How to put sticky notes on your Mac desktop

Stickies: the built-in sticky notes app

Stickies is in your Applications folder, and you can open it from Spotlight by typing its name. Notes save as you type, and each one is its own small window you can drag anywhere.

1. Open Stickies and choose File›, then New Note.
2. Type your note. The first line becomes its title when you collapse it.
3. Pick a color from the Color menu: Yellow, Blue, Green, Pink, Purple or Gray.
4. Drag the note by its title bar to where you want it.

A few options in the Window menu make Stickies far more useful:

• Window›, then Float on Top keeps that note above every app window, so it’s always in view.
• Window›, then Translucent lets you see through it, which makes a floating note easier to live with.
• Window›, then Use as Default makes new notes copy the color and font of the one you’ve selected.
• Window›, then Arrange By gathers all your notes into one group, sorted by color, content, date or place on screen.

Double-click a note’s title bar to collapse it to one line. To delete a note, click the box in its top-left corner, then Delete Note. You can drag a picture or a PDF into a note too.

A Notes widget on the desktop

Since macOS Sonoma, widgets can sit on the desktop itself. The Notes app has two: Note shows one note and Folder shows a folder of them. Unlike Stickies, a widget doesn’t depend on an app staying open, and it stays behind your windows instead of on top of them.

1. Control-click the wallpaper and choose Edit Widgets….
2. Search for Notes, then drag the Note widget onto the desktop, or click it to place it automatically.
3. Click Done. Then Control-click the widget and choose Edit “Note”… to pick which note it shows.

You write and change the note in the Notes app, and the widget follows. You can add several Note widgets, one per note. When windows cover them, click the wallpaper to move the windows aside, as long as Click wallpaper to show desktop in Desktop & Dock settings is set to Always.

If the widget looks gray, check Dim widgets on desktop in System Settings›, then Desktop & Dock. Set it to Never to keep widgets in full color, or Always for monochrome. Our guide to customizing Mac widgets covers sizes and styles.

Quick Note, for a thought you want to catch

Quick Note is the fastest way to write something down without leaving what you’re doing. Hold the Globe (fn) key and press Q, or move the pointer to the bottom-right corner of the screen and click the note that appears. It stays on screen while it’s open, so you can add text or links from other apps.

When you close it, it goes to the Quick Notes folder in Notes rather than staying on the desktop. The same shortcut opens your last Quick Note again, unless you turn off Always resume to last Quick Note in Notes settings.

Which one to use

A desktop full of notes gets noisy fast. If yours is already crowded, our guide to organizing your Mac desktop clears files out of the way first.

A note in your wallpaper’s colors, with MacScapes

MacScapes has a Note widget of its own: a few lines of text on the desktop, in the colors of the live wallpaper behind it. It sits just above the wallpaper and below your Finder icons, and it ignores clicks, so it never gets in the way. Because widgets belong to a vibe, a work vibe can show this week’s priorities and an evening vibe something else, and they switch along with the scene.

1. In MacScapes, open Vibes, Control-click a vibe and choose Edit….
2. Under Widgets, click Add Widget… and choose Note.
3. Type your text in the Note field. A small or medium note shows four or five lines, a large one up to nine.
4. Click Arrange on Desktop…, drag the note into place and click Done, then click Save.

Pick a typeface (grotesk, rounded, serif or mono) and a material for all of a vibe’s widgets, and turn on Match palette colors to tint them with the scene. The Note widget is part of MacScapes Pro; the Clock, Date and Day widgets are free. The desktop widgets page shows all fourteen.