Take notes without leaving what you're doing.
focusnotes is a small Mac app that lives in your menu bar. Select text, drag over the screen, or jot a quick note, each with one shortcut. The window you're working in keeps focus the whole time.
Every capture above happens while Reader keeps focus.
Every note costs you a trip.
To save one sentence, you switch to your notes app, find the right page, paste, tidy it up, then find your way back. That takes seconds. Getting your head back into the work takes much longer.
Why this isn't solved yet
Notes apps are built to be somewhere you go. Each one wants to be the window in front, so writing anything down means leaving what you were doing. focusnotes never comes to the front. It takes the note and gets out of the way.
Three ways to write something down. None of them moves you.
Sessions, for anything that takes more than one sitting.
Learning a language, working through a course, reading a paper over a week, chasing a bug for days. Start a session and give it a name. Every capture and quick note goes into that one note, in order, until you end it. Add a subheading whenever you move on to a new part.
Start with ⌥⇧A
Name the topic. The menu bar shows the session is on.
Capture as usual
Text, screen areas and quick notes all land in the session's note, with where they came from.
Pick it up next week
End the session when you're done. Start it again later and it carries on in the same note.
Search for what you meant, not what you wrote.
You don't need to remember which note had it, or the exact words you used. Describe it, and focusnotes finds it by meaning, screenshots and images included. It all runs on your Mac.
Keyword and meaning search run together, so the exact words you do remember still count. Semantic search needs Apple silicon and a one-time model download of about 500 MB.
Keep the notes app you have. Or don't have one.
Already use Obsidian, Bear or something else?
focusnotes writes ordinary Markdown files. Point it at your Obsidian vault and captures show up there like any other note. Bear, iA Writer, Typora, VS Code and anything else that reads Markdown can open them too.
Don't use a notes app?
Then this is the one. Your notes live in a folder in Documents, and ⌥⇧F searches all of them.
Light enough to forget it's running.
About 55 MB of memory, 0% CPU at rest
Measured on an Apple silicon Mac with the app idle in the menu bar.
No Dock icon, no window
It sits in the menu bar until you press a shortcut.
Nothing runs on a timer
No polling and no background loops. It only works when you capture, search, or your notes change.
The search model sleeps
It runs in a separate process only when there's something to search or index, and quits a minute after.
Images wait for a good moment
Indexing screenshots waits until your Mac is plugged in and running cool.
Nothing leaves your Mac
No account and no cloud. OCR and search run on the device.
Seven shortcuts. That's the whole interface.
Try them here. Hold ⌥ and ⇧, then press a letter.
Your focus stays where it is.
focusnotes is early and in active testing. Build it from source on macOS 14 or later.