Mid-meeting
An idea lands during a call. Press ⌘M, type six words, hit save, and you are back on the call before the next slide. No app switch, no broken eye contact, no losing the thread of what was being said.
Capture
Press your shortcut, drop in anything — link, note, file, voice. Mindly catches it before you lose the thought.
How it works
When to use it
An idea lands during a call. Press ⌘M, type six words, hit save, and you are back on the call before the next slide. No app switch, no broken eye contact, no losing the thread of what was being said.
A lecture or talk says something worth remembering. Drop in a screenshot, paste the timestamp, add a one-line note. Mindly stores all three together so the moment is recoverable by topic, not by which video it came from.
Highlight a quote, hit ⌘M, and the snippet plus its source URL land in your library. Mindly tags the topic automatically, so the quote is findable months later when you actually need to cite it.
Hit record and talk the idea out for ninety seconds. Transcript, tags, and connections to related notes arrive in your library before you sit back down at your desk. The walking thoughts that usually evaporate, do not.
How it actually feels
The default is ⌘M because most Macs leave it free. If something else fits your hands better (⌘⇧Space, ⌥E, or any combo) you can rebind it in Settings. The shortcut you actually use is the one you set, not the one we picked.
Capture opens as a transparent overlay above whatever you were doing. Your current app stays focused. When you save, the overlay disappears and your previous app keeps focus. The whole motion happens without the cmd-tab cost.
The same ⌘M handles pasted links, typed notes, dropped files (PDF, image, audio, video), screenshots, and voice recordings. You do not decide "is this a note or a link" before saving. Mindly figures out the type from what you give it.
You can add a tag in the capture overlay if you want, but most people do not. AI tagging runs after save, so the manual layer is purely optional. Capture stays fast on the days when fast is what you need.
Why it matters
If capture takes more than two seconds, ideas slip. Most note apps cost you four to six seconds of friction: open the app, find the right notebook, create a new entry, paste, name it, save. Multiplied across an average day, that is twenty to forty captures you do not make because the cost feels higher than the value of the thought. Quick Capture inverts that ratio. The friction floor drops to a single keystroke, which means the threshold for "worth saving" drops with it. The result is a second brain that actually has the half-formed thoughts in it, not just the polished ones. That is the difference between a notes app and a real outboard memory.
Common questions
A system-wide keyboard shortcut that opens the Mindly capture overlay from any app on macOS. The default is ⌘M (Command + M), set during onboarding. Press it once, the overlay appears on top of whatever you were doing, and capture is ready immediately. No app switch required.
Yes. Open Mindly Settings, go to the Capture section, and rebind to any keyboard combination your Mac is not already using for something else. Popular alternatives include ⌃Space, ⌘⇧Space, ⌥E, and ⌃⌥M.
Notes (typed text), links (pasted URLs auto-render with preview), files (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, audio, video, images), screenshots, and voice recordings. The same shortcut handles all of them. Mindly detects the content type and stores it appropriately.
Yes for the capture itself. The overlay opens, accepts your input, and saves to your Mac immediately without needing an internet connection. AI tagging and summaries run when you reconnect.
Quick Capture targets a sub-two-second round trip from keystroke to saved. By comparison, opening Notion or Obsidian, creating a new page, pasting, and saving averages four to seven seconds. The difference matters most on the captures you do not make because the friction feels higher than the value.
Yes. The overlay has a record button next to the text field. Hit it, talk for as long as you need (no time limit on Pro), and the recording saves with an automatic transcript. The transcript is searchable and gets tagged like any other note.
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