A Dynamic Island for your Mac: music, synced lyrics, a file shelf, and live activities for your builds and AI agents, right under the camera.
Native, featherweight, free and open source. No account, no tracking, no subscription.
⬇ Download NotchUser for Mac · Leia em português
The notch is dead space in the middle of your menu bar. NotchUser turns it into the most useful spot on your screen, and it looks like Apple put it there.
- Hover, and it opens. Cover, progress and controls grow out of the notch and slip back in when you leave.
- Your AI agents report to it. Claude Code, Codex and Copilot show what they're doing, you approve their commands or answer their questions right in the notch, and when they finish it opens with what they did.
- Your builds too.
npm, Xcode,cargo,docker,git push… show up on their own, with a check or a cross when they end. - A shelf for everything in transit. Drop files, links or text on it, drag them out wherever they go.
- Light enough to forget. About 0.1% CPU and 30–50 MB with music playing. The animations run in Core Animation, inside macOS.
When Claude Code or Codex finishes, the notch opens with its logo, what you asked and a short summary of what it did. One click takes you back to the app.
1.7.1: the notch tells you when a new version is out, so you never miss an update. Also installable with Homebrew.
| 🤖 AI agents in the notch | Claude Code, Codex and Copilot: working, waiting for you, finished. Allow or deny a command, or pick an answer to a question, while the music keeps playing. One click to connect each one. |
| 🔨 Live activities | Builds, tests, installs and deploys appear by themselves, wherever they were started. notch run <command> follows anything else. |
| 🎤 Synced lyrics | A lyrics button in the player: the words scroll beside it, the line being sung lit up, the album's color behind. Optional, and also in the closed notch if you want it. |
| 🔊 Volume and pages | A volume slider that opens under the mouse. When the notch fills up, music, shelf and activities turn into pages with dots. |
| ✨ Motion | The notch oozes out of the bezel and back in. Pick Minimal, Calm, Fluid or Lively, the speed, and the size. |
| 🧰 More add-ons | Gestures for volume and songs, mic indicator and global mute (⌃⌥M), pause when the lid is lowered, haptic pulses, a glow at the screen edges, quick actions on the shelf. |
Basic is pure black, like part of the hardware. Elevated adds depth, a glow in the album's color and a cover that tilts toward the mouse. Glass is Apple's Liquid Glass (macOS 26+) with waves that follow the music.
Music: Spotify, Apple Music and anything playing in the browser. Scrubbable progress, controls, volume, synced lyrics, switching between sources.
Shelf: files, links and text with thumbnails, multi-select drag out, AirDrop, and quick actions (convert to JPEG/PNG, half size, text from an image, compress a video, ZIP).
AI agents and dev work: Claude Code, Codex (app and CLI) and Copilot (VS Code and CLI) connect from Settings → Add-ons. Builds are detected automatically. From the Terminal:
notch run npm test # follow any command until it ends
notch notify "Deploy ok" # a short message
notch progress build 40 # your own activity, with progressOptional add-ons (off until you turn them on): copy text from the screen (⌘⇧2), camera mirror, Bluetooth headphones in high quality, gestures on the notch, mic indicator and mute, pause on lid close, synced lyrics.
And also: a pill on external displays, English / Português / Español, and a welcome tour that sets everything up in one go.
With Homebrew (recommended, updates with brew upgrade):
brew install --cask magnumja/tap/notchuserOr by hand:
- Download NotchUser.zip, unzip it, and drag NotchUser.app to Applications.
- It isn't signed with a paid Apple account, so the first time: right-click the app → Open → Open (or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway). If macOS says it's "damaged":
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/NotchUser.app
- The welcome tour does the rest.
Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple Silicon or Intel.
- No account, no analytics, no tracking.
- Network requests: the Spotify cover art (from Spotify); once a day, the latest version number from GitHub, to tell you when an update is out (turn it off in Settings → General); and, only if you turn lyrics on and open them, the song's title, artist and length to LRCLIB, a free lyrics database.
- Agents and activities stay on your Mac: they talk to the notch through local files. Connecting an agent only adds NotchUser's hooks to its settings, after a backup.
- Text recognition runs on your Mac and the image is deleted right away. Every permission is asked only by the feature that needs it.
| With music playing | Notch closed | Notch open |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | ~0.1% | only what's on screen updates |
| Memory | 30–50 MB | — |
The bars, waves and spinners are played by Core Animation, lyrics wait for the next line instead of ticking, and the mouse is checked 4 times a second when it's far from the notch.
- Ubuntu and other GNOME distros: NotchUser-Linux
- Windows 10/11: NotchUser-Windows
Only the Xcode Command Line Tools are needed (xcode-select --install).
zsh build.sh # build, install into /Applications and open
zsh build.sh release # build dist/NotchUser.zipmain.swift is the whole app, helper.m reads the system's Now Playing, and Tools/notch is the Terminal command.
About browser music: since macOS 15.4 only Apple's apps may read "Now Playing". Like other notch apps, NotchUser does it through a small helper loaded by Apple's /usr/bin/perl. It changes no system setting, but Apple could close the path in an update; Spotify and Apple Music would keep working.
Is it safe? Why does macOS warn me the first time?
NotchUser is open source and every release is built from this repository. The warning appears because the app isn't notarized with a paid Apple developer account, not because of anything in the app. You can read every line in main.swift, or build it yourself.
My Mac doesn't have a notch. It works on any Mac with macOS 14 or later: without a notch, NotchUser shows as a small pill at the top of the screen, and the same goes for external displays.
Does it cost anything? No. No paid tier, no account, no ads. If it helps you, you can sponsor the project or just leave a star.
Which AI agents work? Claude Code (app and CLI), Codex (app and CLI) and GitHub Copilot (VS Code and CLI). Connect them in Settings → Add-ons; nothing is sent anywhere, they talk to the notch through local files.
Issues and pull requests are welcome: bugs, ideas, translations. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md.
If NotchUser made your notch useful, a ⭐ helps other people find it, and telling a friend helps even more.
MIT. Use it, change it, share it.