System HUDs
The Caps Lock light Apple took away
Notchy flashes a brief island on the notch every time Caps Lock toggles — so you find out before the password field does.
No Input Monitoring permission
It reads modifier flags, not keystrokes. That's the whole difference between an indicator and a keylogger, and it means macOS never asks you to grant the scary permission.
Brief, then gone
A compact island at the top of the screen, in the same style as volume and brightness. It confirms and disappears.
Built for the keyboards that lost the LED
Magic Keyboards and several MacBook generations ship without one, and macOS offers nothing in its place. This is the replacement.
Not worth its own app
A dedicated menu-bar utility for one LED is a lot. Here it's one toggle among 50+ tools, free, in an app that's already running.
Everything Notchy does, for free
- Fluid Dynamic Island animations on the Mac notch
- Command palette (⌃⌥K) — every action one keystroke away
- Knock — double-tap a modifier key to open the notch
- AI usage tracker (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot)
- Detach any tab into a menu-bar popover
- Now Playing music controls (Apple Music & Spotify)
- Time-synced karaoke lyrics under the notch
- Mac clipboard history shelf (password-manager safe)
- Searchable clipboard — filter by text, file name, or OCR'd words
- On-device OCR — copy a screenshot, get its text (Apple Vision)
- Window snapping — drag a window to the notch to tile it
- App Launcher — pin apps to the notch, open with one tap
- Text snippets — TextExpander-style pastes from the ⌘K palette
- One-tap screen capture to clipboard + shelf
- Color eyedropper — sample any pixel, hex auto-copied
- System-wide mic mute for every meeting app at once
- Keystroke HUD for demos & screencasts (secure-input safe)
- Keyboard cleaning lock with countdown island (⌘⎋ unlocks)
- Menu-bar icon hiding — Bartender-style separator & chevron
- Live CPU / memory / network stats flyout
- Open GitHub PR count in the notch (Keychain-stored token)
- iPhone-style call island — Answer/Decline FaceTime on the notch
- Notch Terminal — real VT100/xterm shell in a PTY, its own tab
- Privacy Indicator — pill when any app's camera or mic goes live
- Caps Lock HUD — brief island on every toggle
- Full Charge island with adjustable threshold + low-battery sound
- Alt HUD styles — edge-pinned bar or circular gauge off the notch
- Audio-reactive Now Playing visualizer (real FFT of system audio)
- Custom closed-notch idle animation — drop in your own Lottie JSON
- Drag-and-drop file drop shelf — persists across relaunches
- Zip & unzip files right from the shelf
- Image converter (HEIC, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PDF) + video → GIF
- Run Apple Shortcuts with one tap
- Screenshots auto-staged on the shelf, ready to drag
- Download finished alerts with Reveal in Finder
- USB drive mount island with one-tap Eject
- Apple Reminders quick capture & due list
- macOS Pomodoro notch timer & stopwatch — streaks + 7-day chart
- Resizable expanded panel (width & height, live preview)
- System HUDs (volume, brightness, battery)
- Audio output switcher (speakers, AirPods, monitor)
- AirPods connection manager & battery
- Magic Mouse, Keyboard & Trackpad battery + low-battery alerts
- Quick notes & Calendar widgets
- Camera Mirror (check your appearance)
- Keep Awake (caffeine toggle)
- Teleprompter (Cuely) for Zoom calls
- Focus-aware alerts & native haptic feedback
- Lock screen widgets & hide-the-notch mode
- 133 languages, fully localized
- Native SwiftUI, tuned for Apple Silicon
Caps Lock indicator — FAQ
Why doesn't my Mac keyboard have a Caps Lock light?
Several Apple keyboards, including Magic Keyboard models and a number of MacBook generations, dropped the physical LED. There's no software indicator built into macOS to replace it, which is why you find out from a password field.
Does a Caps Lock indicator need Input Monitoring permission?
Notchy's doesn't. It reads modifier flags — the state of the key — rather than watching your keystrokes, so macOS never has to grant it keylogging-adjacent access. Anything that asks for Input Monitoring to show Caps Lock is doing more than it needs to.
Is it intrusive?
It's a brief island on the notch that confirms the toggle and then goes away. No full-screen overlay, no sound, nothing that stays on top of what you're reading.
Is this a Captin alternative?
Yes, and a smaller-footprint one — you get the same confirmation without a dedicated app, because it's part of the notch app already running. The same island style covers volume, brightness and the keyboard backlight.