Stealth Notes

Speaker notes that float above your slides — and stay off the shared screen.
A small native macOS app built with SwiftUI + AppKit.

Why

When you present over Zoom, Meet or Teams with a single screen, your notes have nowhere to go: put them in a window and the audience sees them too, put them on paper and you keep looking away. Stealth Notes is a teleprompter-style overlay for that situation — your notes float above the slides (full-screen apps included), and the windows are flagged so screen sharing leaves them out.

Features

• Floating overlays — borderless cards above every window and Space, including full-screen apps. Open several notes at once; each remembers its position and size.
• Kept out of screen sharing — overlays use NSWindow.sharingType = .none, which conferencing apps and screenshots respect. See Limitations for what this does not cover.
• Sections for talks — split a note with a line containing only --- and page through it with global hotkeys (⌃⌥→ / ⌃⌥←). The overlay shows a progress bar, dots and the current step's heading.
• Click-through by default — overlays never steal clicks from your slides. Hold a key (⌘ by default) to drag, scroll or close them; the border lights up while they are interactive. No Accessibility permission is required.
• Markdown — headings, lists, quotes, inline styles and code blocks render in overlays; the editor has syntax highlighting and an Edit ⇄ Preview toggle (⌘E).
• Plain files — notes are .txt files in ~/Library/Application Support/StealthNotes/Notes/, saved as you type. Import .md / .txt with the button or by dropping files onto the window.
• Native UI — sidebar manager window, menu bar item, standard Settings window (appearance, text size, background/text opacity, fonts including bundled JetBrains Mono).

Install

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later and Xcode (or the Xcode Command Line Tools) with Swift 5.9+.

git clone https://github.com/Junk-debug/stealth-notes.git
cd stealth-notes
./build.sh --install

./build.sh builds Stealth Notes.app in the repo folder; --install also copies it to /Applications.

The app is ad-hoc signed, not notarized. On first launch macOS will refuse to open it: right-click the app → Open, or allow it in System Settings → Privacy & Security.

Usage

1. Open Stealth Notes and write your notes in the editor (Markdown works).
2. Separate the parts of your talk with --- lines.
3. Click the eye button in the toolbar (or use the menu bar icon) to float the note.
4. Start sharing and page through sections with ⌃⌥→ / ⌃⌥←.

Shortcut	Action	Scope
⌃⌥N (configurable)	Show / hide all overlays	Global
⌃⌥→ / ⌃⌥←	Next / previous section	Global
Hold ⌘ (configurable)	Make overlays interactive (or click-through, if you flip the mode)	Global
⌘N	New note	Manager window
⌘E	Toggle Edit / Preview	Manager window

Limitations

• sharingType = .none is a request to capture APIs, not a guarantee. Video-call apps generally respect it, but behavior depends on the capturing app and macOS version — some tools that use ScreenCaptureKit directly (e.g. QuickTime or OBS display capture) have been reported to record such windows on macOS 15. Do a test share before a real talk.
• It only affects software capture on this Mac. A camera pointed at the screen sees everything.
• Global hotkeys can clash with other apps that register the same combination; pick another one in Settings if a shortcut does nothing.

Intended use

Stealth Notes is built for presenters: talks, demos, webinars, recorded walkthroughs — situations where speaker notes are normal and expected. Please don't use it where outside notes are not allowed, such as exams, proctored tests or interviews that ask you not to use them.

How it works

The interesting parts, if you are reading the code:

• Overlay windows (Overlay/OverlayManager.swift) — non-activating NSPanels at .statusBar level with .canJoinAllSpaces + .fullScreenAuxiliary, so they sit above full-screen apps without taking focus from them.
• Hold-to-interact without Accessibility permission — instead of a global flagsChanged monitor (which needs the permission), a timer polls CGEventSource.flagsState(.combinedSessionState) and toggles ignoresMouseEvents on the panels.
• Global hotkeys (Support/HotKeyCenter.swift) — Carbon RegisterEventHotKey, which works while other apps are frontmost and needs no permissions.
• Markdown (Markdown/) — a small line-based parser feeding SwiftUI views for overlays, and regex highlighting on an NSTextView for the editor.
• No Xcode project — it is a plain Swift package; build.sh assembles the .app bundle (binary, Info.plist, icon, fonts loaded via ATSApplicationFontsPath) and ad-hoc signs it.

Project layout

Package.swift            Swift Package Manager manifest
build.sh                 builds, signs and optionally installs Stealth Notes.app
Sources/StealthNotes/
  App/                   @main app, scenes, menu bar
  Models/                Note + NotesStore (plain .txt files on disk)
  Manager/               main window: sidebar, editor, import
  Overlay/               floating panels, click-through logic, overlay view
  Markdown/              parser, SwiftUI renderer, highlighting editor
  Settings/              presets, option lists, settings tabs
  Support/               Carbon global hotkeys, blur background
Tests/StealthNotesTests/ unit tests for the Markdown parser
Resources/               Info.plist, AppIcon.icns, bundled fonts

Development

swift build      # debug build
swift test       # run unit tests
./build.sh       # release .app bundle

You can also open Package.swift in Xcode to edit and run the app with the debugger.

License

MIT. JetBrains Mono is bundled under the SIL Open Font License.