Noty

Sticky notes that live at the edge of your screen. A native macOS app in Swift, SwiftUI and AppKit.

No dock icon, no window to manage. Slide the pointer to the right edge and the deck fans out.

noty-sepia.vercel.app · Download the latest DMG

At rest	Fanned	A note pulled open

The deck shows five notes at a time and puts the rest behind a +N tab, which opens the full list in a scrolling deck. A + button sits in the bottom corner while the deck is open.

Tabs shingle: each one is full height but sits only a strip below the one before, lapping over it like a roof tile. That is what keeps the deck to roughly half the screen height instead of running its full length. The strip is sized to the longest title currently on the deck, so labels read in full and ellipsise cleanly rather than being clipped mid-word.

The fan is only 56 pt wide, so the deck covers almost none of what is behind it.

Right-click the pill → Deck style:

The open note carries its own tab along as a left gutter, separated by a dashed rule, so it reads as growing out of the deck rather than floating beside it.

All of these are listed in Settings (⌘,), and the first four can be rebound there. Global ones are registered through the Carbon hotkey API, so no Accessibility permission is required:

Inside a note:

Standard editing (⌘C / ⌘V / ⌘Z / ⌘A) works everywhere — the app builds a main menu at launch purely so those key equivalents dispatch, even though an accessory app draws no menu bar.

Any line can be a task. ⌘T (or the checklist button in a note's header) puts a checkbox on the current line; click the box to tick it off and the line is struck through and dimmed. Return carries the list on to the next task, and Return on an empty task ends the list.

Tasks live inline in the note body as ☐ / ☑ prefixes, so a note stays plain text. Markdown export writes them as standard - [ ] / - [x] task syntax and import reads that back. All Notes shows a done/total count per note.

• Archived, not deleted. Archiving pulls a note out of the deck but keeps it in All Notes → Archive, restorable at any time.
• All Notes (⌥⌘A) — one window, search across every note body and title, with an editable detail pane.
• Multi-display — each screen gets its own dormant pill on its right edge. The deck opens on whichever screen the pointer enters and the others stay shut. Displays are tracked by CGDirectDisplayID, so hot-plugging rebuilds the decks.
• Over full-screen apps — right-click the pill → Show over full-screen apps. This raises the panel to .statusBar level; .floating alone does not draw over a full-screen space.
• Autosave 250 ms after you stop typing, and again on close.
• Settings (⌘,, the cog under the deck's +, or right-click the pill). Rebind every shortcut, pick the note face, text size and note size, set how far from the edge the pointer wakes the deck, and switch Markdown styling on or off. Everything applies immediately.
• Open on hover. Off by default: turn it on and resting the pointer on a tab opens that note without a click.
• Markdown as you type. # headings, **bold**, *italic*, `code`, ~~struck~~, > quotes and - bullets are styled in place. The markers are dimmed rather than hidden, so the stored text is exactly what you typed and exports unchanged.
• Drag to reorder. Drag a tab up or down and the others step aside to show where it will land.
• Pin a note to keep it open. The pin in a note's header (or ⌘P) stops it being dismissed by anything you did not aim at it — clicking away in another app, or leaving it idle. Esc and Close still close it. Pinned tabs carry a dot, and the pin is remembered.
• Closing a note steps back to the deck. Esc, Close, archiving or deleting leaves the tabs where they were; only moving away from the edge puts the deck back to sleep. Clicking in another app dismisses the whole thing.
• Tidies itself away. A fan left untouched collapses after 4 seconds; an open note after a minute idle.
• Export — Markdown (one .md per note), plain text (one .txt per note), a single document, or a .stickies archive that preserves colours, archived state and dates. Import reads .stickies back, and will also take loose .md / .txt files.
• Right-click the pill for the full menu: new note, windows, edge side, launch at login, export, import, quit.

• Local SQLite database in ~/Library/Application Support/Noty/.
• Note bodies are encrypted with AES-GCM (CryptoKit, 256-bit). Titles, colours and timestamps stay in plaintext so lists render without unsealing every row.
• No account, no server, no analytics, no telemetry, no tracking SDKs.
• One network request, ever: Sparkle fetches the appcast to see whether a newer version exists. Nothing about your notes is sent — it is a plain GET of a public XML file. Turn it off with Check automatically in the pill's menu, and it never fires again.
• No Accessibility permission, no Screen Recording, no system permissions.

Verify it yourself:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Noty/notes.db "SELECT hex(substr(body,1,24)) FROM notes;"
strings ~/Library/Application\ Support/Noty/notes.db | grep "some text from a note body"   # finds nothing

Requires the Swift toolchain from Command Line Tools (Xcode is not needed) and macOS 15+.

./scripts/fetch-sparkle.sh   # once — pulls the Sparkle binary framework
./build.sh                   # release build → build/Noty.app
./build.sh debug             # fast, unoptimised
./build.sh release run       # build, then relaunch
open build/Noty.app

build.sh drives swiftc directly over Sources/*.swift, assembles the .app bundle around Info.plist, embeds Sparkle, and signs it.

Sparkle is optional. Without Sparkle/Sparkle.framework the app still builds — Updater.swift compiles to a stub and the update menu says so.

git tag v1.0.1 && git push origin v1.0.1

That fires .github/workflows/release.yml, which builds the app, packages a DMG, signs it with the EdDSA key, writes appcast.xml, publishes a GitHub Release and commits the appcast so installed copies can see the update.

It needs one repository secret, SPARKLE_PRIVATE_KEY — the contents of the key scripts/fetch-sparkle.sh's toolchain generated. The matching public key is already in Info.plist as SUPublicEDKey; an update signed by any other key is refused by the installed app.

To build a DMG by hand:

./build.sh release && ./scripts/make-dmg.sh 1.0.1

Signing note. Sparkle ships signed by its own team, and dyld refuses to load a framework whose Team ID differs from the process — so build.sh re-signs the framework (innermost bundle first) with the same identity as the app. Set CODESIGN_IDENTITY to use a Developer ID instead of an ad-hoc signature.

Sources/
  Main.swift            @main entry point; NSApplication, accessory policy
  AppDelegate.swift     wiring, actions, main menu
  Core.swift            Paths, AES-GCM Crypto, colour palette, Note model
  Store.swift           SQLite (C API) — schema, load, upsert, delete
  NoteStore.swift       observable model; the single source of truth
  Settings.swift        UserDefaults prefs + launch-at-login
  HotKeys.swift         Carbon global shortcuts (no permissions)
  DeckPanel.swift       geometry, NSPanel subclass, tracking container
  DeckController.swift  one deck per display + the state machine
  DeckViews.swift       pill, fan, tabs, the 45 ms stagger
  NoteEditor.swift      NSTextView bridge, find, 250 ms autosave
  LibraryWindow.swift   All Notes / Archive
  ExportImport.swift    md / txt / single file / .stickies
  UndoToast.swift       the ten-second undo after a delete

Four details worth knowing if you touch the deck:

• A borderless .nonactivatingPanel returns false from canBecomeKey, so the expanded note silently refuses keystrokes unless it is overridden.
• Views default acceptsFirstMouse to false, so the first click on a tab is otherwise eaten to activate the panel instead of opening the note — which is the normal case, since you are always in another app when you reach for the deck.
• The shingle relies on ZStack declaration order, not zIndex. Adding an explicit zIndex per tab reordered neighbouring tabs and broke the lap.
• rotationEffect is a render transform, not a layout one: a rotated label still measures at its unrotated width, so anything sized around one has to be constrained and clipped separately or it bleeds across the note.

Set NOTY_DEBUG_DECK=1 in the environment to trace deck state transitions on stderr.

• Not sandboxed, so data lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Noty/ rather than ~/Library/Containers/. Sandboxing needs a provisioning profile, which needs Xcode and a developer account.
• The AES key is a 0600 file beside the database. The Keychain is the right home for it in a distributed build, but an ad-hoc signature changes on every rebuild, which makes the Keychain re-prompt or deny each time.
• .stickies here is Noty's own JSON archive format — the original's is opaque, so the two are not interchangeable. This one round-trips its own exports with full fidelity.
• No licensing, trial, or update machinery.
• Ad-hoc signed and not notarised, so Gatekeeper will want a right-click → Open the first time if the app is moved off this machine.

MIT — see LICENSE. Do what you like with it; keep the copyright notice.

Noty bundles Sparkle (also MIT) for updates. Its notice is reproduced in licenses/THIRD-PARTY.txt and copied into Noty.app/Contents/Resources/, so it travels with every DMG as its licence requires.