Find an old note in Scratch quickly

You remember writing something a couple of weeks ago — a phone number, a URL, half an idea — and now you need it back. The faster the retrieval, the more you trust the tool with your next thought.

Two paths

Native macOS. Spotlight (⌘Space) indexes plain text files anywhere on disk, so anything you keep as a .md or .txt file is searchable system-wide. Apple Notes has its own in-app search bar. Stickies has no search at all. The friction with Spotlight alone is that it returns one file at a time and dumps you into Quick Look — fine for a single hit, awkward when you want to browse what’s around it.

Scratch. The sidebar groups every note by edit date, so “the note from two Tuesdays ago” usually finds itself by scrolling. For text-content searches, combine Scratch with Spotlight or any Finder search against the notes folder — every Scratch note is a real markdown file.

Four ways to find it

1. Scroll the date-grouped sidebar. Summon Scratch with ⌃⌥⌘S and skim the sidebar — sections are labelled Today, Yesterday, This Week, then older. Useful when you remember roughly when you wrote it.
2. Find inside a note. Open the note you suspect contains it and press ⌘F in the editor to jump to a match. Fast for long rolling notes (journals, meeting logs).
3. Spotlight the folder. Open Finder, press ⇧⌘G, paste ~/Library/Application Support/Scratch/Notes, hit Return, then type into the search field in the top-right. Scope it to "Notes" (the current folder). Spotlight matches inside the markdown content of every note.
4. Check Recently Deleted. If you deleted the note and want it back, click the small Recently Deleted row at the bottom of the Scratch sidebar. Right-click any row → Restore.

A small habit that helps

Give important notes a one-word title on the first line as a markdown heading (# Phone numbers, # Domain ideas). Scratch uses the first non-blank line as the row title in the sidebar, so a real heading makes the note self-labelling — and both Spotlight and the sidebar will surface it the second you start looking.