SideNotes 1.6: What's New for Students

Apptorium released SideNotes 1.6 on 11 May 2026, and it is one of the larger updates the Mac note-taking app has had. The release adds note folding and pinning, a quick formatting toolbar, a rebuilt Settings window and eight new interface languages, all aimed at making the slide-out notes panel quicker to organise. If you keep lecture reminders, reading lists or code snippets in SideNotes, this update changes how tidy that panel can stay over a busy term. It follows SideNotes 1.5 from June 2025, which introduced Invisible Markdown, an editor that hides formatting symbols while keeping the formatting itself.

What's new in SideNotes 1.6

Pinning and folding

You can now pin important notes and frequently used folders so they stay at the top of their lists, rather than drifting down as new notes arrive. Notes can also be folded, collapsing them to a single line so a long checklist or a pasted article doesn't take over the panel. Folding works from a keyboard shortcut, a pinch gesture or a double-click on the note's bottom bar, so it fits whichever way you prefer to work.

Faster formatting

A new quick formatting toolbar appears near your cursor, so you can apply styles without heading to a menu. Underline is now supported, and you can insert horizontal separators to split a note into clear sections. There is also a quick way to clear completed checklist items, which keeps to-do notes from filling up with ticked-off tasks.

A rebuilt Settings window and more customisation

• Settings: the preferences window has been redesigned from scratch, making options easier to find.
• Themes and fonts: more built-in themes and a wider choice of fonts.
• Colours: an improved note colour picker, plus options for how hex colour codes are copied and the ability to turn colour rendering off.
• Moving notes: a redesigned Move Note menu that includes recently used folders.
• Languages: new translations into Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Spanish.

Apptorium also lists faster note opening, new bottom bars in the note view and notes list for common actions, better handling of text pasted from ChatGPT, and several bug fixes. The full list is in the official SideNotes 1.6 release notes.

Since then

Point releases have continued through the summer. SideNotes 1.6.3, released on 23 July 2026, added folder duplication, printing with Command-P, and new Shortcuts actions to pin and fold notes or fetch a note's URL, along with matching AppleScript properties. Later updates in September 2026 brought writing improvements, a fix for pasting URLs and a Siri fix for macOS 27.

Why it matters for students

SideNotes sits at the edge of your screen and slides out when you need it, which makes it well suited to quick capture while another app is open. The 1.6 changes make that panel more practical over a whole term:

• Lectures and seminars: pin a note for each module you're currently taking so it's always at the top, and fold older notes once you've written them up properly elsewhere.
• Coursework deadlines: keep a checklist of assignments, then clear completed items in one go instead of scrolling past a wall of ticks.
• Research and reading: use separators to split a note into sources, quotations to check and questions for your supervisor, so a single note can hold a whole essay plan.
• Coding: store terminal commands, regex patterns or colour codes for a web project, and use the new hex copy formats to paste colours in the style your stylesheet expects.
• Revision: print a note with Command-P (added in 1.6.3) when you want a paper summary sheet to annotate.

If you already automate parts of your workflow, the Shortcuts and AppleScript additions in 1.6.3 mean you can pin or fold notes as part of a routine, for example surfacing a timetable note at the start of the day.

Requirements and upgrade details

• SideNotes 1.6 requires macOS 13 or newer. The Control Center controls need macOS 26.
• It is a free update for anyone who already owns a SideNotes 1.x licence.
• New users buy SideNotes as a one-off purchase rather than a subscription.

Get SideNotes with a student discount

Student App Centre members get 45% Off SideNotes, so you can add it to your Mac for less and still receive the free 1.x updates described above. See the SideNotes student discount page for details. If you're not a member yet, you can start with a 7-day free trial of Student App Centre membership.