Aliento Lets You Turn Off macOS Notifications with a Single Keystroke

Sometimes you’re in the middle of typing something, you see a notification pop up on your screen, and you want it to disappear. Immediately. Unfortunately on Mac, there’s no default way to do this without taking your hand off the keyboard and using your pointer to cover it.

Alien is a pay-what-you-want Mac app that runs in the background and lets you set a keyboard shortcut to dismiss notifications. Just launch the app, set a keyboard shortcut (the default is Command+Escape), and you’re good to go. If you don’t want to turn off notifications entirely (via, say, Focus Mode), this is a nice half-measure: You can make note of a notification when it arrives, but clear it from your screen with little trouble.

Eliminate notifications without interrupting your workflow

Now, whenever you receive a notification, you can dismiss it using the keyboard shortcut. You can also review everything you closed in Notification Center if you need to see it later. I’ve had the app installed on my Mac for a few days now and find myself using it all the time. I can see when a notification arrives, clear it from my screen, and get right back to typing.

You can set the app to start at startup and decide whether you want it to appear in the menu bar. I like that it works without clutter the menu barpersonally — this is the kind of app you can literally install and then forget about, because it works like a native feature.

Very useful, Apple should have considered this

Speaking of which, I wish Apple would offer this functionality as a native feature. The company is generally pretty good at notification management: Focus Mode is very good at reducing distractions, And Apple Intelligence makes it even better. There is also a great tool See iPhone notifications on your Mac. In general, a lot of care and attention is paid to notifications in macOS, so it’s a bit surprising that there aren’t any keyboard shortcuts to dismiss them.

Luckily Aliento takes care of this issue so I can stop thinking about it. (It’s free to add the app to your machine, but if you find it useful, I recommend dropping a few bucks as a thank you to the developer.)