Evergreen Fastball: quick notes for scattered brains

I’ve just pushed up a new open source project called Evergreen Fastball, and I wanted to talk a little bit about why it exists and who might want to use it.

The problem

If you’re anything like me, you have a lot of projects going at once. I keep mine in Obsidian, one markdown file per project, and I love the tool. The trouble is that when I’m in the middle of doing something else — on a call, fixing a bug, halfway through a sentence in my daily note — I’ll have a thought about one of those other projects. A todo, a question, a half-baked idea I don’t want to lose.

What I should do is open up the project’s note and write it down in the right place. What I actually do is jot it into whatever I have open, promise myself I’ll move it later, and then never do. A week later I’m hunting through old daily notes trying to remember which Tuesday I had that idea about the API redesign.

The tool

Evergreen Fastball is a web app you keep open in a tab. It shows all your projects on one dashboard, each with a little input box. You type your note, hit enter, and it gets appended — with a timestamp — under a ## Notes heading in the right project’s markdown file. That’s basically it.

A few things that I think make it nice:

• Your vault is still the source of truth. There’s no database, no proprietary format, no sync service. It’s just writing to the markdown files you already have. If you delete the app tomorrow, your notes are exactly where they should be.
• One keystroke to capture. That’s the whole point. The friction between “I had a thought” and “the thought is in the right place” needs to be near zero, or it won’t happen.
• A combined journal view. Sometimes you want to see everything you’ve jotted across every project, in time order, like a stream. That view is there too.
• Drag to reorder, configurable timezone, the usual. Boring stuff that matters when you actually use a thing every day.

Under the hood it’s Node + Express on the backend and Vue 3 on the front. You can run it locally or stick it in a Docker container — I run mine pointed at my vault on a little home server so I can hit it from any device.

Why anyone should care

Honestly, this is a niche tool. If you don’t use Obsidian, or you don’t think about your work as a set of parallel projects, this probably isn’t for you. But if you do, and you’ve felt that exact “ugh, where did I put that note” pain, give it a try. It scratched a real itch for me, and a friction-free capture loop has been quietly making my week better.

It’s open source, so feel free to fork it, file issues, or send PRs. Repo’s right here.