Here are a few apps for taking notes quickly. Some of them are meant for temp scratch notes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1qh29hv/new_version_of_quick_scrap_note_now_has_sidebar/
I’ve always been a Drafts man, myself.
5 Likes
On my Mac, mouse to botttom right corner creates a new quick note in the Notes App. Can’t be any easier than that.
4 Likes
I need to revisit this. I’ve been using Tot for semi-permanent jottings but I’m not 100% happy with the way it works for me.
How do you find Notes behaves in terms of:
- Write quick note
- Dismiss
- Find quick note later.
- Writing is trivially fast and easy. Move mouse to corner and Notes launches instantly with a clean note window.
- Close window ⌘w when done .
- All quick notes are grouped together in the Notes app. IMHO, they should either be moved to other areas in Notes or deleted. Too many quick notes is like an overflowing Inbox.
3 Likes
I love Antinote.
Fn + N (custom shortcut via BTT) and it comes up. Write and click away and it disappears.
How is that behavior set up?
Assign a “hot corner” to New Quick Note
2 Likes
Scratchpad has nice Shortcuts support. I therefore sometimes like to configure so as to send output from a shortcut to Scratchpad so I can read it more easily.
Thanks. I’ve taken the plunge and copied all the stuff from Tot.
Thankfully, I will mostly be using it on the Mac because the experience on my iPad mini was tragic. My favourite part being that if I opened a Quick Note on top of Tot, the latter stole all text entry! It didn’t help that Tot was adding a toolbar that made it so I could only see about one and a half lines at a time.
I use Raycast Notes for quick notes.
It’s super easy to hit ⌥ . and jot a quick note.
Drafts is my go to for significant bits of writing with Tot being my scratch pad for temporary notes.
I have recently purchased Antinote on the Mac and love it, hope it comes to iPhone soon with sync.
I have used Tot before, but something just feels off 
Antinote really is a lovely little app. Going to try it out.
I tried a bunch of apps including Draft, Ulysses, Tot, and Scratchpad. I can’t remember them all. For now I am back to using Quick Notes in Apple Notes.
macOS 26 Spotlight really improves the process of creating quick notes. You do this by selecting Actions (Command+Space+3) and then select Create Note. After the first time it will assign a quick key for you (it assigned cn for me) or you can change that after to something else if you want. So now it’s (Command+Space+3) then cn+Return and then you can create a note. It is also like quick notes in that it will be aware of what window has focus so you can add that as an attachment right from Spotlight.