NoFormatNotes

A menu bar scratchpad. Plain text, local only, saves itself.

For dumping something somewhere fast — an API key, a snippet, a chunk of text you need stripped of formatting — without opening an editor, picking a folder, or naming a file.

 

Using it

• Option-click the menu bar icon for an instant new note. Right-click does the same. (Not Command-click: macOS reserves that for dragging menu bar icons around.)
• Click the icon to see your notes. Click one to open it.
• Hover a note and click the trash to delete it.
• Open at Login keeps it there after a restart.

There is no save button. Typing saves within half a second; closing a window, switching apps or quitting saves immediately.

Plain text, actually plain

Paste anything — a web page, a rich email — and the styling is gone. Copy back out and only plain text goes to the clipboard, so the formatting cannot come back when you paste it on. That is the Notepad round-trip, without Notepad.

It also fixes what Notepad leaves alone: smart quotes, em dashes, non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters and BOMs, all of which look normal and break whatever you paste them into.

Keys and tokens pass through byte for byte. That is the first thing the tests check.

Where notes live

~/Library/Application Support/NoFormatNotes/

One .txt per note. Not in Documents or Desktop, which get swept into iCloud when Desktop & Documents syncing is on. Nothing leaves the machine: no sync, no network, no telemetry.

The folder is 0700, notes are 0600, it is excluded from Spotlight, and deleting a note overwrites its bytes first.

Notes are not encrypted. Anyone with access to your unlocked Mac can read them. It is a scratchpad, not a password manager.

Updating

NoFormatNotes checks GitHub for new releases once a day. Nothing installs itself. When an update exists the menu bar icon shows a badge, and you choose whether to install it.

Installing downloads the image, checks the app inside is signed by the same developer as your copy and passes Gatekeeper, then replaces the installed app and relaunches. No password: nothing outside /Applications is touched.

Installing

Download the .dmg, open it, drag NoFormatNotes to Applications. Signed and notarized, so no warnings.

Building

Command Line Tools are enough; Xcode is not used.

make        # universal signed app
make test   # text handling and storage
make dmg    # distributable disk image

AI disclosure

Built with AI assistance. Behaviour described here was verified against a running system, not assumed.

Licence

MIT.