You Can Turn Your Mac Menu Bar Into a Virtual Note

There’s nothing wrong with putting sticky notes on your computer monitor—it’s quick and easy. It’s also a bit of a clutter, meaning anything you write down will be hard to forget. However, this doesn’t work very well for modern Macs with their tiny bezels. Meanwhile, your Mac has a menu bar that takes up varying amounts of space, most of which is empty. Why not use some of this space as a virtual note?

One Thing is a simple app that allows you to do just that. You can click on this app at any time to leave yourself a message.

Credit: Justin Poth

Type whatever you want here and it will appear in the menu bar. You can add emojis for emphasis or use Markdown , a simple formatting language, to format the text or even add a clickable link. You can only keep one thing, as stated in the name of the application – you intend to use it to remind you of what you should be working on now. However, it’s just as good for reminders or even a little encouraging note to yourself.

There are several customization options: you can change the maximum width, font size and color. You can also change the alignment, which is handy if some other app you’re using doesn’t quite line up with One Thing.

Credit: Justin Poth

You can also set keyboard shortcuts to open an edit window, clear the current note, or paste the clipboard to the menu bar.

Credit: Justin Poth

There are other ways to quickly add a note—notably, there’s support for Apple’s Share menu and support for Apple Shortcuts , which means you can set up an automation that pushes text from your to-do list app—the developer offers an example of a shortcut that brings up the next task in Things.

However, you can ignore all these features and still get a lot out of this app. Overall, this is a simple app that you can use to leave yourself reminders where they can’t be ignored.

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