Dragging a file between two windows means holding your mouse hostage while you find the target. Shelf ends that: shake the mouse mid-drag and a floating shelf appears next to the cursor. Drop the file, let go, go find the window — then drag it out when you're ready.
A drag on macOS is a held breath: you cannot switch spaces, scroll a folder, or open a window without losing what you picked up. Shelf gives that drag somewhere to rest for a minute.
Start dragging anything, wiggle the mouse left and right, and a shelf appears right where the cursor is. No target window to aim at, no hotkey to reach for mid-drag.
Drop the file and the drag is over. Open the folder, switch spaces, scroll the page, take a call. The shelf floats above everything and waits, and you can open several at once.
Pull items out one at a time, or grab the shelf's header to take the whole stack in a single drag. Emptied shelves close themselves and drop into Recent Shelves, in case you were too quick.
Files from Finder, images dragged straight out of a browser, screenshots sitting in the clipboard, plain text, links. Raw images get saved as PNGs so they behave like real files.
One per task, one per folder, one for the thing you'll deal with later. Shake again and you get a new one, placed so it never lands on top of the last.
One click turns everything on a shelf into a single archive — which lands back on the same shelf, ready to drag into an email. No helper tools, no Terminal.
Close a shelf and it drops into a list of the last ten, reopenable with one click — and they survive a restart, so quitting the app doesn't cost you the pile you built.
Pick your language in Settings and the whole app switches on the spot — menus, open shelves, everything — without a restart.
No Accessibility prompt, no Screen Recording, no Full Disk Access. The shake is read from ordinary mouse position, and the shortcuts use an API that needs no approval.
Shelf has no server, no account, no analytics, and no network code at all. What you park on a shelf stays on your Mac, in your own user folder — the app is sandboxed by macOS, so it can only touch the files you hand it by dragging them in.
It's written in Swift with zero third-party dependencies: nothing in the app was written by anyone but me, so there is no SDK quietly phoning home.
Shelf runs on my own Mac every day, but it isn't signed with an Apple Developer certificate yet — and an unsigned app is one macOS refuses to open without a detour through System Settings. Rather than hand you a download that looks broken, this page waits until there's a notarized build worth installing.
No. Shake detection only counts a gesture that carries something — a real drag, started from a file, an image, or a text selection you actually picked up. Selecting text or dragging a window around leaves it alone. And if you'd rather shake never triggered at all, it's one click to turn off, right in the menu-bar menu — shelves still open from there or with ⌃⌥N.
Shelf never moves or copies your files — a shelf holds a reference to where the file already lives, so parking something doesn't duplicate it and closing a shelf never deletes it. Shelves left open when you quit are saved into Recent Shelves, and reopen with one click next time. Files you delete in Finder meanwhile simply don't come back.
No, and that's deliberate. Reading the mouse position needs no permission on macOS; it's keyboard monitoring that triggers the Accessibility prompt, and Shelf's shortcuts use an older API that doesn't require it. You'll never see a permission dialog.
Tabs help when everything is a file in Finder. A shelf also takes an image out of a web page, a chunk of text, a link, a screenshot from your clipboard — and holds them together until you're ready, across apps that know nothing about each other.
Undecided. It's a small app that fixes one annoyance, so if it's ever paid it will be a one-time price with a proper trial, not a subscription. Nothing is being sold today.
macOS 14 Sonoma or newer, on both Apple silicon and Intel — it's a universal binary. It lives in the menu bar, not the Dock, and takes up a few hundred kilobytes.