First run

The first thing to know: Shady Notes has no main window. Nothing appears in the Dock’s window list, and nothing opens on screen. If you launch it and think nothing happened, that is the expected behaviour.

Find it in the menu bar

Look for the umbrella mark at the right-hand end of the menu bar.

Screenshot menubar-icon.png

The Shady Notes umbrella icon in the macOS menu bar.

Just below it hangs a small amber pull tab — the handle for the shade. It is the only part of the app visible while the shade is closed.

Screenshot pull-tab-idle.png

The amber pull tab collapsed to a small dot beneath the menu bar.

The tab shrinks to a dot shortly after your pointer leaves it, and expands again on hover, so it stays out of the way without disappearing entirely.

Screenshot pull-tab-hover.png

The pull tab expanded to its full width as the pointer hovers over it.

Open the shade

Any of these work:

• Scroll down near the top of the screen
• Click the pull tab
• Press ⌃⌥⌘↓ from any app

The shade slides down over whatever you were looking at. Scroll back up, click outside it, or press ⌃⌥⌘↓ again to send it away.

The shade covers this in full, including how to change the scroll direction and trigger area.

Where your notes go

Shady Notes creates a folder at:

~/Documents/ShadyNotes/

Every note is a plain .md file inside it. Nothing is stored in a database or a proprietary format — you can open the same folder in Obsidian, VS Code, or any text editor, and edits made there show up in Shady Notes.

You can point it somewhere else, or add more folders, in Preferences → Vault. See Vault and files.

Write something

Open the shade and start typing. To create a note, click + at the bottom of the sidebar; press ⌥⌘S if the sidebar isn’t showing.

Next: the tour.