Printing To-Do lists from Apple Notes on a cheap ESC/POS receipt printer

I decided to buy a cheap ESC/POS receipt printer (~25 Euro).
My goal was to easily print my Apple Notes To-Do list with it.
In this post, I explain how I did it.

Sending text from Apple Notes to the receipt printer

To print text from Apple Notes with the receipt printer, we’ll use Apple Shortcuts.

Basic Apple Shortcuts example

In its most basic form, the shortcut looks like this:

• A “Share Sheet” shortcut in Apple Shortcuts.
• The received Text is placed as “Shortcut Input” in
  echo "Shortcut Input" >> /dev/usb/lp0
• The command is executed through SSH on the Linux system that has the ESC/POS printer connected via USB

Share and print from Apple Notes

After setting up the shortcut, simply click on the share button, make sure to select ‘Send Copy’, then choose ‘Shortcuts’. Select the shortcut you previously created. Done.

Advanced Apple Shortcut example

Here is a more advanced Apple Shortcut:

• It uses the ‘Run Shell Script’ building block instead of the ‘Run script over SSH’ one.
• It performs some formatting on the Text input.
• It prints with p910nd via nc (netcat), so SSH is not necessary.
  On the receiving machine p910nd is running.
  • I wrote a short documentation on how to get p910nd up and running on Unraid

What does it do?

The advanced shortcut takes an ‘unformatted’ note from Apple Notes and expands it as shown below:

# Apple Notes             # Printer Output

                          - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
                          2025-10-25
To-Do:            -->        
Buy milk          -->     To-Do:
Buy apples        -->     [ ] Buy milk            
Go swimming       -->     [ ] Buy apples 
                          [ ] Go swimming  

                          - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The script in more detail

{
  printf "%s\n" "- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -"
  printf "\x1B\x45\x01$(date +%F)\x1B\x45\x00\n"
  printf "\n"
  printf "Shortcut Input\n" | awk 'NR==1 {print $0; next} {print "[ ] " $0}'
  printf "\n"
  printf "%s\n" "- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -"
  printf "\n"
  printf "\n"
} | iconv -f UTF-8 -t CP850 | nc 192.168.10.12 9100

1. printf "\x1B\x45\x01$(date +%F)\x1B\x45\x00\n":
   Prints the current date in YYYY-MM-DD format.
   • \x1B\x45\x01 & \x1B\x45\x00 send a ESC/POS command to enable emphasized/bold printing and the second part disables the emphasis again.
2. | awk 'NR==1 {print $0; next} {print "[ ] " $0}:
   This uses the awk command to process the received note text.
   • NR==1 {print $0; next}: It leaves the first line as is.
   • {print "[ ] " $0}: It adds [ ] as a prefix to every subsequent line.
3. | iconv -f UTF-8 -t CP850:
   Converts the character encoding from UTF-8 to CP850.
   This ensures that characters like ÄÖÜ print correctly.
4. | nc 192.168.10.12 9100:
   Pipes the converted bytes into nc (netcat).

Printer Setup

Prerequisites

• A ESC/POS receipt printer.
• A Linux server or Raspberry Pi running, with the ESC/POS printer connected via USB.

Personally, I am running a small Unraid NAS to which I connected my ESC/POS receipt printer via USB.

Steps to follow

1. Connect the ESC/POS printer via USB to your Linux machine
2. Check whether the printer is properly recognized
   e.g. by using lsusb or dmesg.
   Example output from my Unraid server:

# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 025: ID 28e9:0289 GDMicroelectronics micro-printer
# dmesg | tail -n 20
usblp 1-3:1.0: usblp0: USB Bidirectional printer dev 7 if 0 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x28E9 pid 0x0289

3. Perform a test print from your Linux machine:

echo "Hello World!" >> /dev/usb/lp0

That’s it, a working printer, without CUPS or any driver installation needed.