Menu bar notes for your Mac
The thought arrives while you’re doing something else — that’s the whole problem. Locus lives in your menu bar so capture costs two clicks and zero context, and every jot lands in your inbox as real blocks.
Most notes die in transit: the idea occurs, the app is three spaces away, and by the time you get there the sentence is gone. The fix isn’t a faster app switch — it’s not switching at all. A quick-capture pad in the menu bar means the distance from thought to note is the distance to the top of your screen.
Built for the interruption
01Mid-meeting
Someone says the important thing at minute 43. Click the bird in the menu bar, type one line, close. The meeting never sees you leave.
02Mid-code
A fix idea for a different project arrives while you’re deep in this one. Park it in the menu bar pad instead of your working memory — context stays intact.
03Mid-anything
The menu bar is on every screen, over every app, in every Space. The capture pad is two clicks from wherever your attention currently lives.
Capture is the front door, not the house
A menu bar pad only earns its place if the notes land somewhere worth living. Behind the capture sits the full Locus workspace — a block editor with to-dos, tables, code, backlinks, covers, and 22 themes, all stored in a readable local file with daily backups. The privacy contract is the same everywhere: no account, no cloud, no one reading over your shoulder. And everything you capture is exportable the moment you want it — Markdown in, Markdown out.
Questions people ask
How to take quick notes in Mac?
macOS has a built-in answer — Quick Note (hover the bottom-right hot corner, or press Fn+Q) drops a note into Apple Notes, and it’s genuinely handy. Locus’s menu bar capture is the same reflex for people who keep their notes local: click the icon, type, close — and the jot lands as a real block in your Locus inbox instead of iCloud.
Where do menu bar captures go?
Into an Inbox page in your Locus workspace — each capture arrives as a block, timestamped by the page’s history. Process them later: drag blocks onto real pages, turn lines into to-dos, or let the inbox be the compost heap it’s meant to be.
Does the capture window need the main app open?
Locus runs its menu bar presence whenever the app is running. Click the icon (or summon it while any other app is fullscreen) and the pad is there; the main window stays wherever you left it.
Is this a separate utility?
No — it’s built into Locus. One app, one local workspace file, one privacy story: captures never leave your Mac or appear in update traffic. The direct-download build contacts only our signed update service.
Can I capture with a keyboard shortcut?
Today it’s a click on the menu bar icon. A global capture hotkey is the obvious next step and it’s on the roadmap.
How do I get rid of the Notes pop-up in the corner of my Mac?
That’s Quick Note, triggered by the bottom-right hot corner. Turn it off in System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Hot Corners — set the bottom-right corner to '—'. If what bothered you was the interruption rather than the idea, a menu-bar capture like Locus’s is the calmer version: it appears only when you summon it and files into an inbox.