How to click the notch to open something on a Mac

The black strip around the camera at the top of a MacBook looks like it should do something when you click it, and by default it does nothing. macOS leaves that centre blank on purpose. But with the right setup, clicking the notch can open something useful. This guide explains what the notch is, why it is a good place to click, and how to make a click there open a shelf for your files.

What the notch is and why it ignores clicks

The notch is the cutout that holds the camera. The screen extends up around it, and Apple treats the whole top strip as menu bar. Your app menus sit to the left of the notch, the clock and status icons to the right, and the centre, the part directly around the camera, is deliberately left empty so nothing important hides behind the cutout.

Because that centre is defined as blank menu bar space, macOS does not put anything clickable there by default. Click it and nothing happens. That is not a bug; it is the system keeping the area clear. But it also means the most stable, always-visible point on the whole screen is sitting unused, which is the opportunity.

Why the notch is a good thing to click

Think about what makes a target easy to hit with a cursor. It helps if the target is large, if it sits against an edge so you cannot overshoot, and if it never moves. The notch checks all three. It is a wide strip, it is pinned to the very top of the screen so you can throw the pointer upward and stop against the edge, and it is always in the same place regardless of which app is in front.

That last point matters most. Every window on your Mac moves, resizes, and hides behind other windows. The notch does not. It is one of the few spots you can aim for blind, the way you already flick the pointer to the top of the screen to reach the menu bar without looking. A click target that never moves is worth a lot, because your hand can learn it.

Making a click on the notch open a shelf

Since macOS will not make the notch interactive on its own, an app has to claim that region and respond to clicks in it. Ledge does exactly that. It watches the notch area, and when you click it, a shelf drops down from the strip. The shelf is a place to set files, folders, images and links while you move them from one app to another.

So the flow is direct. You click the notch, the shelf appears. You drag a file onto it. You click the notch again, or click away, and the shelf tucks back up into the strip. There is nothing to aim at except the notch itself, which, as above, is one of the easiest targets on the screen to hit.

Clicking is not the only way in. The same shelf opens with a keyboard shortcut, Option and Space by default, so you can reach it with your hands on the keys or with a click, whichever is faster in the moment. The two do the same thing, and you can mix them freely: click to open, shortcut to close, or the other way around.

What you can do once it is open

The click is just the door. What makes the shelf worth opening is what it does with what you drop on it. You can gather several things from different apps in one place: a screenshot from one app, a PDF from a folder, a link from a browser, all sitting on the same shelf. Then you drag them off to wherever they belong.

The part that saves the most effort is that each destination gets the right version of what you dropped. Drag a file off the shelf onto a terminal and it hands over the path as text. Drag the same file onto a chat app and it uploads the file. Drag it into a folder in the Finder and it moves the file itself. You throw one thing at the notch, and each app receives the form it can actually use, without you thinking about formats.

If your Mac has no notch

Not every Mac has a notch, and the idea still works. On a Mac without one, the shelf lives in the same spot, the top centre of the screen, and opens the same way. The click target is a defined region at the top middle rather than a physical cutout, but the behaviour is identical: click there, the shelf drops, drag your files in and out.

So whether or not your MacBook has the camera cutout, the top centre of the screen is a fixed, easy place to reach, and turning it into a click that opens a shelf gives that unused strip a job. The notch was going to sit there either way. A single click can make it the spot where your files pause on their way from one app to the next.