QuickPad

A macOS 14+ menu bar app for rapid logging — fusing Karpathy's append-and-review single stream, Bullet Journal rapid logging symbols, and Raycast Notes' floating menu-bar experience.

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full design rationale, CHANGELOG.md for recent changes, and ROADMAP.md for plans.

Features

• Menu bar popover — click the icon or press ⌥N anywhere to toggle
• Quick Capture panel — press ⌥⇧N anywhere to summon a borderless mini input at the top of the active screen; type, hit Enter, the panel closes and you're back in your original app
• Dynamic Island widget — right-click the menu bar icon to toggle the always-visible pill that shows the latest entry; hover to expand, click to dismiss
• Floating window — detach with ⌘D for always-on-top note taking
• Rapid input — Enter to append, Tab to cycle bullet type (note → task → question → idea)
• Hint bar — clickable bullet/prefix chips below the input row for one-click type switching and read: / watch: / listen: / *priority insertion; toggle on/off from the header
• Gravity decay — older entries fade in opacity; day separators decay from "TODAY" → "YESTERDAY" → "APR 6 · SUN" → "MAR 20"
• Rescue — hover old entries and click to float them back to today; undo with ⌘Z
• Task state — click task glyph to toggle done/pending; right-click for migrated/cancelled
• Change bullet type — right-click → Bullet Type to re-classify an existing entry
• In-place edit — right-click → Edit to fix typos without breaking timestamp
• Soft delete + undo — right-click → Delete with 5-second undo window
• Graduate to pinned note — right-click → Graduate writes the entry to ~/.quickpad/pinned/<slug>.md and pulls it out of the stream; pinned notes appear under the popover header's ⋯ menu
• Inline Markdown — `code`, bold, [links](url) render natively
• Search — ⌘F full-text search across the live stream and every ~/.quickpad/archive/*.md file; archive hits appear under a ── FROM ARCHIVE ── divider
• Review mode — ⌘R opens a card-by-card review of entries from 7 / 30 / 90 days ago; each card offers Rescue · Graduate · Done/Cancel · Skip with single-key shortcuts. Closes Karpathy's review loop without inviting list-skim
• Rescue counter — every rescue bumps @rN inside the bracket token; entries rescued ≥3 times get a 🎓 hint in Review suggesting Graduate
• Stale-task nudge — pending tasks older than 7 days get a soft pulsing dot in the trailing label (tooltip: "Pending for N days — migrate or cancel?")
• Stats strip — between header and input: today N · 7d N · ✓ N · ↑ N · stale N so you can see the stream's current shape at a glance
• Type filter — ⌘1-4 to filter by note/task/question/idea, ⌘5 to clear
• Export — ⌘E exports visible entries as Markdown via save dialog
• Shortcut hints — ⌘/ toggles an overlay listing every shortcut
• Auto-archive — done/cancelled tasks older than 30 days move to ~/.quickpad/archive/YYYY-MM.md
• Live sync — external edits (vim, echo >>) reflect automatically via FSEvents
• Appearance — Auto / Light / Dark cycling (menu bar right-click → Appearance)
• Pin — keep popover open while working elsewhere
• Polished visuals — themed inline Markdown (code/links pick up the accent), accent-tinted timestamps, fade dividers, CJK/Latin density tuning

Install

From source

Requires macOS 14+, Xcode 16+, and XcodeGen.

brew install xcodegen          # one-time
git clone <repo-url> && cd quick-pad
xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -project QuickPad.xcodeproj -scheme QuickPad -configuration Release build

The built app is at ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/QuickPad-*/Build/Products/Release/QuickPad.app.

From zip (shared by someone)

1. Unzip QuickPad.zip
2. Drag QuickPad.app to /Applications
3. First launch: right-click → Open → confirm (only needed once)

Usage

Shortcut	Action
⌥N	Toggle popover (system-wide)
⌥⇧N	Quick Capture mini panel (system-wide)
Enter	Append entry
Tab	Cycle bullet type
⌘F	Search (stream + archive)
⌘R	Review mode (cards)
⌘D	Detach / reattach floating window
⌘E	Export visible entries as Markdown
⌘Z	Undo delete or rescue
⌘1-4	Filter by type (note/task/question/idea)
⌘5	Clear filter
⌘/	Toggle shortcut hints overlay
Right-click entry	Edit, Delete, Rescue, Graduate, change task state, change Bullet Type
Click task glyph	Toggle pending ↔ done
Hover old entry	Shows "↑ rescue" hint (click to rescue)
⌘Q	Quit (also under the popover ⋯ menu)
Right-click menu bar icon	Toggle Dynamic Island
Popover header ⋯	Pinned Notes, Quit

Content shortcut: typing * foo writes *priority foo (red left border).

Data

~/.quickpad/
├── stream.md              # main stream (newest day first)
├── pinned/                # graduated entries — one Markdown file per note
│   └── onboarding-doc-draft.md
└── archive/               # auto-archived done/cancelled tasks
    └── 2026-04.md

If stream.md doesn't exist on first launch, a bundled sample is shown.

QuickPad writes atomically (temp file + rename) and coexists safely with concurrent vim edits.

stream.md format

--- 2026-04-11 Saturday ---

- 2026-04-11T10:30:00+08:00 [note] some insight
- 2026-04-11T09:00:00+08:00 [task] something to do

--- 2026-04-10 Friday ---

- 2026-04-10T22:00:00+08:00 [task>done] shipped a thing
- 2026-04-10T15:00:00+08:00 [task>migrated] punted to next week
- 2026-04-10T14:00:00+08:00 [question] why is p99 flat after the cache warm-up?
- 2026-04-10T10:00:00+08:00 [idea] cool idea

• Bullet types: note, task, question, idea (the legacy event token still parses as question)
• Task states: task>done, task>migrated, task>cancelled
• Rescue count: [task @r3] means rescued back to today 3 times; missing @rN parses as 0
• Soft delete: [note>deleted] — hidden from UI, cleaned after 30 days
• Ordering: newest day at top, newest entry first within each day
• Content prefixes: read:, watch:, listen:, ? are shown as tags
• Malformed lines are preserved verbatim (never dropped)

Tests

xcodebuild test -project QuickPad.xcodeproj -scheme QuickPad \
  -configuration Debug -destination 'platform=macOS'

168 tests across 11 suites covering parser, writer, mutator, archiver, exporter, inline markdown, gravity decay, task state, bullet type, pinned-note slug + graduation logic, and the @rN rescue-count schema.