Instantly Create a New Stickies Note from Safari with a Keystroke in Mac OS X

Want a block of text to float over your Mac desktop so that you can reference it easily? That’s a perfect usage for the Stickies app in OS X, and using a little known trick you can instantly create a new Stickies note from within Safari.

The secret to this trick is quite simple: you’ll need need highlight some text, images, or both, and then just hit the following command key sequence: Command+Shift+Y

Hitting that keystroke while text is selected will instantly generate a new stickies note with the highlighted / selected content, including all formatting, links, etc.

By the way, if you want to change the keyboard shortcut for this feature into something else, you can do that through the “System Preferences” by going to Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services and finding the “make New Sticky Note” option and adjusting the accompanying keystroke necessary to activate the feature.

This is one of those tricks that gets nearly nonstop usage by those who use it, because it’s a great way to gather information, images, links, and whatever else, to keep handy for later. It’s particularly handy if you’re doing research, since the stickies windows can float above everything else, or you can just stack a bunch of them on the side of a word processing app for quick reference when necessary. Use the color coding feature to change the appearance of them into meaningful groups, and you’re good to go.