sidebar. That only forgets it: nothing on disk is deleted or changed. Show in Finder is in the same menu.

A few things to know

• A folder can't be added twice, and a folder inside your notes folder doesn't need adding, as it's already there.
• Coffee adds your notes folder to Spotlight. Notes in a folder from elsewhere are left to the Mac's own Spotlight indexing, where they are.
• AI apps connected over MCP, Git proposals and templates work with your main notes folder.

If you keep your main folder in iCloud Drive, nothing changes there. Syncing with iCloud Drive works as before, and a folder from elsewhere keeps whatever sync or backup it already has.

Questions

Can I keep my notes on an external SSD?

Yes. Add the folder on the drive with the + beside Folders in Coffee's sidebar. Its notes are searched, linked and tagged with the rest, and they're marked Offline while the drive is unplugged.

Does Coffee copy the files into its own folder?

No. It reads and writes them where they are.

What happens to links when a drive is unplugged?

The notes on it leave search until it's back. Links to them work again as soon as the drive is plugged in.

Does removing a folder from the sidebar delete it?

No. Remove from Sidebar only forgets the folder. Your files aren't touched.

Coffee is Mac only, with macOS 15 or later. It's free for 14 days without a card, then €3 a month, €29 a year, or €79 once with two years of updates.