I built this one for myself.
I take notes in meetings. I think you should too — writing things down while someone talks is how you actually process what they're saying, and a note you wrote is worth ten transcripts you didn't read. I'm not going to pretend otherwise just because I shipped a recorder.
But there's a category of meeting where I can't. The ones where I'm presenting. The ones where I'm running the room, doing the talking, fielding the questions, and there is simply no spare hand or spare attention to write anything down. I'd walk out of those with nothing — no action items, no record of what was decided, just a vague memory and three things I'd already half-forgotten. Those are usually the meetings that matter most, and they were the ones I had the worst notes for.
So now Vist records them.
What it actually does
You start a recording — from the template picker, the command palette, or a button in the note toolbar — and you go do the meeting. When you stop, Vist transcribes the audio and writes the result into the note. Two things land:
A summary of what happened. And a list of action items pulled out of the conversation.
And then, at the bottom, the full transcript, tucked into a collapsible section. That last part matters to me more than it sounds. I didn't want a tool that hands you a summary and quietly throws away the source — summaries are wrong sometimes, and when one is, you want to be able to drop down and read what was actually said. So the raw transcript is always there, just folded away so it doesn't turn your note into a wall of text.
The note you get is the summary you'd want to read, with the receipts one click underneath it.
It won't assign your tasks for you
Here's a deliberate decision. The action items it pulls out are all the action items — including the things other people in the room agreed to do. Vist does not assume they're yours.
To turn an item into one of your actual tasks, you add @me to it. That's it. Review the list, @me the ones that are on you, leave the rest as a plain checklist for the record.
I tried it the other way first. I had it tag every action item to me automatically, and it was genuinely annoying — my task list filled up with things I'd delegated, things that were FYI, things that weren't mine at all. The thirty seconds you spend reading the list and marking your own items is not overhead. It's the one moment of active engagement that makes the note yours instead of something a machine dumped on you. I'd rather keep that.
Which is the whole philosophy, really. The recorder is for the meetings where you genuinely can't take notes. It is not permission to stop paying attention.
Two other things shipped with it
While I was in there:
Onboarding is simpler now. It had grown a few too many steps, and a first-run experience that makes you work before you've seen the point of the thing is a bad first-run experience. I trimmed it.
The default theme is now light mode. Vist used to open dark. I like dark mode personally, but defaulting to it was a small act of imposing my taste on everyone, and light is the safer, more legible first impression for a note-taking app that's mostly text. Dark mode is still right there in settings if you want it.
That's the release. The recorder is the kind of feature I'll know is good if I stop noticing it — if I just walk out of a presentation, glance at a note that's already written, @me two things, and move on.
Feedback, anyone? If you record a meeting and the summary's off, or the action items miss something obvious, or you wish it did this differently — tell me. This one came straight out of my own annoyance, and the next round of fixes will come out of yours.