Capture & Shelf
Screenshots that land where you need them
Capture a region and the shot stages itself on the notch — draggable, pasteable, OCR-able. Notchy keeps your Desktop out of it, free.
Staged, not dumped
Each shot becomes a draggable island on the notch. Drop it into Slack, a doc or an upload field without going anywhere near a Finder window.
Clipboard and file, at once
The macOS region selector you already know opens on tap. The result is on your clipboard for an instant ⌘V and on the shelf as a real PNG.
Text out of any capture
Send a shot through OCR and the words in the image land on your clipboard — no retyping an error message out of a screenshot again.
Part of the same shelf
Screenshots share the file shelf with everything else you're moving around — compress, resize or Quick Look without leaving the notch.
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
Mac screenshot tool — FAQ
How do I stop screenshots cluttering my Mac desktop?
Let them land somewhere you can act on instead. Notchy auto-stages every screenshot you take on the notch as a draggable island — drop it straight into a chat, a doc or an upload field, and it never has to sit on the Desktop at all.
Does Notchy take the screenshot, or just catch it?
Both. One tap opens the familiar macOS region selector, and the shot lands on the clipboard for an instant paste plus on the shelf as a PNG you can drag. Screenshots you take with the system shortcuts get staged too.
Is this a free CleanShot X alternative?
For capture, staging and drag-out, yes. CleanShot X goes further on annotation, scrolling capture and screen recording — if you live in those, it earns its price. If you mainly capture and then drag the result somewhere, Notchy covers it for nothing.
Can I pull the text out of a screenshot?
Yes. The capture can go straight into OCR, so text in the image becomes text on your clipboard — the same engine behind Notchy's OCR tool.
Where do the files actually go?
They're real PNGs on disk, staged on the shelf for quick access rather than hidden in an app library. Drag one out and you're dragging the file itself.