Locked notes and Touch ID
Locking a note, opening it on a second Mac, and why iCloud Keychain matters.
Any note can be locked behind Touch ID or your Mac’s password, so its contents are not readable by anyone who opens the file or wanders past your desk.
Locking a note
Open the note settings panel and choose Lock Note . Notel encrypts the note with a key of its own and shows a locked state until you authenticate. To unlock, click the note’s body or the lock badge in its title bar, then touch the sensor or type your password. Right-clicking a locked note offers Unlock Note as well.
- The lock covers the contents, not everything about the note. Its body text, formatting, and objects are encrypted. Its title, its color, its reminders, and where its window sits are not, so give a locked note a title you do not mind being visible.
- Attachments are not encrypted. Images, videos, and files are stored alongside the note and stay readable on disk.
- An unlocked note relocks itself after about three minutes of sitting idle.
Locked notes cannot be exported or shared until you unlock them. Deleting one skips the plain-text archive. If you archive a note by hand after unlocking it, Notel warns you first, because that copy does land on disk as plain text.
The key lives in your Keychain
Each locked note gets its own key, stored as a syncable item in your Mac’s Keychain. Opening a sealed note requires fresh Touch ID or Mac-password authentication. Once opened, its contents remain readable in that Notel session until the note relocks after about three idle minutes.
That has one important consequence for multi-Mac setups:
To open a locked note on a second Mac, iCloud Keychain must be on (System Settings → your name → iCloud) on all your Macs. The note itself syncs through iCloud (Coming soon); its key travels separately through iCloud Keychain.
“This locked note can’t be opened on this Mac yet”
That message means the note synced but the key has not (iCloud Keychain is off, or still propagating). Turn on iCloud Keychain everywhere, wait a few minutes, and try again.
Reset Lock is destructive
If a key is truly gone forever, Reset Lock lets you reclaim the note shell, but it permanently deletes the protected content. There is no way to recover the content afterwards. Only reset once you have accepted that.