How to Use Stickies on Mac (Floating Desktop Notes)

Stickies has shipped with the Mac since 1994, and it still does something Notes can't: put a small, always-visible scrap of text on top of your work. A phone number during a call, today's three tasks, a terminal command you keep forgetting — on a sticky floating above every window, it's unmissable. Everything saves automatically, and the app costs you nothing because you already have it.

The basics in one minute

Open Stickies with Cmd+Space → type "Stickies". You get a note; type in it. Cmd+N makes another. There is no save button and no library window — each note is its own little window, it persists across restarts, and closing a note (Cmd+W) is the only way to delete one, with a confirmation and an offer to export first. That's the whole data model: what's on your screen is what exists.

Notes take real formatting: fonts and sizes via the Font menu, lists (press Tab after a dash, or use Edit → Substitutions' smart lists), links, and even pasted images and PDFs — drag a picture into a note and it sticks. The Color menu recolors any note; six paper colors, useful as categories (yellow = today, blue = reference).

The three tricks that make Stickies great

• Float on Top. Select a note and choose Note → Float on Top. Now it stays above every other window — Safari, your editor, a full-screen video call. This is the killer feature: the note you literally cannot lose behind other windows. Toggle it off in the same menu.
• Translucent. Note → Translucent makes the floating note see-through enough to read what's underneath. Combined with Float on Top, you get a HUD-style overlay for reference text — copy on the left of your brain, the thing you're typing underneath.
• Collapse to a title bar. Press Cmd+M (or double-click the title bar) and the note shrinks to a one-line bar showing its first line of text. A stack of collapsed stickies along a screen edge works like a tiny, glanceable list of open topics — expand one with another double-click.

Size and position are remembered per note. A practical layout: one wide "today" note top-right floating on top, everything else collapsed beneath it.

Housekeeping: export, import, backup

Stickies is deliberately simple, so its file operations are too:

• File → Export Text… saves the current note as plain text or RTF — the escape hatch when a scratch note grows into a real document that belongs in Notes or a proper editor.
• File → Import Text… turns a text file into a new sticky.
• Deleting: Cmd+W on the note, then Delete Note in the confirmation dialog (or Save to export it on the way out). There's no trash and no undo after that, so the confirmation deserves a beat of respect.

Where Stickies fits (and where it doesn't)

Stickies is a scratchpad, not a filing system: no sync to your iPhone, no folders, no search across notes. Its entire value is presence — the note is right there, on top, without opening anything. Use it for what's true today: the meeting dial-in, the reference number, the three things you must not forget before 5 p.m. When a note is still around next week, that's the sign it belongs in Notes (synced, searchable, organized) instead. The two apps make a good pair precisely because they solve opposite problems.

Need a bigger canvas?

When a sticky note wants to become a diagram — boxes, arrows, images, collaborators — the built-in step up is Freeform, Apple's infinite whiteboard. Same zero-cost, already-installed deal; entirely different scale.