NoteLess documentation

A hotkey-driven scratch pad for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Press a key, a card floats over whatever you're doing, you catch the thought, and you're back to work — hands never leaving the keyboard. The few cards that matter get pinned; the rest expire on their own. This page walks through every feature in roughly the order you'd meet it.

Installation

NoteLess comes three ways. The download from bendansby.com/apps/noteless is a standard .dmg — open it and drag NoteLess.app to your Applications folder. The App Store version (Mac, iPhone, and iPad) installs and updates the usual way. The Setapp version is a one-time purchase, not part of a Setapp Membership subscription; it installs through the Setapp client, with no separate license key and no trial.

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, and iOS / iPadOS 17 or later. The direct-download Mac build checks for updates on its own; you can also check anytime via NoteLess → Check for Updates….

NoteLess is a menu-bar app — there's no Dock icon and no main window. After launching, look for the NoteLess glyph in the menu bar; everything else happens through the floating card and a global hotkey.

Quick start

1. Launch NoteLess once. On first run it drops a welcome card explaining the keys; after that it lives quietly in the menu bar.
2. Press ⌘⇧Space from anywhere. A card floats over whatever app you were in, cursor already blinking.
3. Type your thought. Press ⌘↩ to keep it, or Esc to throw it away.
4. Press ⌘⇧K to pin a card you want to keep past its expiry — a yellow dot appears in the corner.
5. Press ⌘⇧G to see every card as a grid of thumbnails. Click one to focus it.

Summon a card

The whole app is built around one motion: ⌘⇧Space summons a fresh card, floating above whatever you were doing. You don't switch apps, you don't find a window — the card comes to you, and the thought goes down before it's gone. The hotkey works system-wide, from any app. Opening NoteLess again — from Finder or Spotlight, say — brings up a fresh card the same way.

The summon chord is rebindable in Preferences → Shortcuts, along with the two other global hotkeys (show last card and show all cards).

Keep or discard

Once a thought is down, you have two ways out:

• ⌘↩ keeps the card and dismisses the panel. The note is saved and starts its expiry countdown.
• Esc discards it. A new card you just summoned vanishes with no trace; edits to an existing card are reverted.

An empty card is never kept — if you summon one and walk away without typing, it quietly removes itself. You can also close the panel with ⌘W (or the small dot in the card's corner), which commits whatever you've written.

Pin a card

Pinning is the one escape hatch from expiry. Press ⌘⇧K to pin or unpin the active card; a yellow dot in the corner marks it as pinned. A pinned card outlives the deletion window and stays until you remove it yourself. In the grid, right-click any thumbnail to pin or unpin it there too.

Dictate

Hold ⌥ (Option) to dictate instead of type. The cursor turns into a microphone while the key is held; release to commit the transcript into the card. Speech recognition runs on-device — audio never leaves your Mac.

Markdown formatting

Cards understand a little Markdown, rendered live as you type. For bold and italic, wrap text in **double** or *single* asterisks, or press ⌘B / ⌘I — the asterisks stay hidden and the text styles itself.

For lists, start a line with:

• - — a bullet
• 1. — a numbered list
• - [ ] — a checkbox you can click to tick off

Press Return and the list keeps going — the next bullet, the next number, or a fresh empty box. An empty item ends the list. Formatting shows in the grid thumbnails too.

One card, one thought

By default each note is capped at what fits on a single card — the structural promise that keeps a thought a thought, not a document. When you reach the edge, the card shakes rather than scrolling, and a pasted block trims to fit instead of being refused.

If you'd rather let notes grow, turn off Limit notes to one card in Preferences → Notes. The setting is per-note for existing cards: turning the cap off frees every current note to grow, and turning it back on only caps cards you create from then on — long notes you wrote while it was off stay editable.

The grid

Press ⌘⇧G (or click the small grid icon on a card) to see everything at once. The live card crossfades into a scrollable wall of thumbnails, each at the same fixed card size, with pinned cards at the top and the rest sorted most recently edited first. Click any thumbnail to focus that card; right-click to pin, copy or delete it. Hover a thumbnail and a small Copy button fades in — one click puts the whole card on the clipboard as plain Markdown. Press ⌘F (or click the magnifier) to search, and the grid filters as you type; matching ignores case and accents, so cafe finds café, and Esc puts search away. The grid scales with your chosen text size.

You can get around without the mouse, too. The arrow keys step from card to card, and Return opens the one you land on — including while you're still typing in the search field, so you can narrow down, step across and open in one go.

Last card

Press ⌘⇧L to bring back the card you most recently had open, instead of a fresh blank one — handy for flicking back to a thought you were just on. Like the summon chord, this hotkey is rebindable in Preferences → Shortcuts.

How cards expire

NoteLess is designed to get lighter over time without housekeeping. Unpinned cards age out automatically; pinned cards never do. The clock runs from when a card was first written, not its last edit, and the purge happens quietly at launch and whenever you open the grid — you just notice old chaff isn't there.

Deletion window

By default, unpinned cards expire after 7 days. You can change that in Preferences → Notes under Delete notes after:

The window applies to every card against its creation date, so changing it re-evaluates what you already have. Lengthening the window (or choosing Never) simply lets cards live longer. Shortening it could remove a batch of older cards — so NoteLess asks first, telling you exactly how many would be deleted before it deletes anything. Pinned cards are always kept, at any setting.

Reset timers

Next to the deletion window is Deletion timers — Reset. It gives every unpinned card a fresh full window starting now, so nothing you meant to keep slips past its deadline. It only ever extends a card's life, so there's no confirmation. Where a card sits in the grid doesn't change — only its expiry clock is reset.

Expiry warnings

So nothing important disappears unnoticed, NoteLess can warn you before cards expire. Turn on Notify about expiring notes in Preferences → Notes: once a day it checks, and if any unpinned cards are due to be deleted within 24 hours it posts a notification — "3 notes will be deleted in the next 24 hours." — with View and Dismiss. View opens the grid scrolled to the oldest cards. It's off by default and asks for notification permission the first time you turn it on.

Whether or not the notification is on, any card within a day of expiring is marked in the grid with a clock badge and a soft pink tint, so you can spot what's about to age out at a glance and pin anything worth keeping.

Preferences

Open NoteLess → Preferences… (⌘,) from the menu bar; ⌘W or Esc closes it. Settings are grouped into a sidebar:

• General — Show in menu bar and Start at login, plus Restore Welcome Note and Restore Defaults.
• Notes — Text size, Limit notes to one card, the deletion window, Reset timers, and expiry warnings.
• Shortcuts — rebind the three global hotkeys: summon a card, show last card, show all cards.
• Updates — Check for Updates… and license management (direct-download build only; the App Store handles updates and licensing itself).

Text size

NoteLess ships its own type-size control, since macOS has no system-wide Dynamic Type. In Preferences → Notes, pick Default, Large, or Extra Large. The card and the Baskerville body scale together — bigger type doesn't squeeze the bound, the card just grows to match, so the same words still fit at every size. The grid scales in lockstep.

iCloud sync

NoteLess syncs your cards across Mac, iPhone, and iPad through iCloud Drive, under your own Apple ID. A card you keep on your Mac shows up on your iPhone a few seconds later. There is no NoteLess account and no NoteLess server — your notes stay under your Apple ID. A full local copy is kept on every device, so NoteLess works completely offline; sync just reconciles when you reconnect.

Sync turns on automatically when you're signed in to iCloud with iCloud Drive enabled. Pinning, edits, and deletions all propagate, and the expiry rules run the same on each device. If the same card changes on two devices before they catch up, NoteLess merges the two edits rather than letting one copy overwrite the other, and cards written while iCloud is unreachable sync as soon as it’s back.

On iPhone and iPad

NoteLess on iPhone and iPad is the same card, made for touch. There's no hotkey: the app opens on the grid of your cards, pinned ones first, and everything else on this page — the one-card bound, Markdown, expiry, sync — works the same way.

• New card. Tap +. Type, then tap Keep to save it or Discard to throw it away. To edit a card, tap it in the grid; your changes save as you type, and going back closes it.
• Long-press a card in the grid for Pin (or Unpin), Copy and Delete. In an open card, the pin button in the toolbar does the same.
• Search. Use the search field at the top of the grid; it filters as you type, ignoring case and accents.
• Copy. In an open card, the Copy button in the toolbar puts the whole card on the clipboard as plain Markdown, and a brief Copied confirms it. With a keyboard attached, ⌘C with nothing selected does the same, and ⌘B / ⌘I format text.
• Expiring soon. In its last 24 hours, a card turns pink in the grid and picks up a small clock, just as on the Mac. Pin it and it stops counting down.
• Settings. NoteLess keeps its settings in the system Settings app: open Settings, tap NoteLess, and you'll find Limit notes to one card, Delete notes after, and Notify about expiring notes. The deletion window travels with your notes, so changing it on one device changes it everywhere; if shortening it would delete cards you still have, NoteLess tells you how many and asks first, the next time you open it.
• Expiry warnings. With Notify about expiring notes on, NoteLess lets you know when unpinned cards are within a day of being deleted — and never in the middle of the night. Because the switch lives in Settings, NoteLess asks for notification permission the next time you open it.
• Accessibility. VoiceOver reads each card the way it looks, without the Markdown symbols, and offers Pin, Copy and Delete as actions; in an open card, VoiceOver and Voice Control can make text bold or italic and tick a checklist item, and you'll hear when a card is full. Voice Control knows each card by its first few words. Text follows your system text size up to the largest Larger Text sizes, where grid cards widen and their badges grow; Increase Contrast and Reduce Motion are respected too.

Keyboard shortcuts

On the Mac:

The first three are global (they work from any app) and can be rebound in Preferences → Shortcuts. The rest act on the card while it's on screen.

Languages

NoteLess is localized into English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Português (Brasil), Українська, Русский, and 简体中文. It picks the right language automatically from your System Settings → General → Language & Region.

To pin NoteLess to one language without changing your system preferences, open System Settings → General → Language & Region → Applications, click +, and choose NoteLess.

License

NoteLess ships through three channels — pick the one that fits how you like to pay for software:

• Direct download. Free to use, with a gentle reminder that appears now and then until you buy a one-time license — no feature is ever locked. Buy via NoteLess → Buy License… in the menu, then activate via Enter License…. Activation needs the internet briefly, then works offline; NoteLess revalidates quietly in the background so refunded or revoked keys stop working.
• App Store. Paid once through Apple's standard pipeline — Mac, iPhone, and iPad, with no separate license key. Updates and purchases are handled by the store.
• Setapp. A one-time purchase through Setapp — bought outright, not part of a Setapp Membership subscription. No separate license key; Setapp handles the purchase and delivers updates automatically. The app runs through the Setapp client, so keep it installed and your Setapp account active.

Privacy

NoteLess collects nothing. There are no analytics in the app, no accounts, and no third-party SDKs. Dictation runs on-device, so audio never leaves your Mac; iCloud sync runs through Apple's servers under your Apple ID. The full privacy policy spells it out.