How to hide Stickies on a Mac

To hide Apple's Stickies on a Mac without deleting them, quit the Stickies app. Apple's guide says that when Stickies is closed, notes don't appear on your desktop, and they show again when you reopen it. To hide one note rather than all of them, collapse it or make it translucent.

This guide covers those options in Apple's Stickies, which comes with macOS, then how to remove a note for good, then the other approach: hiding a note at the edge of the screen, which is how Stickies by Coduo works. Stickies by Coduo is a separate menu-bar app from Apple's Stickies. It does not read or change Apple's notes, and it is not released yet.

How do you hide Apple's Stickies without deleting them?

Apple's Stickies gives you three ways, from hiding everything to shrinking one note:

1. Hide every note: quit Apple's Stickies. Notes only appear while the app is open. Quit it and they leave the desktop; open it and they are back. Nothing is deleted.
2. Shrink one note: collapse it. Double-click the note's title bar. Apple says a collapsed note shows its first line in the title bar, so give your notes a useful first line. Double-click again to expand it.
3. Fade one note: make it translucent. Select the note and choose Window > Translucent. The note stays where it is but becomes semi-transparent, so you can see what is behind it.

Two more settings help with clutter without hiding anything. Window > Arrange By groups your notes by an option you pick. And if a note is floating over everything because you turned on Window > Float on Top, the guide to keeping sticky notes on top covers that setting.

Quitting is the only one of these that clears the desktop, and it is all or nothing: every note goes, including the one you wanted to keep in view.

How do you remove a sticky for good?

In Apple's Stickies, click the box in the note's top-left corner, then click Delete Note. Apple's guide describes no undo and no trash for a deleted note, so if there is any chance you want it later, save a copy first with File > Export Text. The guide to where Stickies are stored covers exporting and backing up every note.

In Stickies by Coduo, Delete is in the menu at the bottom of each sticky. It removes the sticky at once, with no confirmation and no trash, so it is not a way to hide anything.

Can you hide notes but keep them one move away?

Not in Apple's Stickies. Its options either leave the note on the desktop (collapsed or translucent) or take every note away with the app. There is no place to put one note aside and pull it back with a single move.

That gap is what an edge stash fills: the note leaves your working area, but a strip of it stays at the screen edge, and pointing at the strip brings it back. Stickies by Coduo is built around that idea. Every sticky is either pinned, as a window on the desktop, or stashed, as a strip at the right edge.

How does Stickies by Coduo's stash work?

Click the pin at the top of a pinned sticky. The window closes and the sticky goes to the top of the stash on the right edge of the screen. That is the whole hide: no menu, and the sticky is not deleted, only moved.

What the stash looks like, from the code:

• A column of strips. Each stashed sticky shows as a strip 12 points wide and 84 tall (42 if the sticky has no text), 4 points apart, in a column centred on the right edge. The most recently changed sticky is at the top.
• One panel per display. With more than one screen, each gets its own stash at its right edge, on every Space.
• Nothing when empty. When no sticky is stashed, the app removes the edge panel entirely. No strip, and no area at the edge that reacts to the pointer.
• Out of the way at rest. The panel at rest is 20 points wide, just enough for the strips and the area that responds to the pointer.

A sticky you write in the menu-bar panel goes straight to the stash unless you turn on the panel's pin before saving. Command-Shift-N does the opposite and makes a new sticky already pinned on the desktop.

How do you bring a stashed sticky back?

Hover, click, then pin it if you want it to stay.

1. Hover to peek. Hold the pointer over a strip for a tenth of a second and a 264 × 176 point card appears beside it, showing that sticky's title and first lines. Only the one you point at appears; the others stay strips. Move away and the card goes after 0.2 seconds.
2. Click to open. Click the card and the sticky opens as a full window. Its strip leaves the edge while it is open.
3. Pin it to keep it. An opened sticky is still stashed. Click anywhere else and it closes back to the edge. To keep it on the desktop, click its pin.

The stash has limits worth knowing:

• Right edge only. There is no setting for the left edge.
• Seven before it scrolls. With more than seven stashed stickies, the column becomes a scrolling list. You can still click any strip to open it, but hovering does not peek in the scrolling list yet.
• Strips all look alike for now. Every new sticky gets the default theme and there is no way to change it yet, so the strips do not tell stickies apart. Peeking is how you find the one you want.

Which way of hiding should you use?

If you only need a clear desktop now and then, quitting Apple's Stickies does it and brings everything back when you reopen the app. If you keep a handful of notes you want out of sight but close at hand all day, that is the job the stash in Stickies by Coduo was built for. The guide to putting sticky notes on the desktop covers the other half, getting a note onto the screen.