tyke.app

Tyke is a little scratch pad that lives in your menu bar. Click the icon, type, click away. Your text is still there next time.

Where is it?

Tyke has no Dock icon and no main window — it lives entirely in the menu bar at the top of your screen. Look for the Tyke icon up there and click it to open the scratch pad.

Opening it from the keyboard

Press ⌃⌥T (control-option-T) from any app to open Tyke with the cursor already in the text box. Press it again to dismiss. You can change this shortcut in Settings.

Settings

Click the gear in the bottom corner of the Tyke window, or press ⌘, while Tyke is open. From there you can change the font, set the global hotkey, and choose whether Tyke launches when you log in.

Keeping it on screen

Click the detach button in the bottom corner to pop Tyke out into a small floating window that stays visible while you work in other apps. Drag the window where you like — Tyke remembers the position. Click the menu bar icon again to snap it back.

While detached, the global hotkey hides and shows the floating window rather than opening the menu bar popover.

Quitting

Right-click the Tyke icon in the menu bar and choose Quit Tyke. (⌘Q won't work from the floating window — because Tyke never takes focus away from the app you're working in, ⌘Q goes to that app instead.)

How much can it hold?

100,000 characters, which is a lot of scratch paper. The counter at the bottom shows where you are. If you paste something that would push you over, Tyke refuses the paste and tells you — your clipboard is left untouched, so nothing is lost.

Where is my text kept?

In one plain-text file on your Mac, at:

~/Library/Containers/org.torrez.tyke/Data/Library/
Application Support/Tyke/scratch.txt

It is ordinary UTF-8 text with no wrapper format, so you can always open it with any editor. Tyke saves shortly after you stop typing, and again when you quit. Nothing is ever sent anywhere — see the privacy policy.

Something is wrong

If Tyke says it can't save or load, the usual cause is a permissions problem on that file or a full disk. If you get stuck, write to me — details below, and please say which version of macOS you're on.