How to Turn Off the Quick Note Corner on Mac

Aim for a scroll bar, overshoot by ten pixels, and a Notes page curls out of the bottom-right corner — again. That's Quick Note, the only hot corner macOS ships turned on. Switching it off takes a minute, you can keep Quick Note itself on a keystroke, and there's a middle path most people miss: requiring a modifier key.

Turn the corner off

1. Open System Settings → Desktop & Dock.
2. Scroll to the bottom and click Hot Corners…
3. The sheet shows a dropdown for each screen corner. Open the bottom-right one (or wherever Quick Note lives on your machine).
4. Choose the “–” at the top of the menu — no action — and click Done.

The corner is now inert. This works the same on Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia; Quick Note has been the default bottom-right corner since macOS Monterey, which is why every Mac you set up fresh greets you with the same surprise note sooner or later. Nothing else about Notes changes — existing Quick Notes stay in their folder, and the feature remains available from the keyboard as described below.

The middle path: keep it, but require a key

Hot corners have a barely-documented option that fixes accidental triggers without losing the feature: hold a modifier key while choosing the action in that same dropdown. Hold Cmd as you select Quick Note and the menu entry records as ⌘ Quick Note — now the corner only fires when Cmd is held as the pointer arrives. Accidental scroll-bar overshoots do nothing; a deliberate Cmd-flick to the corner still opens your note. This trick works for every hot corner action, and it's often better than disabling corners outright.

The Terminal route

Hot corners store per-corner action codes in the Dock's preferences — 14 is Quick Note, 1 is no action:

# disable the bottom-right (br) Quick Note corner
defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-br-corner -int 1
killall Dock

# undo: restore Quick Note to the bottom-right corner
defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-br-corner -int 14
killall Dock

The other corners are wvous-tl-corner, wvous-tr-corner, and wvous-bl-corner, if you script your setup across Macs.

Quick Note without the corner

Disabling the corner doesn't touch the feature. You can still summon Quick Note any time:

• fn + Q (or Globe + Q) — opens a Quick Note from anywhere; links to the page you're on in Safari, just like the corner did.
• In Notes, your Quick Notes collect in their own folder in the sidebar, corner or no corner.

If anything, the keystroke is the better trigger: it works when the pointer is nowhere near a corner, and it never fires by accident.

Or give the corner a better job

Before writing the corner off entirely, consider a remap — the same dropdown lists a dozen actions, and several earn prime real estate better than Quick Note does:

• Desktop — shoves every window aside to expose your files; the single most useful corner for drag-and-drop work.
• Lock Screen — one flick locks the Mac as you stand up; pairs perfectly with a modifier key so a stray swipe can't lock you mid-sentence.
• Mission Control — the full overview, for people who navigate by mouse more than keyboard.
• Put Display to Sleep — the classic end-of-day corner, and kinder than letting the screen idle at full brightness.

While the sheet is open, audit the other three corners too — most Macs have three doing nothing. Whatever you assign, the modifier-key trick applies everywhere: hold Cmd or Option while selecting an action and accidental triggers vanish while deliberate ones stay a flick away. Quick Note's real mistake wasn't being a hot corner; it was being the only one enabled by default, in the exact corner where scroll bars and notification buttons live.

While you're in there

Hot corners are worth configuring rather than abandoning — a Lock Screen corner and a Desktop corner earn their pixels daily. The full action list and setup is in the complete hot corners guide.