Scratchpadfor macOSA quiet place to think
Think on your trackpad.
Scratchpad turns the trackpad surface into a pressure-sensitive drawing canvas. Sketch a diagram, scribble an equation that converts to LaTeX, stash it in a library that stays out of your way.
Toolbar
Six tools. no settings deep-dive.
Everything on the surface, nothing hidden. The toolbar floats where you put it, snaps to edges, and gets out of the way when you draw.
Trackpad-first
The surface you already touch.
Press ⌘D and your trackpad becomes a pressure-sensitive canvas. Palm rejection handles errant contacts. Two fingers? That's undo. Keep your hand where it's been all day.
- Force-touch mapped to stroke weight.
- Cursor hides while you draw, returns when you stop.
- Works with any Apple Magic Trackpad or built-in.
e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0Handwriting → LaTeX
Scribble the math. Get the LaTeX.
A small MLX model runs on your Mac's neural engine — so your notebook never leaves your laptop. Select the ink, hit convert, paste into your doc. That's the whole loop.
Home
A library, not a folder.
Every scratchpad autosaves the moment you stop drawing. Find them later in the Home window — by name, by date, by the shape of what you drew.
.scratchpad JSON.The small print
Things we'd rather not ship without.
Paper your way
Dots, grid, lined, or blank. Infinite canvas or stacked pages.
Autosave, actually
Pauses you don't even notice. Your file is written before you look up.
Undo that remembers
Per-stroke undo wired through NSUndoManager. ⌘Z where it should be.
Keyboard + trackpad
Pan with scroll, ⌘-scroll to zoom, arrows with acceleration.
Export anywhere
PNG for the doc, PDF for the print, .scratchpad for the repo.
Quiet by design
No accounts. No cloud. No analytics. Just a window and a surface.
Put the thought somewhere.
Free, offline, open-source, and about the size of three web pages. For Apple silicon Macs, running macOS 14 or later.