CapaTheNotch

Codex, Claude Code and OpenCode limits in the MacBook notch — beside the camera, at a
glance. Music, a teleprompter, dictation, a shelf for files, a calendar and a
translator live there too.

Website: https://capathenotch.tech/ ·
Download: latest release

A free beta for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 14 or later.

What it does

Limits. What is left in the five-hour and weekly windows of Codex,
Claude Code and OpenCode (its Go plan) — any two at once — when they reset, and whether it will last until then. An alert
when a window drops below 10%.
Music. What is playing, the artwork, seeking, the controls and the Mac's
volume — for any player that shows its track in Control Center.
Teleprompter. A Script scrolls right under the camera, so you can read
and look into the lens — at a set speed, or following your voice as you
read it aloud. While it runs, the surface is kept out of screen recording
and sharing.
Dictation. Hold ⌃⌥D (or a shortcut of your own), speak, let go — the text appears at the cursor.
Recognised entirely on this Mac, with GigaAM.
Shelf. Files dropped on the notch stay at hand until you drag them out;
new screenshots land there too, and copied text if you turn that on. Kept
in memory only, and empty after you quit.
Calendar. What is next, ten minutes before it starts — with Join for a
call link — and the day, week and month when the notch is open.
Translator. Russian ↔ English on this Mac (macOS 26 or later): select
text anywhere, press ⌃⌥T, then copy the translation or put it in place of
the selection.
Two taps on the trackpad open the notch from anywhere, if you turn that
on.

Each module is turned on on its own in Settings. The interface speaks English
and Russian.

Privacy

CapaTheNotch asks Codex and Claude Code without their credentials:
Codex through Codex's own App Server, Claude Code through its own status
line.
OpenCode is the one exception. OpenCode has no way of its own to report
its limits, so with your consent CapaTheNotch reads your OpenCode Go key
from OpenCode's own file and asks opencode.ai only for the plan's usage. The
key is kept nowhere and sent nowhere else.
Dictation stays on the Mac. Audio is never saved. A history of
recognised text is off unless you turn it on.
So does the Translator, with macOS's own on-device translation; nothing
translated is kept. Calendar event titles never reach the log or the
diagnostics.
Copied diagnostics carry versions, states and timings — no addresses,
identifiers or dictated text.

Install

It is signed with the author's own certificate, not Apple's. It is not
signed with an Apple Developer ID and not notarized by Apple — that is a paid
membership this project does not have. So:

macOS warns you the first time you open it, because Apple has not
checked it: macOS does not know the author's certificate. The steps below
approve this one application; nothing asks you to turn Gatekeeper off, and
you should not;
what you allow is kept across updates — and only for builds the author
signed. macOS ties the microphone, Accessibility, System Events and
Calendars to that certificate, so a copy of CapaTheNotch signed by anyone
else is another application to it and gets none of them without asking.

Checking the signature. In Terminal:

codesign -dvv /Applications/CapaTheNotch.app 2>&1 | grep Authority
codesign -d -r- /Applications/CapaTheNotch.app

The first prints Authority=CapaTheNotch; the second ends with
certificate leaf = H"96f745c0374edf111dd823b633b23c9477efbba5", the SHA-1 of the
author's certificate. A different one, or none, was not signed by the author.

Download CapaTheNotch-<version>.zip from the
latest release.
Open the zip and move CapaTheNotch.app to Applications.
Open it. macOS says it could not verify the application; close that
message.
Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click
Open Anyway beside CapaTheNotch. When the warning comes back, click
Open.

Updating. Choose Check for Updates… in Settings → General; it opens
the latest release on GitHub. CapaTheNotch never checks on its own. Quit the
running copy and repeat the steps above with the new zip — step 4 likely
again.

Coming from Capacity Notch 0.3.0 or earlier. The application is now
CapaTheNotch.app; delete CapacityNotch.app from Applications. What you
allowed is kept. If Claude Code's status line runs the bridge from
CapacityNotch.app, CapaTheNotch offers on its first launch to point that
path at itself — and opens ~/.claude/settings.json only after you say yes.

Coming from 0.3.1 or earlier. The first launch of 0.4.0 clears, once, the
permissions macOS kept under the old ad-hoc signature and opens onboarding at
Permissions to ask for them again. After that, updates keep them.

Connecting

Codex. Sign in with codex login and turn on Codex in Settings →
Providers. CapaTheNotch starts its own codex app-server and reads the
limits from it.

Claude Code. Turn on Claude Code in Settings → Providers. Claude Code
hands its limits to its status-line command after each answer, so
CapaTheNotch asks once and then sets its bridge as that command in
~/.claude/settings.json. A status line you already have keeps running after
the bridge; turning Claude Code off puts back what was there. The limits
appear after your next message in Claude Code in a terminal — the desktop app
and editor extensions run no status line.

With Claude Code 2.1.287 or later (2.1.286 in the Claude desktop app), the same
question also adds a small Claude Code mod in ~/.claude/skills/capathenotch.
After each reply — in the desktop app's Code tab, VS Code or a terminal — it
hands the bridge the two windows and nothing else, so the limits stay fresh
outside a terminal too. The bridge runs with an empty environment, none of
Claude Code's sign-in in it. Nothing in settings.json changes; turning
Claude Code off removes the folder.

The bridge keeps only the time, the percentages and the reset times, and
discards everything else. To set it up by hand instead, the line is:

{
  "statusLine": {
    "type": "command",
    "command": "/Applications/CapaTheNotch.app/Contents/MacOS/CapacityNotchClaudeBridge -- /bin/sh -c '~/.claude/statusline.sh'"
  }
}

— without -- and what follows if you have no status line of your own. See
Anthropic's status-line documentation.

OpenCode. You need an OpenCode Go or Go Plus subscription. Sign in with
opencode auth login and turn on OpenCode in Settings → Providers. Every five
minutes, and when you refresh, CapaTheNotch takes the key from
~/.local/share/opencode/auth.json and asks opencode.ai for the five-hour
and weekly windows. The monthly window is not drawn, but when it is used up
the card says so in red.

Any two of the three Providers can be on at once.

Guides

Building from source

Apple Silicon, macOS 14+, Xcode with the Metal Toolchain, and Swift 6.

swift run CapacityNotchTests      # checks
./Scripts/test-signing.sh         # checks the signature, with a throwaway certificate
./Scripts/build-app.sh            # .build/CapaTheNotch.app, signed with your certificate
./Scripts/build-release.sh        # dist/CapaTheNotch-<version>.zip

Both build scripts sign with a code-signing certificate and refuse to build
without one. ./Scripts/create-signing-certificate.sh walks you through
making your own in Keychain Access, once; or name one you have in
CAPACITY_NOTCH_SIGNING_IDENTITY. A build you sign is your application to
macOS, not the author's, and asks for its own permissions.

The release archive is reproducible: the same commit, Swift toolchain and
certificate give the same bytes — the signature carries no signing time. So
only the author can rebuild the published archive byte for byte; with your
own certificate, everything but the signature is the same. Views declare their state with State(initialValue:) rather
than @State, whose macro plugin ships inside Xcode.

License

MIT. Third-party parts — sherpa-onnx, ONNX Runtime, Murmur, GigaAM, the Geist
font, the OpenCode logo — are credited in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

CapaTheNotch is not affiliated with, or made by, OpenAI, Anthropic or the
OpenCode team.

capa-the-notch