MewNotch: turning the Mac notch into a live HUD and file shelf

A notch that carries state instead of just cameras

The display notch on a Mac is dead space occupied by a camera housing. MewNotch treats it as an output surface and fills it with the information macOS otherwise shows in a transient system overlay, the kind of volume and brightness toast that appears and disappears before you can read it.

The project describes itself as a free, open-source macOS app that transforms the notch into a customizable HUD for brightness, volume, power and more. The target is macOS 14.0 and later, and the implementation is Swift with SwiftUI for the interface. The audience is not general Mac users but people who already own a notched machine and want the hardware to earn its space, along with developers who want to read the source of a native Mac utility rather than install an opaque binary.

What makes it more than an overlay replacement is the file shelf. You can drag files onto the notch for quick access or AirDrop sharing, and the shelf persists across restarts, syncs across multiple displays, supports packaging and renaming of multiple files, and keeps working when the show-on-lock-screen option is enabled. The rest of the notch is a small set of well-chosen panels rather than a general-purpose dashboard.

Three shapes the notch can take on screen

The HUD layer is not drawn in one fixed place. The documentation describes a choice between a simulated bezel-connected notch, a floating island, and an on-demand HUD with custom position and dimension controls, plus integration with BetterDisplay for external displays. The full display control is separate again: you choose which displays the notch appears on.

That choice is the real design decision in this app, because the three shapes solve different problems. A simulated bezel-connected notch keeps the visual language of the hardware, so it suits a laptop where the notch is physically present. A floating island detaches from the top edge, which makes sense on an external monitor with no notch of its own. An on-demand HUD that appears only when something changes is the least intrusive option, and it is the one most likely to suit a multi-monitor desk where a permanent shape on one screen would be distracting.

The lock screen gets its own treatment, with separately configurable notch dimensions for width and height, default expanded views, and visibility rules for the macOS lock screen. That separation matters because the lock screen has different layout constraints and different privacy expectations than the desktop.

The app can also hide the stock macOS HUDs entirely, so the notch readout and the system toast are not showing the same information twice.

A bash script panel that runs commands from the notch

The custom bash script view is the feature that turns the notch into a small command surface. You define a shell command, the app runs it and shows the output, and the panel has its own chrome: selectable header styles of Custom Title, Command, or None, text alignment options of Leading, Center or Trailing, a click-to-copy context menu, and enriched environment paths so that a command can find the tools it needs.

This is the part of MewNotch that deserves the most caution, and the documentation does not soften it. A panel that executes shell commands is an execution surface attached to a physical gesture, and a mistake in a command line is a mistake you can trigger by accident. The app does not describe a confirmation step or a permission prompt for script execution, and the README says nothing about sandboxing the commands or about restricting what they may touch.

The practical consequence is that the script view should be reserved for short, read-only commands that you have already tested in a terminal, and the panel should be left out of the list of notch items on any shared or kiosk machine. Treat it as a shortcut to commands you trust, not as a general command prompt.

Installing the app and clearing the quarantine flag

Two installation paths are documented. The Homebrew route is a single cask install from the maintainer's own tap:

brew install --cask monuk7735/tap/mew-notch

The manual route is to download the latest release from GitHub Releases, move the app into the Applications folder, and run it, granting the permissions it asks for.

Either way you will meet the gatekeeper problem, because the README states plainly that the author does not have an Apple Developer account yet, so the application shows a popup on first launch. The documented fix is to open System Settings, go to Privacy and Security, find the message that MewNotch was blocked and choose Open Anyway, then confirm with Open. There is a terminal alternative for the same job:

xattr -cr /Applications/MewNotch.app

That command clears all file attributes recursively across the app bundle, which removes the quarantine flag macOS places on apps downloaded from the internet. Understand what it does before running it. It strips extended attributes from every file in the bundle, and it is the command a user typically reaches for when they are prepared to vouch for the binary themselves. It also means the app is not notarized, so macOS will not vouch for it either.

After launch, the documentation notes that the notch will not appear on a first launch on non-notched devices, and that re-launching opens the settings.

Permissions, displays and the limits of the shelf

Several features depend on macOS permissions that the user has to grant, and the documentation does not enumerate them one by one beyond the instruction to grant necessary permissions if prompted. Volume and brightness readout in particular are system-level state, and a mirror view that shows a live preview of the user needs camera access. Any of these can be denied in Privacy and Security, and a denied permission shows up as a panel that never updates rather than as an error dialog.

The file shelf has a persistence design that is worth understanding before you rely on it. Files dropped on the notch survive restarts, which is convenient, and they sync across multiple displays, which avoids the same drop being visible in two places. The shelf also supports multi-file packaging and renaming, and it keeps functioning with show-on-lock-screen enabled, which is the case most likely to expose a shelf on a screen anyone can walk past.

That last point is a privacy boundary, not a feature gap. The lock screen visibility setting applies to the notch, and the shelf travels with the notch, so a shelf containing files you would not show to a passer-by is exposed whenever the lock screen view is on screen. The README does not describe any per-file sensitivity marking, so the control you have is the lock screen setting itself.

The mirror view is likewise a deliberate tradeoff, with a customisable corner radius and capture streaming. It is a nice feature for checking your appearance before a call, and it is another camera permission in an app that already needs system-level access.

What is under the hood, and who can ship it

The project is a native macOS application, built with Swift and SwiftUI, with the Xcode project checked in as MewNotch.xcodeproj alongside a MewNotch source directory. The repository also carries a .swiftlint.yml configuration, a .swiftformat file, a .swift-version pin, a mise.toml toolchain file and a .githooks directory, which is the shape of a project that expects contributors and consistent local tooling.

Dependencies are listed in the README: Lottie for animation, LaunchAtLogin-Modern for the login item, SwiftyJSON for JSON handling, Sparkle for the built-in updater, and MacroVisionKit. Sparkle is what makes the auto-update feature possible, and it is worth noting that an updater framework, in any project, is a component that fetches code from the network.

The licence is GPLv3, and that has a direct consequence for anyone thinking beyond personal use. The project is fine for a developer installing it on their own machine, and fine for a company distributing a modified build of it, because GPLv3 requires that the source of the modified version is made available under the same terms. It is a poor fit for anyone hoping to lift the notch implementation into a closed-source product, where the copyleft obligation would reach the derived work. The project itself states it is licensed under the GPLv3 License.

The performance claim in the feature list is worth reading closely rather than repeating. The README cites a baseline memory of about 57 MB, no unused database runtime overhead, and GPU-accelerated CoreAnimation rendering, and it describes the UI as SwiftUI-based. Those are the author's own numbers, with no benchmark published in the repository, so they describe the intent of the implementation rather than a measurement you can rely on.

Release pace and the update path

MewNotch ships frequently. Recent releases include version 2.4.0 on 2026-10-19, version 2.3.1 on 2026-10-18 and version 2.3.0 on 2026-10-18, and the last push was on 2026-10-19. Three tagged versions inside two days is a project in active work, and it also means the app will change shape under you.

The built-in Sparkle updater handles the upgrades, so the operational cost of staying current is low for the person using the app. The cost falls on whoever packages it. The Homebrew cask points at the maintainer's tap, so a Homebrew user pulls the new version through brew upgrade rather than through the in-app updater, and a manual installer gets the Sparkle prompt. Both paths are documented, which is one more reason the cask is the sensible starting point for a team that wants a repeatable install step.

Two roadmap items remain open at the time of writing, a HUD for keyboard backlight changes and further exploration of notch-based utilities. Neither is a promise with a date attached. The more relevant caveat for an adopter is the gatekeeper issue, which will recur on every new build that is not notarized, and the answer to it is the same xattr command each time.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt MewNotch if you own a notched Mac and want volume, brightness, power and media feedback in one place, plus a shelf for files you drag to the notch. Do not adopt it on a Mac without a notch, on a machine where you cannot grant the accessibility and screen recording permissions the app needs, or if your organisation requires signed and notarised software. Verify first that the Homebrew cask or the release you download is what you expect, that the app launches cleanly after you clear the quarantine flag, and that the notch shows on the displays you actually use before you move anything into the file shelf.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: GPL-3.0
2. monuk7735/mew-notch on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases