Jot
From thought to .md in one keystroke.
Jot is a native Mac menu-bar app. Press ⇧⌘J anywhere, type your thought, hit Return — it's saved to today's dated Markdown note and the field vanishes.
No app to open. No window to find. No cloud, no account. Just the hotkey and a plain .md in a folder you own.
Download for macOS7-day free trial, no card. €6 once — the current major version, on up to 7 Macs · macOS 14+
How it works
Hotkey. Type. Done.
Press ⇧⌘J anywhere
A small capture field floats up over whatever you're doing — it takes the keystroke without pulling you out of your work.
Type it — or dictate it
Tap the mic and speak; it's transcribed on your Mac (Apple's Speech framework, nothing uploaded) straight into the field, where you can still edit it.
Return saves, Shift+Return for a newline
Type a line or a paragraph. Return files it and the field disappears. Esc cancels. Under a second, start to finish.
One dated note a day
Each jot is appended to YYYY-MM-DD.md as a timestamped section — append-only, so nothing is ever overwritten or lost.
Plain Markdown, in your folder
Default ~/Documents/Notes, or anywhere you choose. Desk Sweeper can file it, Markdown Viewer opens it — it's just a file.
The promise
The fastest way to start a note.
Every other way in loses the thought: find the app, find the file, find your place. Jot removes all of it. It's the counterpart to the rest of the family — Web Clipper, Drop Converter and Paste bring in things that already exist; Jot captures what's only in your head, before it's gone.
Why
A thought caught is a thought kept.
Quick-capture apps make you open them. Notes apps make you file things. Jot is a single global hotkey and a plain-text file — no lock-in, no database, no account. What you write is yours, on disk, the moment you hit Return.
A global-hotkey quick-capture app for Mac — press ⇧⌘J anywhere to append a note to today's dated Markdown file. Local, plain-text, no cloud, no account.