The shade

Most notes apps give you another window to manage. Shady Notes puts your notes just off the top of the screen instead — a scroll away, above everything else.

Screenshot shade-closed.png

A desktop with the shade closed; only the small amber pull tab is visible below the menu bar.

Opening and closing

Action	Effect
Scroll down near the top of the screen	Open
Scroll up while open	Close
Click the pull tab	Toggle
⌃⌥⌘↓ from any app	Toggle
Click ↑ in the toolbar	Close
Click outside the shade	Close, unless pinned
Esc	Close, if enabled in Preferences

Screenshot shade-opening.png

The shade partway through its slide-down animation.

The scroll trigger

The scroll gesture only fires when your pointer is within a set distance of the top edge of the frontmost window — the trigger zone. That keeps an ordinary scroll in a document from yanking the shade down.

Both the zone depth and the scroll direction are in Preferences → Appearance. Direction defaults to matching your input device, so trackpad natural scrolling and a mouse wheel both behave the way you’d expect.

Esc

Esc closing the shade is off by default, and it is deliberately layered: if a sidebar search is active, the first Esc clears the search and the shade stays put. Only a second press closes it.

Pinning

Click the pin in the toolbar and clicking outside no longer closes the shade. Useful when you’re copying between the notes and something behind them. Click it again to unpin.

Minimize

⇧⌘M hides the toolbar and sidebar, leaving only the editing surface. A small restore button appears in the tab bar — or floating in the editor if only one tab is open. ⇧⌘M again brings the chrome back.

Window mode

Sometimes you want an ordinary window. Click the ⊡ icon in the toolbar (or choose Window Mode from the menu bar icon) and the shade detaches into a normal, resizable macOS window that behaves like any other app.

Click the icon again — now showing ⇕ — or close the window to go back.

Size and position

The shade opens 900 pt wide, toward the right of the screen.

Action	Effect
Drag the bottom edge	Height
Drag the left or right edge	Width, from that side
Drag a bottom corner	Both
Drag the toolbar or empty tab-bar space	Move it horizontally
Hold ⇧ while dragging	Resize symmetrically about the centre

Minimum size is 400 × 200 pt. Size and position persist until you quit.