Quick Capture

The fastest idea is the one you never lose. Jotaid gives you several ways to catch a thought the moment it arrives — and to sort it out later.

Quick Note

Quick Note is a lightweight capture window for jotting something down without interrupting whatever you were doing.

• macOS: Press ⇧⌘J (Shift + Command + J) anywhere in the app to toggle the floating Quick Note window. It keeps your draft even when it loses focus, so you can glance elsewhere and come back.
• iOS: Quick Note is the first thing you see at launch. Its Save and New Note button saves the current note and clears the field for the next one — built for capturing several ideas in a row.

Everything you capture lands in the Inbox by default, so you never have to decide where it belongs up front.

Three ways to close it on macOS, three different outcomes

Cancel in the Quick Note panel discards the draft; Save publishes it as a note; closing the window, pressing Esc or ⌘W just closes the window and keeps the draft for next time. To come back to it later, close the window — do not hit Cancel.

Say it instead (iOS)

When thoughts arrive faster than you can type, dictate them: open the keyboard in Quick Note on iOS, tap the Dictation button (the microphone), and watch the words appear as you speak. Fix them up afterwards.

This is iOS's own built-in dictation — there is no switch to turn on in Jotaid and no separate recorder app. The system does the transcribing; Jotaid only receives the finished text. Whatever occurs to you while walking, commuting or doing the dishes is one spoken sentence away from the Inbox.

TIP

Tagging as you write makes notes far easier to find and cluster later — see Tags.

Share Extension (iOS)

Send text, images, or URLs to Jotaid from any other app using the iOS share sheet:

1. Select text or an image in Safari, Notes, Photos, or any app — or share a link
2. Tap Share → Jotaid
3. Add anything you want in the quick compose view, then save — it becomes a new note in your Inbox

It saves straight away by default. To edit the title and body first, turn on Settings → Import & Paste → Share Edit Mode.

This is the fastest way to clip an article quote, a screenshot, or a research link without switching apps.

Import From the Clipboard

Copy something, then open Jotaid, and a banner asks whether to keep it. Two kinds:

What is on the clipboard	The banner	Tapping it
An https: link	"Detected a Link — Import as Note?" plus the domain	Fetches the page's text and previews it before creating the note
Text of 20 characters or more	"Detected Text — Create Note?" plus the first line	Opens the compose view with the content already in it

The banner retires itself after five seconds, and content you dismissed is never offered again.

Whole AI Conversations, in One Step

This path is at its best for importing an entire AI conversation: hit Share in ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, come back to Jotaid, tap the banner, and the whole exchange becomes one Markdown note — no copying passage by passage, and no need to open the AI chat panel.

The fetching is done by a third party, Jina Reader, so there is a domain allowlist:

• Only share links from known AI chat sites (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Poe, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Kimi, Tongyi, Yuanbao and the like) are ever forwarded for fetching
• No other link is forwarded — an internal company document or a private share link carrying a token never leaves your device; it can only become a plain-text note
• Even for allowlisted domains, the link is stripped of its user info, query string and fragment before being sent; only the path goes

Turn it off if you would rather not be asked

Settings → Import & Paste → Clipboard Monitor. With it off, Jotaid never reads the clipboard at all — not even enough to trigger the system's "Paste?" permission prompt. With it on, it checks once per launch rather than repeatedly.

Clip From Any App (macOS)

The Mac has no system-wide share sheet, so Jotaid ships two official extensions that send a selection to the Inbox from wherever you can select text — a browser, a PDF reader, a mail client.

PopClip

PopClip pops up a small bar whenever you select text. Install the Jotaid extension and that bar gains a Jotaid button:

1. Open the Jotaid extension in the PopClip Extensions Directory and install it — or search the directory for Jotaid from PopClip → Extensions
2. Select text in any app and click Jotaid in the bar
3. The selection lands in your Inbox, with the page title, link, source app and capture time recorded underneath

The part you selected, kept verbatim.

---

> Source: Safari · [The page title](https://example.com/post)
> Clipped Aug 12, 2026 at 2:30 PM

Every clipping is tagged clipping, so the whole collection is one filter away in the note list.

Nothing comes to the front — the clipping is saved in the background and you stay in whatever app you were reading. The tick in the PopClip bar is your confirmation.

Three options live in PopClip → Extensions → Jotaid:

Option	Default	What it does
Keep formatting	on	Sends Markdown when the source app offers rich text, so links and emphasis survive. Off = always plain text
Include source	on	Adds the page title, link and app name to the footnote. Off = the selection alone
Edit before saving	off	Opens a small window in Jotaid so you can fix the clipping up first. Off = saved straight to the Inbox

TIP

With Edit before saving on, ticking Don't ask again in that window switches back to silent saving. To bring the window back, turn the option off and on again here in PopClip — Jotaid cannot read PopClip's settings, so a changed value is how it learns you have made up your mind again.

Raycast

The Raycast extension is under review in the Raycast Store; once it ships you will find it by searching the store from Raycast.

If you use Raycast as your launcher, the Jotaid extension adds three commands:

Command	What it does
Quick Capture	Sends the text selected in whatever app you are in straight to the Inbox — or the clipboard, where macOS will not hand a selection over; the confirmation says which of the two it saved. Captures from a browser record the page's title and link, not merely the browser's name. Worth a hotkey
Search Notes	Search by title, or by title and body. ↵ opens the note in Jotaid; ⌘⇧C copies its text, ⌘⇧L copies a link back to it
Create Note	A place to type, and nothing else — whatever you write goes to the Inbox while Jotaid stays in the background

Captures land in the Inbox tagged clipping too, with the source app and time underneath, and with the title left blank so auto-fill can name them.

Raycast needs three system permissions (System Settings → Privacy & Security): Full Disk Access for Search Notes to read the library; Accessibility for Quick Capture to read your selection (without it, it falls back to the clipboard silently, which looks like the extension is broken); and Automation so it can ask a browser which page you are on (without it, the footnote carries only the browser's name). Restart Raycast completely after changing any of them.

Roll your own

Both extensions are thin wrappers over one deep link, which Shortcuts, Alfred, a script — anything that can open a URL — can call just as well:

jotaid://clip-note?text=<required>&title=&url=&app=&mode=silent|ask

All values are percent-encoded. mode picks between saving silently and opening the editor; the default is silent. Whatever you pass is cleaned up and length-capped, and a source URL is accepted only if it is https: — anything else is dropped. A missing or empty text means the link is ignored.

Keep an Answer From an AI Chat (macOS)

The AI chat panel behind ⇧⌘B is not only for asking — when an answer is worth keeping, save it as a note without leaving the panel:

1. Select the passage in the panel
2. Click Save to Note in the panel's toolbar (the bookmark icon; it moves into the ⋯ menu when the panel is narrow)

The note goes to the project you are currently in (or the Inbox when no project is selected), tagged browser-capture, and carries the context you will need to make sense of it later:

Field	What it holds
Source	The service (Claude / ChatGPT / Gemini / DeepSeek / Kimi / Web) and the page title
Section	The heading the selection sat under
Context	The text surrounding the selection, so it still reads
Link	The page link (https: only)
Date	When you saved it

The button is greyed out until something is selected. This path has nothing to do with Jotaid's own AI features: it does not consume your API key and is free to use.

Templates

When you do not know where to start, the empty page on macOS offers six thinking templates (literature note, decision record, problem framing, insight card, weekly review, brainstorm) — one click gives you a note with the skeleton already laid out. See Note Templates.

Next Steps

• New Note — Starting a note inside Jotaid
• Note Templates — Six ready-made thinking skeletons
• Note Formatting — Write with live highlighting
• Tags — Classify what you captured across the hierarchy
• Projects — Move captures out of the Inbox