Why

You're three layers deep in a Figma file, or rereading a paragraph of a paper, or untangling a function that almost compiles, and your brain does the thing it always does:

"I should email Maya about Friday." "What was that link Jay sent me?" "Add a tag system to crane."

Three options, all bad:

1. Hold the thought. Now you're juggling two things, and the original task is degraded.
2. Switch apps to write it down properly (Notes, Linear, a journal). The switch costs you the flow you were protecting in the first place.
3. Let it go. It comes back at 11pm, in the shower, three days later — the wrong moment, every time.

crane is the fourth option. A global Cmd+Shift+Space anywhere, a one-line capture pill in the upper third of your screen, hit Enter, the pill dismisses, you're back in your editor. Total elapsed time: roughly 2 seconds.

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.

Cmd+Shift+Space

Hit the hotkey from anywhere.

1. Hit the hotkey

Cmd+Shift+Space drops a 620×88pt panel at the upper third of the active screen. The text field is already focused. No Dock animation, no app switch, no warm-up — registered via Carbon's RegisterEventHotKey, so it works inside the App Sandbox.

Cmd+Shift+Space

Drop your thought…

Email Maya about Friday — try the late slot|

Press EnterEnter

2. Drop a thought

Type a fragment or paste a URL. Cmd+L toggles link mode — a LINK badge appears and the URL is parsed at save-time. crane doesn't care what you put in; it cares that putting it in took zero context-switch.

Cmd+Shift+Space

Drop your thought…

Email Maya about Friday — try the late slot

SavedEnter

3. Save and vanish

Return saves the drop and dismisses the pill with a quick checkmark blip. The window collapses, the drop joins your history, and you're back in the document you were reading two seconds ago.

What it does

• Cmd+Shift+Space anywhere — toggle the capture pill on the active screen's upper third
• Type → Enter — persist the drop, dismiss the pill
• Cmd+L — toggle link mode; URLs render as clickable rows in history
• Cmd+H — expand the same panel into a searchable history list, newest-first, with per-row delete on hover
• Menu-bar dashboard — TOTAL / TODAY / STREAK cards, a 14-day activity sparkline, thoughts-vs-links breakdown, and three most recent drops
• Stays out of your way — no Dock icon, no Cmd-Tab entry; crane lives in your menu bar and behind a global keystroke

A small history of what you saved

Every drop goes into a local SwiftData store you can search and delete from. There's no sync, no account, no LLM rephrasing your sentence — it's a flat list with a search box on top.

Architecture

The capture pill and history list live inside the same borderless NSPanel, not separate windows. Switching between views animates the panel's frame downward from 620×88 (pill) to 620×480 (history) while the SwiftUI hierarchy cross-fades.

The menu-bar dashboard and the overlay panel point to the same shared ModelContainer. A drop captured via Cmd+Shift+Space lights up the dashboard's TOTAL/TODAY/STREAK numbers and the recent list live — both surfaces consume drops via @Query.

craneApp (SwiftUI scene + MenuBarExtra)
  │
  ├── AppDelegate ──── GlobalHotkey (⌘⇧Space)
  │       │
  │       └── OverlayController ──── NSPanel (borderless, .floating)
  │                                       │
  │                                       └── NSHostingView<ContentView>
  │                                               ├── DropInputBar
  │                                               └── HistoryView
  │
  └── DashboardView (menu-bar popover)

Design system

crane is built to feel like one coordinated surface, not a bag of views. Three shared tokens carry that: one motion language, one corner radius, one edge highlight — all in Design.swift.

• Two springs, not five. craneSpring for big transitions (input ⇄ history, panel resize); craneSnappy for hover, press, and the save checkmark.
• Continuous corners at 22pt for primary surfaces (pill, history card). Always .continuous — never .circular.
• Specular border — a 0.5pt linear-gradient stroke from white-at-22% top-leading to white-at-4% bottom-trailing. Reads as a highlight on the lit side of glass, not an outline.
• Liquid Glass where safe. Dashboard stat cards and row hover states use .glassEffect(); the capture pill uses .regularMaterial instead — focused text fields inside a glass surface get an unavoidable focus halo on macOS 26, and there's no public API to opt out.

Keyboard

| Where | Combo | Action | |---|---|---| | Anywhere | Cmd+Shift+Space | Toggle the capture pill | | Capture pill | Enter | Save the drop, dismiss | | Capture pill | Cmd+L | Toggle link mode | | Capture pill | Cmd+H | Switch to history view | | Capture pill | Esc | Dismiss | | History | Esc | Back to capture pill | | Anywhere | Cmd+Q | Quit |

Development

Requires macOS 26.4 (Tahoe) and Xcode 26 — the app leans on @Model / @Query (SwiftData), Liquid Glass tokens, and MenuBarExtra features from this era. There's no release artifact yet; building from source is the supported path.

git clone https://github.com/abhay-cs/crane.git
cd crane
open crane.xcodeproj
⌘R in Xcode

See the live site at crane.byabhay.com or the full README on GitHub.