A lightweight sticky-notes app for macOS that lives in your menu bar. Jot down anything in a floating note that stays out of your way, formats text beautifully, and is always one keystroke away.
Website: mandarchaudhari.com/sticky-finger
Sticky Finger gives you instant, frictionless notes:
- Menu-bar app — no Dock icon, no main window. It sits quietly in your menu bar until you need it.
- Floating notes — each note is its own translucent ("Liquid Glass") window that can hover above other apps and follow you across every Space.
- Rich text editing — a full formatting toolbar with bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, three heading levels, bullet / numbered / task lists, inline code, code blocks, and blockquotes.
- Color themes — tint any note one of eight colors (yellow, orange, rose, purple, blue, teal, graphite, or the default).
- Pin on top — keep an important note always above your other windows.
- All Notes overview — a searchable panel listing every note so you can jump to the one you want.
- Automatic saving — notes are saved as you type and restored the next time you launch the app.
Sticky Finger is a native macOS app built with Swift, SwiftUI, and
AppKit, with rich text powered by the Tiptap editor
running inside a WKWebView.
A few key pieces:
AppDelegate— sets up the menu-bar (status) item and global keyboard shortcuts, and re-opens all your saved notes on launch.NoteStore— the single source of truth for your notes. It saves them to a JSON file using debounced, atomic writes (so a crash mid-save can't corrupt your data):~/Library/Application Support/Sticky Finger/notes.jsonWindowManager— creates and tracks one floating note window per note.TiptapEditor/EditorBridge— host the web-based editor and shuttle content and formatting commands between Swift and JavaScript.
All your data stays on your Mac. Nothing is sent anywhere.
- Download
StickyFinger.zipfrom the Releases page. - Unzip it and drag Sticky Finger.app into your Applications folder.
- Open it. A document icon appears in your menu bar — there is no Dock icon or window, that's expected.
- Click the menu-bar icon and choose New Note, or press ⌘N from anywhere.
- Start typing. Use the formatting toolbar at the bottom of a note to style text, or change the note's color with the color picker.
- Drag a note anywhere on screen; it remembers where you left it.
- Open All Notes from the menu (or press ⌘F) to search across every note and jump to one.
- Use Send Feedback… in the menu to email the developer.
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| ⌘N | Create a new note |
| ⌘F | Open the All Notes search panel |
| ⌘P | Pin / unpin the focused note (keep it always on top) |
| ⌘Q | Close the focused note window |
Quit the app entirely from the menu-bar icon → Quit Sticky Finger.
Requirements: macOS 26 or later and a matching version of Xcode.
- Clone the repository.
- Open
Sticky Finger.xcodeprojin Xcode. - Select the Sticky Finger scheme and press Run (⌘R). The app it produces is Sticky Finger.app.
To produce a distributable build, run the release script with a version number:
./release.sh 1.0.3
It bumps the version, builds a Release .app, and zips it to
build-release/Release/StickyFinger.zip ready to upload to GitHub Releases.
See RELEASING.md for the full release process.
Sticky Finger is distributed as a manual download via GitHub Releases — to update, download the latest version and replace the app in your Applications folder. (There is no in-app auto-update; see RELEASING.md for the rationale.)
Copyright © 2026 Mandar Chaudhari. All rights reserved.