FinderNotes | Jesper GB Henriksen

FinderNotes

A scratchpad that appears when you press a key and disappears when you are done. Write the thing down, copy it, carry on. It lives in the menu bar with no Dock icon, so it is never a window you have to find or close. End a line with = and it works the sum out for you.

Download 1.1 macOS · free · signed and notarised · 2.5 MB

The rail sits under the editor, and the shortcut hints along the bottom are buttons too.

Press, write, gone.

Most note apps are somewhere you go. This one comes to you: ⌃⌥Space from inside any app puts a small editor in front of whatever you were doing, and esc puts it away and hands focus back where it came from.

There is no save button. The editor always edits the selected card and saves shortly after you stop typing. Notes stay as cards in a rail under the editor, so nothing you wrote is gone just because you closed the panel.

Summon it

One shortcut from any app. The panel appears over your work rather than replacing it.

Write

Plain text, with spelling and grammar checking if you want them. It autosaves.

Copy and close

⇧⌘C takes the whole note and shuts the panel in one keystroke.

Or keep it

Cards stay in the rail. Pin the ones you keep coming back to and they stay at the front.

End a line with =.

Type 3949 + 3 = and the answer appears after the = in grey. Press tab to turn it into real text, or keep typing and it goes away. Nothing is written into the note unless you ask for it.

The answer is drawn over the text rather than inserted into it, so what is stored on disk stays exactly what you typed. A suggestion cannot be saved, copied, counted in the character count, or turn up on a card in the rail.

What it understands+ − × ÷ ^ ( ) %

Also * and /, and either a full stop or a comma as the decimal separator.

When it stays quiet

Only pure arithmetic counts. A reference number, a version string or a command in a note is left as typed, and a bare number with no operator is not a sum worth answering.

Why it is hand-written

The obvious tool, NSExpression, raises an Objective-C exception on malformed input, which Swift cannot catch — so evaluating every line as you type would be a crash generator. This parser returns nothing instead. Checked against 200,000 fuzzed lines with no trap.

The caret starts at the end

Opening a note now puts you at the bottom rather than the top, which suits a scratchpad and makes a sum on the last line answerable straight away.

Everything without the mouse.

Show and hide⌃⌥Space

Works from inside any app. Rebindable from the menu bar icon, and combinations macOS or another app already owns are greyed out rather than silently failing.

Hideesc

Focus returns to wherever you came from, so you carry on typing where you left off.

New note⌘N

Starts a fresh card. Blank ones are cleared out when the panel closes, so trying and abandoning costs nothing.

Jump to a card⌘1 … ⌘9

Opens the first through ninth card in the rail.

Copy and close⇧⌘C

The whole note to the clipboard, panel shut, in one keystroke. This is the main path.

Take the answertab

Writes the suggested result of a sum into the note. Carry on typing instead and the suggestion disappears.

Layout⌘L · ⇧⌘L

Moves the window into a tall side panel against the right edge and back. It remembers whatever size you had made it, so coming back restores exactly that.

Text size⌘+ ⌘- ⌘0

A reading preference from 11 to 28pt. Notes are plain text, so this changes nothing on disk.

Small on purpose.

No permissions

The global shortcut uses the old Carbon hot key API, so macOS never asks for Accessibility access. Nothing to grant, nothing to revoke.

One file

Everything lives in ~/Library/Application Support/FinderNotes/notes.json. No account, no sync, no database.

Menu bar only

No Dock icon and no window in your app switcher. Left-click the icon to toggle the panel, right-click for the menu.

Two themes

Muted follows the system appearance. Beige is warmer and stays light whatever the system is doing.

Stays put

The panel does not vanish when another app takes focus, so it can sit open beside your work. Switchable if you would rather it hid.

About 3 MB

Native SwiftUI and AppKit, universal for Apple silicon and Intel. No frameworks bundled, nothing downloaded at runtime.

Version 1.1, free.

Installing

Open the disk image and drag FinderNotes to Applications. The app and the image are both signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarised by Apple, so macOS opens them without a Gatekeeper warning, and the app still validates if someone drags it out of the image and passes it on offline.

On first launch it puts an icon in the menu bar and nothing else. Press ⌃⌥Space to bring up the panel, or left-click the icon.