Burst Notes: Product Overview

Burst Notes is a small utility that lives in your Mac’s menu bar. It has no document window of its own. Instead it waits for a global keyboard shortcut, shows a command window, and writes what you type into a Markdown file of your choosing. The whole point is to get a thought out of your head and into the right place without leaving whatever you were doing.

The first launch

When you start Burst Notes for the first time, a short onboarding sequence runs:

  1. a welcome screen
  2. a one-page introduction to Markdown
  3. a choice of starter templates, or the option to open an existing Markdown file of your own
  4. the global keyboard shortcut, which you can change or keep at its default

Once that is done, the Burst Notes icon sits in the menu bar and the command window is one keystroke away. You can add more files and change the shortcut at any time, see Managing Files and Settings.

Summoning the command window

The default shortcut is Command-Shift-B. Try it now:


The command window appears in the middle of your main screen. It shows a searchable list made up of the headers of your current Markdown file plus the commands that are available at this level. If you have several files, the top level lists the files, and a file’s headers are one level down.

Clicking the menu bar icon and choosing Bring Up Command Window does the same thing.

Use the up arrow and down arrow keys to move through the list, or simply start typing: the list narrows to the items that match. Say you have a Today header:

The window “drills down” into that header and shows its sub-headers, if there are any, together with the capture commands for that section. The left arrow key takes you back up a level, and the right arrow key drills into whatever is highlighted. Breadcrumbs at the top of the window show where you are.

Capturing a note

With Today open:

Burst Notes writes a new line - Don't forget to bring the bin out! at the end of the Today section and opens its built-in editor with the cursor on that line, in case you want to add more. Press Escape to close the editor; your change is saved automatically.

If you would rather not see the editor at all, press Command-Return instead of Return when you submit the text. The line is written and the command window simply goes away.

That is the whole core loop: shortcut, header, text, Return. Everything else in this manual is about doing the same thing faster or in slightly different ways. Capturing Notes covers to-do items, quotes, code blocks and where new lines are placed. Modes turns the same window into a navigator, a snippet clipboard or an editor launcher.

It learns what you use

Burst Notes keeps a count of the headers and commands you choose. Items you use often move up the list and match earlier, so after a few days your most common capture targets are usually the first one or two rows.

Your notes are just files

Burst Notes does not have a database. Everything goes into ordinary .md text files that you can open in any editor, sync with any service and read in ten years’ time. Burst Notes offers a built-in editor for quick fixes and can hand a file to Nova, BBEdit, Sublime Text, TextEdit or whatever application is set as the default for Markdown files. See Managing Files.

Commands

Besides headers, the command window gives you access to commands. Type the first letters of a command’s name to find it. The main groups are:

Back to Help Topics