Apple introduced a feature in macOS called “Quick Note.” By default, if you push your mouse cursor into the extreme bottom-right corner of your screen, a small white square will peek out. If you click it or push slightly harder, a brand new Apple Notes window will automatically pop open, ready for you to jot down a thought.
While Apple intended this to be a fast productivity hack, it relies on “Hot Corners,” which are notoriously easy to trigger by accident. If you are simply trying to click the Trash icon in your Dock or trying to grab the corner of an application window to resize it, you will frequently trigger the Quick Note by mistake, throwing a giant notepad directly into the center of your workflow.
You can completely sever the link between your mouse cursor and the Quick Note application by modifying your Hot Corners configuration.
How to Turn Off the Quick Note Hot Corner
You must dive into the Desktop & Dock settings to remove this trigger.
- Open the System Settings (or System Preferences) via the Apple Logo in the top-left menu bar.
- Scroll down the left sidebar and click on Desktop & Dock.
- Scroll all the way down to the very bottom of the right-hand pane.
- Click on the button labeled Hot Corners….
- A dialog box will appear representing the four corners of your screen. Look at the dropdown menu in the bottom-right corner.
- Click the dropdown menu that currently says “Quick Note.”
- Change the selection to the very last option: – (hyphen/minus sign), which means “do nothing.”
- Click Done to save your changes.
macOS will immediately stop monitoring the bottom-right corner of your screen. You can now throw your mouse cursor into the corner with reckless abandon without ever accidentally launching the Apple Notes app.