Quick Note

Meetings are one kind of capture. The other is the thought you have between them, which is gone by the time you’ve found a window to type it into. Quick Note is that second path: press a hotkey anywhere on your Mac, say the thing, and the transcribed text lands in the destination you configured. Nothing has to have focus — the hotkey is global. Oris itself does need to stay running, though, and closing its last window quits it, so leave the window open (or minimized) if you want the hotkey live.

Quick Note lives on the Voice tab in the Oris app. A master switch there, Enable voice capture, turns the whole feature on or off. It’s read once when Oris launches, so flipping it shows “Saved — relaunch Oris to apply.” until you quit and reopen the app. The hotkey is latched at launch the same way. Destination, activation mode, and AI cleanup are the live ones: change any of those and your very next capture uses the new value.

The tab stays put either way. Switching off takes effect at the next launch just as switching on does, so until you quit and reopen, the hotkey is still registered and still captures. Once Oris has started up with it off, the tab says the hotkey isn’t listening and points out that quick notes you’ve already taken are still there to open — turning it back on is one switch and a relaunch away.

Speaking a note

The default hotkey is ⌃⇧Space. It’s registered system-wide, so it works from any app, and it needs no extra permission grant beyond the microphone access Oris already has.

If you swap it for something else, be aware that macOS claims a lot of combinations for itself, and it doesn’t announce it when it does: a reserved shortcut registers perfectly happily and the system then eats the keypress before Oris ever sees it. A hotkey that appears to do nothing is usually this rather than a bug. The Voice tab helps on both counts — it warns you when the hotkey you’ve configured is one macOS is known to own, and it shows whether the registration itself succeeded.

While you speak, a small panel sits in the top-right corner of the screen with a record dot, a running timer, and a level meter. It confirms Oris is hearing you without covering what you were doing. When you finish, the panel moves through “Transcribing…” and “Saving…”, then a short toast names where the note went. On a cold first run the panel says “Preparing model…” and explains the wait rather than looking frozen.

Transcription for quick notes runs on your Mac, the same as it does for meetings.

Two ways to activate

Under Activation you pick how the hotkey behaves:

• Press to start, press again to stop (the default). Best for longer notes, since you’re free to gesture, scroll, or walk away from the keyboard while you talk.
• Hold to talk, release to finish. Hold the hotkey while you speak and let go when you’re done. A press too quick to be a real hold records nothing rather than starting a capture you didn’t want.

Hold mode is a strict superset of toggle: the key-down still starts a capture, so if a release is ever missed, pressing the hotkey again always finishes the note. It can’t get stuck.

Where captures land

Quick note destination offers four choices:

Destination	What it does
In-app inbox (default)	The capture stays in Oris’s own quick-notes store. No vault setup needed, and nothing is written to your vault until you say so.
Pinned note	Appends to an existing note in your vault, at a vault-relative path you name (inbox/quick-notes.md, say).
Daily note	Appends to a per-day quick-notes file, created on first use.
Weekly note	The same, one file per ISO week.

Daily and weekly notes live in a folder you choose (inbox by default) and are Oris’s own files (quick-2026-07-26.md, quick-2026-W30.md) rather than your Daily Notes plugin’s note. Each capture appends as one timestamped bullet, so a day’s file reads as a running list.

The stamp on that bullet matches the note it lands in. In the daily note it’s the time alone (- 10:09 …), because the date is already the note’s name. A pinned note and the weekly note collect captures across days, so there each bullet carries its capture date too (- 2026-08-10 10:09 …) — a month of appends stays readable history instead of a wall of bare times. The date is the day you spoke the note, even when a held capture is delivered later.

Two deliberate behaviors are worth knowing:

• A pinned note is never created for you. If the note you named isn’t there, Oris doesn’t guess, because a silent create would quietly hide a note you’d renamed or moved. The capture falls back to the in-app inbox instead.
• A misconfiguration never costs you a capture. Every destination problem (an unset vault, a missing pinned note, an unrecognized mode, a vault write that didn’t go through) falls back to the in-app inbox, and the toast tells you which one happened. If even that write fails (a full disk, a permissions problem), Oris says so rather than shrugging: the toast reads “Quick note not saved — audio kept”, stays on screen instead of dismissing itself, and names the audio file it kept so nothing is silently thrown away.

While a vault destination is configured, the settings tab shows “Next capture lands in …” with the actual path, computed the same way the real capture computes it. With an Apple Notes destination none of these file choices applies — quick notes go to Notes — so the Voice tab says that instead of showing them: it names the folder and the note your captures append to, and the vault fields stay out of the way until you switch back to a file destination.

With an Apple Notes destination, captures go to Notes, and the shapes above change. The sink is a note in Notes rather than a file, so what you get is a note per day (Quick notes — <date>, created as Oris needs it) or one note you name, created the first time you use it. The same stamp rule applies there: the per-day note keeps time-only bullets, and the single named note dates each one. The file choices on the Voice tab, including the “Next capture lands in …” preview they feed, stay configured but don’t act while Apple Notes is the destination; switch back to a vault or folder (by re-running the walkthrough from the General tab, which is where every destination change is made) and they take over again. A capture whose delivery to Notes doesn’t complete is saved to the in-app inbox rather than lost, and what happens next depends on how far the delivery got; the Apple Notes page walks through both cases.

A stuck delivery announces itself. When something can’t be delivered and ends up waiting — a quick note, or any other capture — the Recordings tab’s label carries the count, and when the queue goes from empty to non-empty — and stays that way for the half-minute grace described below — Oris also posts one macOS notification: “A note couldn’t be delivered — it’s saved in Oris.” Clicking it brings you to the Recordings tab in Oris, which holds the Awaiting delivery queue. It’s one banner per incident, not one per capture: three captures failing in a row get a single notification, and you won’t be re-notified on every launch about a queue you’ve already been told about. That grace period exists because a queued delivery Oris is about to finish on its own — the normal state right after you open the app with an Apple Notes destination — isn’t stuck at all, and most of those drain quietly before the banner would fire.

The in-app viewer

Voice → Open quick notes opens the Quick notes window: the captures Oris is holding listed down the left, grouped by day (Today, Yesterday, then dates), and the selected capture’s full text on the right. It lists the ones kept in the in-app inbox — a quick note you routed straight to a vault note went to your vault, and one delivered straight to Apple Notes went to Notes, so those live there and not here. (A held capture that Oris later re-delivered on its own stays listed here too — but it flips to sent the moment that delivery lands, so the list never claims a delivered capture is still waiting.) It updates live, so a note you speak while the window is open appears on its own.

Four actions sit above the text:

• Send to vault — sends the capture on to your destination (⌘↩). With a file destination it writes the capture into your vault, following whichever vault destination you’ve configured (pinned, daily, or weekly). The in-app inbox isn’t a vault location, so if that’s your setting, sends go to today’s daily quick note. Once it lands, the button becomes Open in Obsidian and takes you straight to the note. With an Apple Notes destination the same button re-sends the capture to Notes rather than writing a file, and once the capture has landed there it becomes Open in Apple Notes — one click and Notes comes forward on the exact note it went to, whether you sent it yourself or Oris finished a queued delivery on its own. A capture delivered by an older version of Oris didn’t record which note it landed in, so it reads Sent to Apple Notes without offering the open. A held capture whose failure happened after Oris had already reached Notes is queued and retried on its own, and when that retry lands the capture flips to sent here by itself — the button stops offering a re-send, so a capture that already landed can’t be appended a second time by accident. The other order is covered too: when you press Send and it lands, the queued delivery that capture had been waiting on is retired at that moment rather than left to fire later, so a capture you sent by hand never has a second copy appended behind your back. That holds however many sends failed before one worked — every attempt still waiting is cleared by the one that lands. It holds in the other direction too: when a queued delivery finishes on its own, the other attempts Oris can still tie to that capture are cleared with it, so in the ordinary case there is nothing left over to append the note again afterwards. The exceptions are narrow and worth naming: an attempt Oris can no longer tie to a capture, one whose clearing didn’t take, and one the queue had already picked up in the moment the other landed. Mark delivered… in the Recordings tab clears whichever of those you are left with.
• Copy — the capture’s full text to the clipboard (⇧⌘C). The text in the pane is selectable too, so ⌘C still copies just what you highlighted.
• Reveal — shows the underlying file in Finder (⇧⌘R).
• Delete — removes the capture from Oris (⌘⌫), after a confirmation that’s explicit about whether a copy already went to your vault. Deleting here never touches the vault copy.

Sending to the vault doesn’t remove the in-app copy: the capture stays listed, marked as sent, and the vault note is a separate document from that point on.

Send to vault is how a capture turns into something you work with. This window’s job is to show you what you said and get it where it belongs; once a capture lands in Obsidian it’s an ordinary Markdown note, and reshaping it, filing it, linking it, or folding it into something longer all happen there, in the editor you already use. With an Apple Notes destination the landing spot is Notes, and the same work happens there.

Optional AI cleanup

Tidy up quick notes with AI is off by default. Turned on, it adds punctuation and capitalization and drops filler words before the note lands, so a dictated thought reads like writing rather than a transcript. It uses the same provider settings as your summaries, which means on-device by default — and, if you’ve pointed Oris at a provider that isn’t on this Mac, the note’s text goes there the way a summary would. That’s a cloud provider, or a self-hosted Ollama endpoint running on another machine. That adds a step between “Transcribing…” and the note landing: a second or two on-device with a warm model, longer on a cold one or over the network with an off-device provider. There’s a ceiling on how long it will wait, and passing it just files the plain transcript.

The reason it’s safe to turn on isn’t that a model is trusted, it’s that its output has to earn its place. Dropping “um” is the job, so the check isn’t “did any word disappear”, it’s “is this still the same note”. Before a cleaned version replaces your capture, Oris compares it against the raw transcript and rejects it for content that went missing beyond the filler, wording that was never dictated, or output that drifted into summarizing rather than tidying. Negations and numbers get the strictest treatment of all: they’re checked in place, so one that quietly moves to another clause is rejected outright.

This is a deliberately conservative check rather than a proof. It’s tuned to reject anything suspicious, because a rejection costs you nothing: you get the raw transcript, which is the floor the feature promises. Two things it can’t do, both worth knowing. It can’t certify that an accepted note is word-perfect, since a long capture carries a little tolerance for the ordinary substitutions that come with tidying. And it compares against the transcript rather than against your speech, so a word the recognizer misheard is a word the check will happily preserve. Read a note you’re relying on, the way you would any other. If that trade isn’t one you want, leave the setting off and nothing stands between the transcript and your note. Cleanup that fails, times out, or can’t run lands the raw text the same way.

Very long captures skip cleanup and land raw. It’s a tidy-up pass for a spoken thought, not a rewrite engine for a monologue.

Meetings win

A meeting recording and a quick note both want the microphone, so they can’t overlap, and the tie always breaks the same way: the meeting wins.

Start a meeting recording while a quick note is in flight and the quick note is cancelled. Oris notices within about a second, whichever activation mode you’re on, and the panel says what happened: “Quick note cancelled,” with a line naming the reason, which is that a meeting recording started. Nothing is filed. The meeting recorder starts once the quick note’s recorder has stopped, so the handoff takes a moment and a sentence spoken across it may not land in either recording.

Discarding it is the deliberate part. You didn’t choose to end the note where the meeting cut in, so half of a sentence saved as an ordinary quick note would read exactly like one you meant to stop there, and you’d have no way to tell the difference later. A cancelled note you were told about is the better of the two.

A recording that stops for some other reason (the recorder crashed, or something outside Oris killed it) is treated differently, because nothing else is competing for that audio. The panel says “Recording stopped — audio kept”, stays on screen instead of dismissing itself, and names the folder holding what was captured, the same way every other kept-audio message does.

Going the other way, pressing the hotkey to start a new quick note while a meeting is recording is refused with “Meeting recording in progress.” Stop the meeting first.

Changing the hotkey

Every Quick Note setting is a control on the Voice tab, with one exception: the hotkey itself is shown read-only while the control for changing it in the app is still being built. Until then, the Voice tab tells you what to do if you need a different combination, naming the setting to change (ORIS_QUICKNOTE_HOTKEY) in the message itself. A hotkey needs at least one modifier, so a bare key can’t quietly take over a system-wide shortcut, and it takes effect after a relaunch because it is registered once when Oris launches.

A combination Oris can’t make sense of never leaves you with a dead feature. It falls back to the default and the Voice tab shows a warning naming what it couldn’t read.

How it works underneath

Every control on the Voice tab

The Voice tab holds Quick Note. It stays present whether or not capture is running, so the master switch and your captures are always reachable. Two of these settings are read when Oris launches, the master switch and the hotkey, while destination, activation, and cleanup are re-read for every capture and apply immediately.

• Enable voice capture — the master switch. Because it is read at launch, flipping it shows “Saved — relaunch Oris to apply.” until you restart the app. While capture is off, the tab says so and points out that quick notes you have already taken are still openable below.
• Open quick notes — opens the two-pane quick-notes reader, with captures by day on the left, the selected capture on the right, and Send to vault, Copy, Reveal and Delete above the text.
• Quick note destination — the in-app inbox (the default), a pinned note at a vault path you name, a daily note, or a weekly note. Daily and weekly notes are created in a folder you choose. A live preview shows the exact path your next capture lands in when your notes go to a vault or folder. With an Apple Notes destination these file choices, the preview they feed included, stay configured but don’t act: the connector decides where captures land (a note per day, or one note you name; the Apple Notes page covers both shapes), and the file settings take effect again when you switch back to a vault or folder (which, like any destination change, happens by re-running the walkthrough from the General tab).
• Hotkey — the current combination, shown read-only, defaulting to ⌃⇧Space. A control for changing it in the app is coming. The tab warns you when the combination is one macOS is known to claim for itself, and it shows whether the registration succeeded.
• Activation — press to start and press again to stop, which is the default, or hold to talk and release to finish.
• Tidy up quick notes with AI — off by default. It adds punctuation and casing and drops filler before the capture lands, using the same provider settings as your summaries.