A sheet of glass over whatever you're doing, that you can write on.
An open-source, file-backed alternative to Raycast Notes for macOS.
Press ⌃⌥Space and a panel floats in over your work, caret already in the note you used last. Type. Press it again and it's gone, caret back where it was. No app switch, no save dialog, no cold start — summoning Pane doesn't activate it or touch your menu bar.
Your notes are .md files in a flat folder you choose. Unlimited, yours, and readable by
everything else you own.
brew install --cask ColeMei/pane/paneOr download the .dmg from the latest release, open it,
and drag Pane.app onto the Applications folder beside it.
Important
macOS will say Pane "is damaged and can't be opened". It isn't.
That is what Gatekeeper says about any unsigned app, and right-click → Open no longer gets past it. Pane has no Apple Developer ID behind it. Clear the quarantine flag once and it launches normally from then on:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Pane.appOr skip the flag at install time:
brew install --cask --no-quarantine ColeMei/pane/panePane is built to the same habits on purpose — same summon-and-type feel, and every shortcut both apps have uses the same key, so your fingers carry over.
| Raycast Notes | Pane | |
|---|---|---|
| Notes | 5 on the free plan, unlimited on Pro | Unlimited |
| Where they live | Raycast's own storage | .md files in a folder you pick |
| Sync | Cloud Sync, on Pro | Whatever you already run — iCloud Drive, Syncthing, git |
| Cost | Free tier + Pro subscription | Free, MIT, no account |
| Needs | The Raycast app | Nothing |
Not affiliated with or endorsed by Raycast Technologies.
- Live markdown, Typora-style — raw syntax shows only on the caret's line, so the rest of the note stays rendered while you type.
- ⌘P switcher: recency bands, fuzzy title match, full-text search. No results? ⏎ makes a note titled with what you typed.
- ⌘K for everything else — find, export, reveal in Finder, hide from screen capture, recently deleted — so the title bar stays at three icons.
- Deleted notes are recoverable for as long as you choose, and they wait outside your vault so they don't sync back.
- Height follows the note until you drag it. Floats over fullscreen apps, follows you between Spaces, menu bar item, launch at login, light and dark.
- External edits are picked up automatically, and Pane never silently overwrites a file that changed underneath it.
Plain .md files, ~/Documents/Pane by default. What's in the file is what you typed, byte for
byte — no frontmatter, no database.
Filenames are frozen at creation (2026-08-11-1453-first-few-words.md) and the title is just the
first line, so editing a title never renames a file. Renames are the biggest single source of
duplicate copies in iCloud Drive and Syncthing. Caret positions, pins and window geometry live in
~/Library/Application Support/Pane/, outside the vault, never synced.
⌘, from any pane. Hotkey recorder, vault location, accent, text size, translucency, and a rebindable table for every in-pane shortcut.
It's all plain JSON in settings.json, which Pane watches and re-reads live — so editing it by
hand, over SSH, or from a dotfiles repo works immediately. A markdown theme is just a CSS file:
drop one in the themes folder and it appears in Appearance.
Pane requests no privacy permissions at all — the global hotkey needs no Accessibility access. No telemetry, no account, no server. The only network call it ever makes is checking for a new release, and only when you press the button.
A SwiftPM package plus a web bundle. No Xcode project, on purpose — everything builds with the Command Line Tools alone.
Scripts/test.sh # run the PaneKit suite
Scripts/build-app.sh --debug # assemble build/Pane.appSwift + AppKit owns the panel, hotkey and file I/O; the editor is CodeMirror 6 in a WKWebView.
No Node process, no Rust core, no Electron. The buffer is the markdown — live preview is
view-only decoration, so what lands on disk is byte-for-byte what you typed.
MIT
Special thanks to linux.do