Master Quick Notes on Your iPad (and Mac)
With iPadOS 15—and macOS Monterey — Apple added a cool new feature called Quick Note.
You can probably already guess what this feature does just from the name. Swiping up from the bottom right of your iPad’s display, using either your finger or Apple Pencil, brings up a Quick Note that will hover over any app you’re using. You can even drag it around the screen to move it out of the way. Once you’re done with it, you can tap on Done, and the note will be automatically saved in the Notes app.
If you’re using Apple’s Magic Keyboard with your iPad, you can also call up the Quick Note function by pressing the Globe key and the Q key at the same time. This also works on the Mac; on older Macs, use the FN key in place of the Globe key.
Quick Note should normally be enabled by default, but if you want to get rid of it, or set it so that it only works with your Apple Pencil and not your finger, just follow these steps:
- On your iPad, open the Settings app.
- Scroll down and tap on Notes.
- Scroll down and tap on Corner Gestures
- To disable the finger gesture, tap the switch beside Allow Finger to Swipe from Corner to toggle it off.
- To disable the Quick Note gesture entirely, tap on Right Corner Swipe, and then tap Off.
From here you can also change the setting to allow you to take a screenshot by swiping from the bottom right corner, or set Quick Note to come up when swiping from the bottom left corner instead. Note that this won’t disable the Globe-Q keyboard shortcut, so you can still use that from an external keyboard even if you’ve switched off the swipe gestures.
There are several other options for Quick Notes that you can customize in the Notes settings as well, such as whether calling up a Quick Note window pulls up the last quick note or creates a new one. You can also have your iPad automatically suggest links to whatever apps you’re using, such as a web page in Safari or an email in the Mail app.