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Native macOS sticky notes — menubar-resident, global hotkey capture, multi-window floats, Markdown, iCloud sync.
Perch is a native sticky-notes / quick-capture app for macOS 15+. No Dock icon — it lives in the menu bar and stays out of the way until you need it.
Menu bar tray Floating sticky note
- 6-color palette (yellow / pink / blue / green / purple / gray); the default color for new notes is configurable in Settings.
- Three layout modes (menubar → Layout):
- Free — place anywhere
- Stack — cascade; selecting a note slides it to the bottom for full visibility
- Tile — auto-arranged grid; drag a note to reorder
- The Pin flag doubles as "auto-restore on next launch" — quitting the app doesn't lose your working set.
- Each note remembers its own window position and size.
- Float on top keeps every floating note above other windows — toggle it from the menu bar or bind a global shortcut (Settings → Shortcuts).
- Double-click the title bar to collapse (toggleable in Settings).
- Inactive notes fade for less visual noise (toggleable in Settings).
Stack layout — the selected note slides to the bottom
Stack — selecting a note slides it to the bottom for full visibility
Tile layout — drag a note to reorder
Tile — auto-arranged grid; drag a note to reorder
- Live WYSIWYG Markdown — formatting is styled inline as you type (headings, bold/italic, lists, quotes); no mode switching, no double-click to edit. Plain text just works too — no markup means no styling.
- Syntax-highlighted code blocks, inline images, and LaTeX math.
- Task lists (
- [ ]/- [x]) show a live completion pie on the note's title bar and in the Manager list. - Global font size (12–24, applied live to every open window).
- Default
⌘⇧N, customizable in Settings → Shortcuts (powered by sindresorhus/KeyboardShortcuts). - Three capture sources:
- AX + whitelist — read the selected text from the frontmost app via the Accessibility API (requires permission).
- Clipboard only — pre-fill with the current clipboard contents.
- Disabled — open a blank capture window.
- Whitelist is configured per app; selected-text reading is only invoked for whitelisted apps.
- Sidebar: All Notes / your custom groups / Ungrouped / All Tasks / Archive / Trash.
- Drag-and-drop notes into groups (multi-select drag follows the selection).
- Full-text search.
- Create / rename / move groups via right-click.
- Multi-select bulk operations: change color, pin/unpin, open as floating (capped at 8 to avoid screen clutter).
- A built-in view (Manager sidebar, above Archive) that gathers every unchecked task from across all your notes into one list, grouped by source note.
- Check a task off there and it writes straight back to the source note — any open window for that note updates live.
- Respects sub-task hierarchy: a completed parent stays visible (dimmed) while it still has open children, so nested to-dos keep their context.
- Click a note's heading to jump straight to it.
- Deletions are soft — items go to Trash.
- On launch, items older than N days (default 30, configurable 7–365 in Settings) are purged for real, matching the behavior of macOS Notes / Mail.
- Single-note Markdown export (
.md), or batch-export multiple notes to a folder. - File menu: full-database backup / restore as a single JSON file.
- Restore is non-destructive — it dedupes by UUID and skips notes already present, so it never overwrites your current data.
- Off by default. Toggle in Settings → iCloud Sync; first-time enable requires a restart.
- Once enabled, runs live cross-Mac sync.
- Verified working with China iCloud (
gateway.icloud.com.cn).
- Bundled English and Simplified Chinese; follows the system locale by default, can be forced in Settings → General.
- On store load failure, Perch never silently nukes the database — it backs
up your data to
~/Desktop/Perch-Recovery-{ts}/, shows a critical alert, and quits, so a corrupt store never costs you your notes. - Data migration across app updates is automatic and always on.
- macOS 15.0+
- xVanTuring/swift-markdown-engine — the live WYSIWYG Markdown editor (code highlighting via HighlighterSwift, math via SwiftMath).
- sindresorhus/KeyboardShortcuts — global hotkey recording and persistence.
Building from source, project layout, packaging & release, and the CloudKit schema workflow are documented in DEV.md (architecture deep-dive in CLAUDE.md).
© 2026 xVanTuring.