Quick capture

A single hotkey, reachable from anywhere on the Mac. Press it while you're in your browser, your terminal, or anywhere else, type a thought, and it lands in your vault - without switching you to Halcyon.

What it doesn't do

It doesn't bring Halcyon to the front. It doesn't raise any of your open Halcyon windows. The app you were already in keeps its menu bar, keeps the keyboard, and keeps looking exactly like it did before you pressed the key. A small panel simply appears on top, you type into it, and it goes away again.

That's the entire point: a capture that cost you your place in whatever you were doing would be worse than no capture at all.

Turning it on

The hotkey ships unbound - pressing nothing does nothing, on purpose. A default chord could collide with a shortcut some other app on your Mac already uses, and that looks like Halcyon broke the other app, not like something you need to configure.

Bind one yourself in Settings → Keybindings (⌘,): find Quick capture under App, click it, and press the keys you want. It goes through the same recorder as every other shortcut, so it won't let you shadow a chord another command already owns. See Settings.

Using it

Press the hotkey. A small text field appears, already focused.

Keys	What it does
⌘↩	Save it and close the panel
Esc	Discard it and close the panel

That's the whole interface: one field, two ways out. There's no formatting, no title, no folder picker - just the thought, typed and saved.

Where it goes

With nothing configured, every capture becomes a new note in an inbox/ folder, created the first time you need it - each capture its own file, with the text you typed as its entire body.

Which vault it lands in follows whichever one you were most recently working in - the vault behind your most recently focused Halcyon window, or, if you didn't have one open, the vault you opened most recently. You don't choose a vault in the panel itself; there's nothing to pick from.

If Halcyon can't work out a vault at all - nothing has ever been opened - the panel stays open with what you typed still sitting there and an inline message explaining why. Nothing is lost: open a vault in another window and press ⌘↩ again.

Note

If you keep more than one vault open at once and the guess lands in the wrong one, the capture isn't gone - it's a real note, just in a vault you didn't mean. Move it the same way you'd move any other note: see Notes and folders.

Appending to one note instead

If you'd rather every capture land in a single running note - a daily log, a journal, an ideas file - than scatter into separate files, turn that on per vault in Settings → General → Quick capture destination. Choose Append, name the note (created on the first capture if it doesn't already exist), and every capture after that adds to the end of it, separated from what came before by a blank line. Switch back to New note at any point to go back to the default; nothing about past captures changes either way.

This setting lives on this Mac only, not synced with the rest of the vault - so with more than one Mac, you set it on each. See Settings.

If the note you're appending to happens to be open in an editor window with edits you haven't saved yet, the capture still lands - but Halcyon won't overwrite what you're mid-typing to make room for it. The window shows the same "This note changed on disk" message it would for any other outside edit, and the next save you make waits for you to choose which copy wins, the same as it always would.

Capturing without a hotkey

Shortcuts, Raycast, or a script can trigger the exact same capture through a link instead of a keypress. See Capture from a link.

Why capture and typing don't fight over focus

The panel takes real keyboard focus - what you type lands in it, not in whatever was behind it - without your Mac treating Halcyon as the active application. That's a deliberate, narrow trick specific to this one panel, not a general property of Halcyon windows. Everything else about the app behaves the way any other Mac app does: opening a note, switching windows, all of it brings Halcyon to the front the normal way.