How to Turn Off Quick Note on a Mac

This article explains how to turn off Quick Notes and how to modify your hot corners preferences.

How to Stop Quick Notes From Popping up on Your Mac

If you’re running macOS Monterey or later, Quick Notes will be tied to your bottom-right hot corner. When you move your cursor into this corner of your screen, a small white box will appear, allowing you to create a Quick Note. The only way to prevent this from happening is to disable Quick Note as a hot corner in System Preferences. 

To turn off Quick Note: 

1. Open the Apple menu and select System Preferences. 

2. Select Desktop & Screen Saver.

   You can also access Hot Corners through the Mission Control menu.

3. Click the Screen Saver tab and select the Hot Corners… button in the bottom-right corner.

4. Select the Quick Note hot corner (it should be the bottom-right corner). 

5. From the dropdown menu, select Blank (—). Alternatively, you can select a different option to change the hot corner’s functionality.

6. Click OK to save changes.

7. Optionally, if you’d still like easy access to Quick Note, you can assign it to a different hot corner. Select a corner and click Quick Note from the dropdown menu.

How to Prevent Hot Corners From Accidentally Activating

If you’d like to keep Quick Notes assigned to a hot corner without accidentally triggering it, you can add modifier key. This way, you’ll need to hold down the Command, Shift, Option, or Control key (or a combination) while moving your mouse over the corresponding corner in order to activate it. 

Here’s how to enable modifier keys:

1. Navigate to Hot Corners… in System Preferences.

2. Select the corner you’d like to assign an action to and hold down the Command, Shift, Option, or Control key while selecting an action.

3. You should now see the corresponding modifier key symbol next to the hot corner action. Click OK to confirm.

4. To disable a modifier key, click the hot corner dropdown menu and tap the corresponding modifier key.

How to Set Up Hot Corners on Mac

By default, Quick Note is the only action that is automatically assigned to a hot corner. However, macOS will let you assign one of nine additional actions to hot corners. To do so, navigate to System Preferences > Mission Control > Hot Corners… and select from the following options:

• Start Screen Saver: Launches your screen saver.
• Disable Screen Saver: Turns off your screen saver.
• Mission Control: Displays all open windows.
• Application Windows: Shows all open windows of a specific app.
• Desktop: Hides all of your open windows to show your desktop.
• Notification Center: Displays the Notification Center, which includes missed notifications and widgets for appointments, weather, top headlines, and more.
• Launchpad: Displays all of your applications.
• Put Display to Sleep: Put your Mac to sleep.
• Lock Screen: Locks your screen.