The Note My toolbar, button by button
Note My's toolbar is icon-only: nineteen controls in eleven glass capsules, every one of them named. Here is each control in order, what it does for you, and the four that show their current state at a glance.
You are looking at a row of small symbols across the top of the window, and you would rather know what a button does before you press it. This page names all nineteen controls in Note My in the order they appear, says what each one gives you, and points out the few that reward a second look: the menus that hide a whole family of commands behind a chevron, and the four toggles that report their own state back to you.
How to read the bar
Two things about the bar's shape make it much easier to scan once you know them.
It is icon-only by design. The glyph is the whole control, which keeps the row short and gives the window over to your text. Every item is still fully named: the names in this guide are the accessibility labels — the same words VoiceOver speaks, and the same words the in-app tour uses as its headings. Hovering a control shows its tooltip, and several of the tooltips report state rather than describing an action.
The nineteen items sit inside eleven glass capsules. The grouping is not decoration and it is not random: a run of ordinary buttons shares one capsule, and every button that opens a menu gets a capsule to itself. The rule does not run backwards, though: a plain button can end up alone in a capsule too, so the dependable tell for a menu is the chevron drawn beside the glyph, not the capsule around it. Scan for chevrons first and the bar sorts into two kinds of control: things that act at once, and things that offer a list.
Four of the controls are toggles rather than buttons. A toggle that is on is drawn as a solid accent-coloured disc with a white glyph — not as a bordered rectangle. If a symbol is sitting on a filled circle, that feature is on right now.
The identity capsule, and the path that is a link
The first item is not a button at all. It is the app icon, the app name in bold, and one or more path labels for the file you are in.
The path is live. Click it and the Finder opens with that file selected. Hover it and you get the full path as a tooltip. A document you have never saved shows no path — its name lives on its tab instead. While you are comparing two documents, both files are shown, separated.
Files: New, Templates, Open, Save, Save As
New (⌘N) opens an untitled document in a new tab. Nothing appears in the Finder until you save it yourself, and our auto-recovery safety net looks after the text from your first keystroke, so an unexpected quit does not cost you what you had typed. All of that stays on your Mac: nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and your files never leave the machine. The new document takes its encoding and line ending from your defaults in Settings.
Templates is a menu. Its tooltip reads "New file from a template, save the current file as one, or insert a smart token", which is an unusually complete description of a button. It carries the 40 built-in templates in four groups — Documents, Licenses, Config, Languages — plus a fifth group, My Templates, for anything you add with Save Current Document as Template…. The same menu holds Insert Smart Token, the 14 placeholders such as {{DATE}}, {{YEAR}}, {{AUTHOR}} and {{UUID}} that our template library fills in for you, so a new file arrives already dated and attributed.
Open (⌘O) opens files from disk. Select several and each arrives in its own tab.
Save (⌘S) writes the tab you are looking at, and only that one. Other tabs with unsaved changes keep them. This is worth internalising, because the tab bar's markers are easy to misread: the unsaved marker is a leading asterisk on the tab title, and the orange dot means the file changed on disk, not that you have unsaved work.
Save As (⇧⌘S) is a menu — its chevron carries the rest of the save family: Save, Save a Copy As… (⌥⇧⌘S), Rename File…, Reload from Disk and Reveal in Finder. Saving under a new name makes the tab follow the new file.
Layout: Multi View, Single View, Compare
Multi View — tooltip "Show every tab in its own side-by-side pane." — gives each open tab its own pane, each aligned under its tab. Read that sentence carefully, because it is the button that changes how you work once it clicks: every pane holds a different tab. It is how you put a config file, the notes that explain it and the script that reads it in front of you at the same time, all in one window.
Single View collapses back to one pane showing the tab you had selected — its tooltip reads "Collapse back to a single pane showing the active tab." The other panes slide away.
Compare is a menu. Compare Files… opens a pairing canvas with two scrolling columns of cards, one per open tab; choose one on each side and press Compare. Quick Compare skips the canvas when exactly two tabs are open, and shows a partner picker when there are more. A comparison runs on two documents at a time, so open both and choose one for each side. Our comparison view then tints the differing lines in place, so you read the changes in the files themselves. ⎋ leaves the mode, and the two panes scroll together only while you hold Shift — a HUD says so when you enter.
Find and go: Find & Replace, Go to Line
Find & Replace is the odd one out visually: a bezeled button with no chevron, even though pressing it opens a popover rather than performing an action. Its tooltip is "Find and replace in the active tab." Inside are find and replace fields, a scope segment for This File or All Tabs, and the options Case Sensitive, Whole Word and Regular Expression. A live count updates as you type; ↩ steps forward, ⇧↩ back, ⎋ closes. Set the scope to All Tabs when you are renaming something across several open files: our find and replace changes every one of them at once.
The toolbar button is the route to the full popover — the find and replace fields, the scope segment and the three options together in one place. It sits in the same spot in every window, so the same click works whatever you happen to be editing.
Go to Line (⌘L) asks for a line number and takes you there. The field arrives pre-filled with the line you are on, selected — so typing replaces it, and the button doubles as an answer to "where am I?". Ask for a line past the end of the file and the field waits for one that exists, so you always arrive exactly where you meant to be.
Automate: Macros
Macros is a menu, tooltip "Open the Macros menu." Our macro recorder is the quickest way through a repetitive edit: you make the change once and have it repeated for you as many times as you need. The items are Start Recording (⌥⌘R), Stop Recording (⌥⇧⌘R), Playback (⌥⌘P), Playback Multiple Times… and Cancel Playback (⎋). While recording, the toolbar glyph flips to a red stop symbol and a glass HUD counts the actions. A single ⌘Z reverses a whole playback run — undo takes it back as one step, named "Macro Playback" in the Edit menu — so you can try a macro without committing to the result. Playback Multiple Times… is the one to reach for on a long file: give it the number of runs and the sequence repeats that many times on its own, and ⎋ stops it whenever you have seen enough.
Text and view: Wrap, Show Invisibles, Clean, Indent, Guides, Smart Edit
This is the longest run in the bar, and it mixes toggles, a menu and a button that opens a sheet. Three of them then deserve a sentence more.
| Control | Kind | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Wrap | Toggle | Folds lines that run past the window instead of scrolling sideways. One global setting, applied to every pane at once. On by default. |
| Show Invisibles | Toggle | Draws spaces, tabs and line endings. Changes drawing only — never the file. |
| Clean | Menu | Edits the document itself, not just how it is drawn. Every pass can be undone. |
| Indent | Button | Opens the Indentation sheet, where you choose a style and see it previewed. Nothing changes until you press Apply. |
| Guides | Toggle | Marks each level of indentation. Ten styles, chosen in Settings ▸ Guides. On by default. |
| Smart Edit | Toggle | Carries indentation onto the next line, closes brackets and quotes, finishes HTML tags. |
Clean drops a menu in this order: Clean Now, then Clean AI Copy/Paste Markers, Clean Invisible / Special Characters…, Find Next Hidden Character, Find Previous Hidden Character, then Edit Removal Rules…, then Text Cleanup Settings…. Where Show Invisibles only draws, Clean rewrites — which is exactly the distinction people get wrong. Clean AI Copy/Paste Markers is a single click with no dialog: it applies our cleanup rules, so the stray characters in pasted AI output go without you hunting for them. The item below it opens a review sheet, where our hidden-character scanner lists every finding by line and column and you decide what to apply. Both work on your Mac alone — nothing is sent anywhere to be checked.
Indent opens a sheet rather than acting the moment you press it, and that is the point of it: a language picker, a brace-style switch, indent width and a live preview card, with Cancel or Apply. Nothing in your document moves until you apply, so you can try three styles against the preview and walk away from all three. The preview card draws a sample snippet, which is what you want here — you are judging the style itself, where the braces sit and how wide a level runs, before it goes anywhere near your work. Apply then puts our indentation engine to work, and every level in the file comes back in the style you picked, in one move rather than line by line.
Save the file before you press Apply and you always have a clean way back: File ▸ Reload from Disk brings the saved version straight into the tab, and reloading never changes the file on disk — it simply returns you to it. That is a good habit with any sheet that restyles a whole document in one move.
Smart Edit covers five switches, all on by default: the master, Return handling, brackets, quotes and HTML tags. Six pairs close themselves as you type — (), [], {}, "", '' and backticks — and the HTML switch finishes your tags, so a long stretch of markup or a nest of calls stays balanced without you counting anything.
The four toggles that show their state
Wrap, Show Invisibles, Guides and Smart Edit are not just switches — each one shows you whether it is on right now, so the bar is a status display as much as a control panel. Glance along it before you type and you know what the editor will do with your Return key and your long lines. Their tooltips report the state in words as well. Off, they read like this:
| Toggle | Tooltip when off |
|---|---|
| Wrap | Word wrap: off — click to wrap long lines to the window |
| Show Invisibles | Show spaces, tabs and line endings |
| Guides | Indentation guides: OFF — click to show |
| Smart Edit | Smart Editing: OFF — plain newlines and typing |
Settings, and the tour that walks the bar with you
The last item is Settings (⌘,), tooltip "Open Settings". Fourteen panes down a sidebar — General, Editing, Code Suggestions, Text Cleanup, Guides, Ruler, Invisibles, Encoding, Line Endings, File Monitor, Backup, Bookmarks, Macros, Print & Export — with a search field that finds any row by name.
If you would rather be walked through the bar than read about it, Help ▸ Walk Me Through the Toolbar opens a 21-beat tour of about two minutes. It draws a replica of the bar and steps through it one control at a time. Clicking any button in the replica jumps straight to that beat, and any interaction stops the auto-advance for good. The tour never opens itself; it is always something you ask for.
Six habits that make the bar quicker
- Learn the row by hovering it. Every glyph gives you its name under the pointer, and four of them give you their state as well. One slow pass along the bar teaches you the whole thing in under a minute, and the in-app tour does the same walk with commentary.
- Reach for Multi View when one file is not the whole story. Panes are tabs, so it is the quickest way to hold a file and its documentation, or a draft and the note it came from, in the same window.
- Set the indentation style in the sheet, then apply it once. The language picker, the brace switch and the preview sit together, and the whole file follows in a single move when you are happy with what you see.
- Show Invisibles to look, Clean to change. The toggle draws spaces, tabs and line endings and never touches a byte; the Clean menu is where rewriting happens, and every pass there can be undone. Removal itself lives at Clean ▸ Clean Invisible / Special Characters….
- Let the bar be the shortcut. Find & Replace, Indent and Guides sit in the same position in every window, so one click gets you the full find and replace popover, the Indentation sheet with its preview, or the guides on and off again. That is often quicker than reaching for a combination, and it is the same click whatever you happen to be editing.
- Look for each setting where you use it. Wrap sits on the toolbar and in the View menu, indentation in the Indent sheet, and the fourteen Settings panes hold the rest with a search field that finds any row by name.
Troubleshooting
The toolbar is not there
⌥⌘T shows it again — View ▸ Show Toolbar.
The window is narrow and buttons have collapsed into a chevron
That is the standard macOS overflow menu: whatever no longer fits across the bar is listed behind the chevron, so a narrow window keeps the same set of commands. If Guides or Smart Edit does not respond from that list, widen the window until the bar shows them in full, or go straight to the setting — Settings ▸ Guides and Edit ▸ Smart Editing switch them from anywhere, at any window width.
The Smart Edit glyph and the setting disagree
Change smart editing from Settings or the Edit menu and the toolbar glyph can still be showing the previous state. The feature follows the setting itself, so what you chose is what is happening as you type. Click the toolbar toggle twice and the glyph agrees with it again.
Show Invisibles is on, but trailing whitespace is not highlighted
The toolbar toggle turns on whitespace markers, end-of-line markers and whitespace underlining — but not the separate trailing-whitespace highlight. Turn that one on in Settings ▸ Invisibles, where the four markers are independent switches and you can also choose between symbol, code-point and byte markers.
A Clean menu item beeps instead of running
Clean acts on the document in front of you, so open a file — one with something for that command to find — and the item runs. The menu keeps every command visible rather than dimming them, which means you can read the whole list of what Clean offers before you have a document open at all.
I pressed Save and another tab still shows unsaved changes
That is correct. Save writes the active tab only. The asterisk in front of a tab title is the unsaved marker; the orange dot is a different signal and means the file changed on disk underneath you.
Frequently asked questions
How do I learn what each toolbar icon does?
Hover it. The tooltip gives you the control's name, and for four of them the current state as well. Every item also carries its name for VoiceOver, and the in-app toolbar tour walks all nineteen in order if you would rather be shown than read.
How do I tell which buttons open a menu?
By the chevron beside the glyph. Templates, Save As, Compare, Macros and Clean are the five menus, and each of them also sits alone in its own glass capsule — though being alone in a capsule is not itself proof, since a plain button can be alone too. Find & Replace is the exception to watch: it has no chevron, but it opens a popover.
Which toolbar buttons have keyboard shortcuts?
New ⌘N, Open ⌘O, Save ⌘S, Save As ⇧⌘S, Go to Line ⌘L, Macros recording and playback (⌥⌘R, ⌥⇧⌘R, ⌥⌘P) and Settings ⌘,. Find & Replace, Indent and Guides are a single click on the bar, in the same position in every window.
Can I tell my settings from the toolbar without opening Settings?
For four of them, yes. Wrap, Show Invisibles, Guides and Smart Edit show their current state, so a filled accent disc means on and a plain glyph means off. Their tooltips spell the state out in words as well.
What happens when I click the file path?
The Finder opens with that file selected, and that is all it does — your document is untouched and nothing is written. Hover instead and you get the full path as a tooltip, which is the quick way to tell two tabs apart when they share a filename.
Can I take the toolbar tour again later?
Yes, as often as you like, from Help ▸ Walk Me Through the Toolbar. It always restarts at the first beat, and it never launches on its own.