crane is a tiny Mac menu-bar app that catches ideas before they disappear. Hit ⌘⇧Space over anything you're doing, type, press Enter — the bar closes and your thought is saved. No dock icon. No window to manage. No context lost.
~2s
From key-press to saved and gone
0
Network requests crane ever makes
100%
Tagging that runs on your Mac
Free
Open source — no account, no server
01
Press ⌘⇧Space over any app and a quiet bar floats in, already focused. Type the thought, press ↵, and it's gone — you never left the thing you were doing. That's the whole app: nothing to file, nothing to close.
02
Pasting a URL? Hit ⌘L and the bar flips to link mode. Thoughts and links land in the same history, searchable with ⌘F — one place for everything your brain throws at you mid-task.
03
crane makes zero network requests — no API key, no sign-in, nothing to phone home. Every note lives in a single file on your Mac. Reset it all from the menu whenever you like.
04
It's a menu-bar app, not a workspace. No dock icon, no big window — just a floating bar when you need it and a small popover for recent entries, tags and stats when you don't.
crane reads each thought and tags it with a topic or two, so you can find things later without having remembered to file them. That runs entirely on your Mac, through Apple Intelligence's Foundation Models — your thoughts are never sent anywhere.
Tagging happens after the save. It never slows down capture.“Can someone capture a thought in two seconds without thinking about the UI? If not, simplify.”
Download crane, drag it to Applications, press ⌘⇧Space. That's the setup. It's free and open source — build it yourself if you'd rather.