A pad appears over whatever you're doing. Double-tap again and it's gone, saved, cursor exactly where you left it. Markdown that styles itself as you type, stored as plain .md files in a folder you own.
The pad appears over your terminal, your browser, your full-screen editor, on whatever Space you're on. It never takes the Dock and never shows up in ⌘-Tab. Prefer a normal hotkey? ⌥⇧S does the same thing, and it's rebindable.
# makes a heading, - makes a bullet that continues itself, - [ ] makes a checkbox you can click. No preview pane: the source is the styled view, so the file stays exactly what you see.
Gone. Saved. Focus back in the app you came from, mid-sentence. Next time you summon it, the caret is exactly where you left it.
.md, in your folderPoint Scratchpad at an Obsidian vault, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or a git repo. Edit a pad in another editor and Scratchpad picks it up live; if you both changed it, your text wins and the other copy is saved beside it. Never a silent overwrite.
Make as many pads as you like. The list is ordered by what you touched last, and pads you haven't opened in a month archive themselves: off the list, still on disk, still found by search.
No account, no telemetry, no network calls except the update check. Autosave runs 400 ms after you stop typing and again when you put the pad away.
| App | Price | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Scratchpad (this one) | Free | Uncapped · live-styled Markdown · plain .md in a folder you choose |
| Scratch | $14.99 | Files live in Application Support; folder isn't relocatable |
| Scratchpad | $10 | One note, plain text only |
| Antinote | $5 | Not a Markdown editor; disposable-first |
| Raycast Notes | Free tier | Capped at 5 notes; notes live in Raycast, not as files |
| Tot | Free | Hard cap of 7 notes; no .md files; no search across them |
| Apple Quick Note | Free | Rich text in the Notes database; activates Notes |
It only fires on a clean tap, so holding Shift to type a capital never summons it. Because a bare modifier can't be a normal hotkey, that one feature asks for Accessibility permission. Turn it off and the ⌥⇧S hotkey still works; Settings lets you rebind it, and makes you press the key once to prove nothing else already owns it.
No tiers, no keys, no accounts. Updates itself.
Download Scratchpad · 1.0.0 · universal