Press ⌘⇧O and a transparent layer appears over your entire desktop. It isn’t a window you have to manage: clicks pass straight through the empty parts of it to whatever is underneath, so the app you were working in keeps working. Only the panes you place on the canvas catch the mouse.
That’s the whole idea. A place to put things — a note, a shell, a web page — that floats over your work instead of stealing a window from it.
Screenshot pending: overlay-canvas.png
Opening and closing it
| To | Do this |
|---|---|
| Open or close | ⌘⇧O |
| Open or close | Menu-bar ✨ icon → Overlay → Show Overlay |
| Open or close | Ask the assistant — “open the overlay”, “close the overlay” |
| Close | Esc, or the × at the right-hand end of the toolbar |
It opens on the display you’re working on — the one holding the window you had focused.
Closing it puts you straight back where you were. It does not bring the main Clabrate window forward, and neither does typing into a pane.
Note: ⌘⇧O is rebindable like every other Clabrate shortcut — Settings → Keys has Change…, Clear and Reset on the Overlay row. Clearing it leaves the overlay with no shortcut at all, which is a supported state: the menu-bar item above still opens it. See Customizing shortcuts — worth reading if you use Xcode, whose Open Quickly wants the same chord.
Esc takes two presses
If a pane is selected, the first Esc deselects it and the second hides the canvas. If nothing is selected, one press hides it. Renaming a pane, editing a board name, or marking up a browser pane each swallow their own Esc first — so you can back out of an edit without losing the whole canvas.
The toolbar
A small pill sits at the top-centre of the canvas, clear of the menu bar. Left to right:
- Board switcher — the boards you have, plus New board…
- Rename board and Delete board
- App picker — which surface the next pane will be: Browser, Terminal, or any overlay extension you’ve installed (Sticky for pads)
- The create button — reads New browser, New terminal, or New pad depending on what’s picked
- Fit panes — brings every pane on the board fully back onto the screen (⌘⇧F)
- Ambient / Edit — the mode toggle, labelled with the mode it will switch you to
- × — hide the canvas
Screenshot pending: overlay-toolbar.png
Boards
A board is a named set of panes. You get one called Board 1 to start with; add more from the board switcher (New board…) and rename or delete the active one with the two buttons beside it. Board names have to be unique, deleting a board deletes its panes, and the delete button disappears when only one board is left — you can’t end up with none.
Switching boards swaps the whole set of panes at once. That’s the point of them — one board for the article you’re writing, one for the thing you’re debugging, one for the week’s loose ends. Boards are named, so you can also switch them by voice.
Panes remember where you put them as a proportion of the screen, not as pixels, so a board opened on a different display or after a resolution change comes back in the same arrangement rather than half off the edge.
Panes
A pane is a rectangle on the canvas with a title bar. There are three kinds you can create:
| Pane | What it holds | More |
|---|---|---|
| Pad | A scratch note, plain text or rendered Markdown | Sticky pads |
| Terminal | A real login shell | Terminal & browser panes |
| Browser | A live web page | Terminal & browser panes |
Pads need the Sticky add-on installed; Browser and Terminal are built in.
Once a pane is on the board:
- Move it — drag its title bar.
- Resize it — drag the tab in its bottom-right corner. The double-arrow grip in the title bar sets height alone; double-click that grip to fit the pane back on screen.
- Rename it — double-click its title. Names are how you refer to panes by voice, so they’re worth setting; new panes arrive as Pane 1, Pane 2 and so on. (Browser panes are the exception — their title bar is the URL field, so there’s nothing to double-click.)
- Close it — the × on its title bar.
New panes cascade so they don’t land exactly on top of each other, and clicking one raises it to the front. For tidying a board that’s got away from you, see Arranging panes.
Closing a pad deletes its text. Pads are a scratch surface, not a filing cabinet — if something on one matters, move it somewhere permanent before you close the pane. Terminal and browser panes have no content to lose this way; pads do.
Edit mode and Ambient mode
Edit is the normal mode: panes catch the mouse, the toolbar shows the full set of controls.
Ambient makes the entire canvas click-through, panes included. The board is still visible — you just can’t touch it, and neither can a stray click. Use it when you want a board up while you work under it. The toolbar stays clickable, so you can always switch back.
When it won’t open
macOS has a system-wide setting called Secure Keyboard Entry. While an app holds it on, no other app — Clabrate included — can see your keystrokes, which means the canvas would have no working Esc.
So Clabrate refuses to leave a screen-covering surface up without an escape hatch: if another app turns Secure Keyboard Entry on while the overlay is open, the overlay hides itself and shows a short notice naming the app. Try to open it while that app still holds it, and you get the same notice instead of the canvas. Nothing is lost — pane contents are stored, not held in the window — and it opens again the moment the other app releases it.
One case is different: when one of your own browser panes triggers Secure Keyboard Entry by focusing a password field, the canvas stays up and a banner explains it instead. That’s covered on the browser pane page.
Doing it by voice
The assistant can drive the canvas: open and close it, switch and create boards, arrange panes, and read from or write to your pads. Try “open the overlay”, “switch to the articles board”, “put the terminal on the left half”.
Those tools live under an Overlay control card in Settings → Add-ons, where you can see which models are allowed to use them and revoke any of them. As with every assistant tool, they act only on your Mac.
Spot lives here
The overlay is Spot’s room. Opening the canvas brings him out, and he walks home when you close it — a Focus mode or a dictation won’t shoo him out while it’s up.
Privacy
Boards, pane positions, pad text, and pasted images are all stored on your Mac. Nothing about the canvas is sent anywhere. If you point a cloud model at your pads by asking it to read or rewrite one, that text goes to the provider you chose, the same as any other assistant request — see Privacy & your data.
Common questions
Nothing happened when I pressed ⌘⇧O. Another app may have Secure Keyboard Entry on (see above), or the app you’re in may be capturing the chord itself — Xcode’s Open Quickly is the usual one. The menu-bar Overlay → Show Overlay item always works.
My clicks are going through the pane instead of into it. You’re in Ambient mode. Click Edit on the toolbar.
The panes have wandered off the screen. Fit panes on the toolbar, or ⌘⇧F. The toolbar is pinned centre-screen precisely so this is always reachable.
⌘⇧F did nothing. A focused pad or browser pane swallows the chord, the same as it swallows Esc. Click an empty part of the canvas first. It also only applies in Edit mode.
Where did my pad text go? Closing a pad’s pane deletes it. See the warning above.
Does the canvas cover full-screen apps? Yes — it floats above them, and it follows you across Spaces.
Is there more than one canvas on a multi-monitor setup? Not today. It opens on the display holding the window you had focused.
For the thinking behind all this, there’s an essay: A place to put a thought down.