8 New Notch Tools: Terminal, Window Snapping & More (2026)
Notchy's notch just grew a real terminal, window snapping, a privacy indicator, and five more tools. Here's what each one does and why it lives in your MacBook notch.
By Vishva Variya · Published July 20, 2026
Notchy's notch keeps growing. On top of the window snapping, app launcher, and OCR clipboard searchfrom the last round of updates, eight more tools have landed — a real terminal, a privacy indicator, and six smaller quality-of-life additions that each solve one specific annoyance. Here's what each one does.
1. A real terminal in the notch
The Notch Terminal spawns your actual login shell in a PTY — full VT100/xterm emulation, colors, cursor keys, and TUI apps like vim or htop all work exactly as they do in Terminal.app. It stays alive when you switch tabs, so a build or dev server keeps running in the background while you check Clipboard or AI Usage.
2. Know when your camera or mic is live
The Privacy Indicator lights up a notch pill the instant any app's camera or microphone goes active — system-wide, via the same CoreMediaIO and CoreAudio signals behind macOS's own green and orange menu-bar dots. It just puts that state somewhere you actually look.
3. Caps Lock HUD
Newer keyboards keep dropping the physical Caps Lock LED. Notchy now pops a brief island every time Caps Lock toggles — reading modifier flags only, so it needs no extra permission.
4. Full Charge island
Set a charge threshold between 80% and 100% and Notchy fires an island the moment your battery hits it — the cue to unplug, which matters more than people think for long-term battery health. An optional low-battery alert sound covers the other end.
5. Alt HUD styles
Not everyone wants the volume and brightness HUD living on the notch. Alt HUD styles swap it for an edge-pinned bar or a circular gauge, with adjustable size — an Atoll-style alternative for people who'd rather keep the notch itself uncluttered.
6. A visualizer that reacts to real audio
The Now Playing visualizer can now tap your system audio with a Core Audio process tap and run an actual FFT — the bars move with the real song, not a synthetic wobble. It fails soft to the old animation on unsupported setups, so there's no risk in turning it on.
7. 20 Liquid Glass variants
Apple's private glass material has more looks than the one Notchy shipped with by default. A new variant picker in Appearance lets you cycle through all 20 and pick the one that matches your taste.
8. Your own idle animation
Drop in a Lottie JSON file and Notchy loops it as the closed-notch idle animation instead of the default pill — with an in-app editor for speed, scale, and vertical offset, live preview included, so you can see exactly what plays before saving it.
Turning any of these on
Every feature here lives in Notchy → Settings, opt-in and off by default except the Caps Lock HUD and Privacy Indicator. None of them add a background process when disabled — if you're not using it, it costs nothing. If you don't have Notchy yet, grab it free — no account, no trial.
Notchy productivity toolkit — FAQ
Is Notchy still free with all these new features?
Yes. Every tool in this roundup ships in the same free app, donation-supported only — no subscription tier, no feature paywall.
Do I need to turn all of these on?
No. Every feature here is opt-in from Settings. Turn on what you use; the rest stays inactive and costs nothing.
Will these features slow my Mac down?
No. Each one is event-driven or best-effort by design — the terminal only runs when you're using it, the privacy indicator fires on property-listener callbacks (not polling), and anything that needs hardware support (like the audio-reactive visualizer) fails soft to a synthetic fallback rather than costing extra cycles.