A menubar scratchpad for macOS: a small fixed set of pads, each a floating window you can summon over whatever you are working in, type or paste into, and close without being asked to name or file anything.
What makes it worth building rather than another notes application is what the pads are connected to. Text in a pad can be reshaped in place by a transform — pretty-print the JSON, decode the base64 field, sort the lines — or handed to a language model to tidy or summarise, and the same pad can be opened up to a coding agent that reads and writes it over the Model Context Protocol. The pad is the shared surface: you work in it, and so does whatever else you have running.
Status: version 1.0.0, in daily use by its author. Download the latest release — signed with a Developer ID and notarised, so it opens on a Mac that has never seen it without a Gatekeeper override. Runs on macOS 15 or later.
A request fails. You paste the response body into a pad, where it arrives as one unreadable line, and pretty-print it from the wand menu. The interesting part is a base64 field, so you select that and decode it in place. You add two lines of your own underneath about what you think is going on.
Then you expose the pad and tell Claude Code to look at it. It reads the pad, works out that the token expired four hours ago, and appends what it found below your notes — one undo away if you disagree. Nothing was copied between windows, and there is no third place where the conversation lives.
Everything below is detail about how each of those parts behaves.
Nine pads by default and never more than twenty, listed under the cat in the menubar. A pad opens over whatever you are doing, including a fullscreen application, and stays where you put it without pulling focus or rearranging anything behind it. ⌃⌥Space brings back the one you used last from inside any application, and pressing it again puts it away.
Styled pads keep formatting and images, so a paste from a browser arrives intact with its screenshots. Plain pads hold text and nothing else, which is what you want for code and JSON where smart quotes are never welcome.
There is nothing to save, no title to invent and no folder to choose. Close a pad and it is still there next time. Pads are ordinary files in your Library, readable with any editor and kept out of Spotlight, and Itchy makes no network connection of its own until you configure something that needs one.
A pad can carry a coloured rule under its title bar, set in that pad's own settings and off until you set it. It is there for the moment you are looking for one pad among a screenful of windows: the title bar greys out when a pad is not the window you are typing in, and the rule does not. Six colours, each with a value for light and for dark, or one of your own.
Twelve of them, from the wand button on the pad: flatten styling, upper and lower and title case, pretty-print and minify JSON, encode and decode base64, encode and decode URL components, trim whitespace, sort lines. Each acts on the selection if there is one and the whole pad if there is not, and each is a single undo step that the Edit menu names.
A transform is offered only when it would work on the text in front of you, so Decode Base64 is greyed out on text that is not base64 and says why when you hover it. The alternative is a menu that offers everything and then fails, which teaches you to distrust the menu.
Three more transforms in the same menu, once you have configured a model: tidy the prose, summarise it, or turn it into bullet points. They replace text with text and undo in one step like everything else. There is no chat panel and no conversation view, because a scratchpad that answers questions grows a reply field, then a history, and ends up as a chat window with a save button.
Itchy looks for a model on your Mac first — Ollama, or anything speaking its API — under every setting and on every pad, because a model running locally sends nothing anywhere. If the local one cannot be reached, Itchy says so rather than sending your text to a remote service instead, and that holds even on a pad you have set to allow remote work. Each pad carries its own answer to whether its text may go remote at all: local only, allowed, or ask me each time, which asks before anything leaves and names where it is going.
Switch the agent server on, expose a pad, and a coding agent can list, read,
append to, replace and create pads over the Model Context Protocol. It listens
on 127.0.0.1 and nothing else, every request carries a token you can
regenerate, and no pad is reachable until you expose it individually.
Five tools and no sixth. An agent cannot run your transforms, reach your models, or see a pad you have not opened up, and widening that surface is a decision somebody has to take rather than a line somebody adds.
When an agent writes to a pad you have open, the write lands in the window as a single named undo. When it writes to one you have closed, the pad says so the next time you look at it, and the menubar marks it until you do. Clients that run on your Mac work directly — Claude Code, Codex, and Claude Desktop through the small shim that ships inside the application.
Itchy is for content that is passing through: a tracking number, a failing request's JSON, a paragraph still being argued over. It is not a note-taking application and will not grow into one. There is no document library, no folders, no tags and no search across everything, because the whole collection fits in a glance.
The vision document explains why the limit is the design, and what the project is measured by.
Take the disk image from the latest release, open it, and drag Itchy into Applications. It is notarised, so it opens without a Gatekeeper override and without the right-click dance.
Itchy has no Dock icon and no main window; look for the cat in the menubar. It
only offers to start at login when it runs from /Applications.
To build it yourself instead:
brew install swiftlint xcodegen
git clone https://github.com/thowland/itchy.git && cd itchy
make appThat leaves the bundle at build/Itchy.app, to be dragged into /Applications
the same way. A build from source is signed ad-hoc rather than with a Developer
ID, which is fine on the machine that built it.
The user guide covers everything from there, and Itchy Help in the menubar covers the same ground inside the application.
| To run | macOS 15 or later |
| To build | macOS 26 and Xcode 26, which also provides swift-format |
| SwiftLint, XcodeGen | brew install swiftlint xcodegen |
make open # generate the Xcode project and open it
make run # build and launch
make test # the test suite, without the UI tests
make gate # lint, architecture checks, tests and coverage
make help # everything elseThe gate is what a change has to pass: SwiftLint and swift-format in strict
mode, six architecture checks, every test, and a coverage floor of 80 per cent.
docs/development.md covers the rest — the test suites and
their permissions, signing for development, the repository layout, and
troubleshooting.
| User guide | Using Itchy |
| Development | Building, testing, permissions, troubleshooting |
| Releasing | Versions, certificates, notarisation, packaging |
| Changelog | What changed, by version |
| Vision | Why this exists, and what it must never become |
| Architecture | Layers, storage, build order |
| Requirements | Numbered, with acceptance criteria |
| Specification | How it is assembled |
| Implementation plan | Sprints and the exit gate |
| Decisions | Every design decision, with its reasoning |
Itchy is a personal tool first, and its main risk is growing into the application it was built to avoid. Bug reports are welcome. Before proposing a feature, read CONTRIBUTING.md, which explains the one question every addition has to answer.
Security issues: see SECURITY.md.
Copyright © 2026 Tim Howland.
Itchy is free software, released under the GNU General Public License, version 3.