A scratchpad in your Mac's notch

The problem

You need somewhere to put a phone number, a thought, a line from a call. Notes.app is three clicks away, and by tonight you'll have forgotten which note you put it in.

How Scratchpad works

Hover the notch, pick the pencil in the dock and type. There is nothing to create, name or save. The text is written to disk a third of a second after you stop typing, so quitting the app or restarting the Mac never loses a word.

It's the same box everywhere. Switch desktops, go fullscreen in a video call, come back tomorrow: the note is exactly as you left it.

Standard editing works inside the notch: Cmd-A, Cmd-Z, Cmd-C, Cmd-V and Cmd-X, without pulling you out of the app you were in.

Tips

• Press Escape to close the notch while typing.
• There's one scratchpad on purpose. For anything longer than a screen, use Notes.

Questions

Can I have more than one scratchpad?

No, and that's deliberate. Scratchpad is for the thing you need in the next five minutes. Once a note needs a title, it belongs in Notes or Obsidian.

Where is the text stored?

In a SQLite database in your Application Support folder. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, and there is no account.

Does it support Markdown or formatting?

No. Plain text only, so whatever you paste in goes in clean and copies out clean.

Goes well with

• Clipboard

  macOS remembers one thing. This remembers the last five hundred.

• Timers

  Pomodoro, countdown and stopwatch, without a window for a number.