What is notchy?

Notchy is a small macOS menu bar app that turns the notch on your MacBook screen into a shortcut for running AI coding assistants. Instead of switching to a terminal window, you hover over the notch or click a menu bar icon, and a floating terminal panel appears with a session already connected to your project. The app automatically looks at the Xcode projects you have open and figures out which folder to work in. If that project has a CLAUDE.md file, Notchy starts Claude Code for you. If it has an AGENTS.md file instead, it starts Codex. You can also open several sessions at once and switch between them as tabs, so you could have more than one project or more than one assistant running side by side. While an assistant is working, the notch itself shows a small animated status pill that tells you whether it is thinking, waiting for input, or finished, so you do not have to keep the terminal window in view to know what is happening. There is also a Git checkpoint shortcut, Cmd+S, that saves a snapshot of your project before the assistant makes any changes, giving you an easy point to go back to if something goes wrong. This project is a community-maintained continuation of an earlier app by Adam Lyttle, who is no longer updating the original. The current maintainer, bones7456, keeps it alive and adds small fixes on top of that original work. To use it you need a Mac running macOS 15.6 or later. The notch features need a MacBook that actually has a notch, though the regular menu bar functions still work without one. You can install it by downloading a signed and notarized build from the Releases page, either as a drag-and-drop installer or as a plain app file, or you can build it yourself from source in Xcode. It relies on a small terminal-emulator library called SwiftTerm to render the embedded sessions. The project is released under the MIT license.