A floating capture bar that lives behind ⌘⇧Space and a menu-bar drop. Type a thought, hit Enter, get back to your editor. Total elapsed time: roughly two seconds. The thought is yours to come back to on your own terms — not the brain's.
"I should email Maya about Friday."
"What was that link Jay sent me?"
"Add a tag system to crane."
Three options, all bad. Hold the thought and watch your real task degrade. Switch apps to write it down properly and lose the flow you were protecting in the first place. Or let it go, and it comes back at 11:00 PM, in the shower, three days later — the wrong moment, every time.
crane is the fourth option. A global ⌘⇧Space anywhere, a one-line capture pill in the upper third of your screen, hit ↵ — the pill dismisses, you're back in your editor.
This is not a notes app. It's a holding pen between flow and proper capture. The history is meant to be skimmed at the end of a session and either acted on or discarded.
Friction so low your real task barely notices the interruption. No naming files. No choosing folders. No waiting for an Electron window to come up — just open, type, enter.
Capture, link, and history share one borderless panel. Switching between them animates the panel's frame downward while the SwiftUI hierarchy cross-fades — so the pill stays exactly where your eye left it.
Anywhere on macOS, hit ⌘⇧Space. A 596×64pt pill drops in at the upper third of the active screen with the cursor already inside. No dock animation, no app switch, no warm-up.
Hit ⌘L and a tiny LINK badge appears. The URL is parsed at save-time and rendered as a clickable row in history. Same input, same two-second flow.
⌘H grows the same panel downward into a searchable list of every drop, newest-first, with per-row delete on hover. Esc anywhere takes you back.
⌘⇧Space drops the pill on the
active screen's upper third — registered via Carbon's RegisterEventHotKey, so it
works inside the App Sandbox with no extra entitlements.
Type. Hit Enter. A quick checkmark blip and the pill is gone. The thought is captured in SwiftData.
⌘L toggles a LINK badge. URLs are parsed at save-time and rendered as clickable rows in history.
⌘H expands the same panel into a searchable list, newest-first, with per-row delete on hover.
A drop-shaped tray icon gives you TOTAL, TODAY, STREAK, a 14-day sparkline, a thoughts-vs-links breakdown, and your three most recent drops.
No Dock icon. No Cmd-Tab entry. crane lives in your menu bar and behind a global keystroke.
Materials, continuous corners, and a 0.5pt specular border on every primary surface. One motion language, one corner radius, one edge highlight — across the pill, history, and dashboard.
One shared ModelContainer backs the pill and the dashboard. A capture lights up
TODAY, STREAK and the recent list live — both surfaces consume drops via @Query.
crane is a keyboard-first tool. Touching the mouse should be a choice, not a requirement. Every chord is a single hand from the home row.
Click the drop in your menu bar and a small panel slides down with TOTAL / TODAY / STREAK,
a 14-day activity sparkline, a thoughts-vs-links breakdown, and the three most recent drops —
all backed by the same ModelContainer as the pill.
Requires macOS 26.4 (Tahoe) and Xcode 26. The capture pill registers via Carbon's
RegisterEventHotKey — works inside the App Sandbox without extra entitlements.
