FromScratch is a persistent, always-ready scratchpad for Mac that silently saves every keystroke so your thoughts are never lost — no commands, no file management, just an open canvas waiting for you.
What is FromScratch?
FromScratch is a minimalist Mac app that gives you a single, continuously auto-saving text canvas that lives in your menu bar and opens instantly whenever you need it. There are no notebooks, no projects, no hierarchies — just one persistent scratch surface that is always exactly where you left it.
Think of it as the digital equivalent of that sticky notepad beside your keyboard. You hit a global shortcut, the window snaps open, you type, you dismiss it — and everything is still there the next time, whether that is five seconds or five days later.
What does FromScratch do best?
FromScratch excels at zero-friction capture. The moment between having a thought and losing it is brutally short, and most note-taking apps have too much ceremony: open the app, create a note, name it, pick a folder. FromScratch eliminates that entire sequence.
The continuous auto-save is the killer feature. I have closed my laptop in the middle of a half-formed sentence and come back to find every character preserved. There is no save shortcut to remember, no draft state to reconcile — the app simply never loses anything.
The interface itself is worth mentioning: a clean, dark or light canvas with sensible typography, zero chrome, and full support for Apple Silicon. It quietly stays out of your way while you think.
Who should use FromScratch?
FromScratch is ideal for anyone who uses a persistent scratchpad as a thinking tool — developers keeping a running log of terminal outputs, writers capturing half-baked lines before they evaporate, researchers pasting URLs and snippets mid-research session.
It is not the right tool if you need multiple notes, rich formatting, attachments, or sync across devices. For those needs you will want something like Bear, Notion, or Apple Notes. And if you want structured task capture, Things 3 or OmniFocus is a better fit. FromScratch occupies a different niche: the single-surface, always-on scratchpad — the one app that should open faster than your brain can second-guess it.
How does FromScratch compare to alternatives?
The closest category competition comes from menu-bar text apps like Typora (document-focused, not scratchpad-oriented) and plain-text editors like BBEdit or Nova, neither of which is designed for ephemeral capture. nvALT and its successor nvUltra are closer in philosophy but add folder-and-file complexity that FromScratch deliberately avoids.
Compared to just leaving a TextEdit window open, FromScratch wins on every axis: menu-bar access, global shortcut, persistent auto-save without a file path to manage, and a purpose-built UI that does not ask you to choose between Rich Text and Plain Text every time you open a new document.
Among pure scratchpad tools, Tot by Iconfactory is the most direct competitor — it offers seven distinct dot-keyed strips of text, which suits multi-context juggling but adds cognitive overhead. FromScratch stays opinionated: one surface, zero overhead.
Is FromScratch free?
FromScratch is free to download and use. The developer offers the app openly, and it has been actively maintained with regular updates. There is no subscription tier or feature paywall — the full experience is available from the first launch.
Given how genuinely useful it is, the free price feels almost unfair. If you rely on it daily, consider supporting the developer through whatever channel they make available on the official site.
What are the best FromScratch alternatives?
For multi-note workflows: Bear (Markdown, tags, iCloud sync), Noteship, or Apple Notes (free, iCloud). For structured capture: Things 3 or OmniFocus. For a second scratchpad philosophy: Tot. If you want a multi-tab plain-text workspace, BBEdit with its scratch window comes close. None of these fully replicate the single-surface, zero-ceremony experience that FromScratch delivers.
