Paper tear-off pads that live on your Mac desktop.
One pad per goal, one sheet per day, torn off only after you've actually done the thing.

Habit apps nag you. A paper pad on your desk doesn't — it just sits there getting thinner, and the only way it gets thinner is if you did the work. Tearoff is that, on your desktop: set a count (21, 10, 66, whatever), and tear one sheet off per day. The stack visibly thins as you go. There is no way to tear ahead, and nothing to dismiss.

Download the latest Tearoff.zip from Releases, unzip, and drag Tearoff.app to /Applications. It's a universal binary — Apple silicon and Intel, macOS 14 Sonoma or later.

The app is ad-hoc signed, not notarised — Apple charges $99/year for that — so macOS will refuse to open it on the first try. Either right-click the app → Open → Open, or:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Tearoff.app

Or build it yourself, which skips the quarantine dance entirely:

git clone https://github.com/CoderMayhem/tearoff.git
cd tearoff
./build.sh --install     # builds, signs, installs to /Applications, launches

Needs the Swift toolchain from Xcode (xcode-select --install is not enough — the app links SwiftUI).

Tearoff lives in the menu bar — no Dock icon, no window in your way. The number beside the icon is how many pads still need tearing today; it disappears when you're caught up.

Pads come in three sizes and six paper stocks, including a dark one. Any starting count from 1 to 999 — presets for 7, 10, 21, 30, 66 and 90.

• One tear per calendar day. Pull at a pad you've already torn today and it gives a few points of slack, then springs back. There is no way to tear tomorrow's sheet tonight.
• Undo only reaches today. You can take back a mistaken tear; you cannot rewrite last week.
• Missing a day costs you nothing but the truth. Nothing resets, nothing scolds you. The seven dots on each sheet are the last seven days — filled where you tore, hollow where you didn't, ringed on today.
• A streak survives until you actually miss a day, not from midnight onwards. Tearing yesterday and not yet today still reads as a live streak.

By default pads sit on the desktop layer — above the wallpaper and your desktop icons, behind every app window, on the one desktop Space where you put them. They never cover your work, never follow you to another Space, and never appear over a full-screen app. Clicking one doesn't steal focus from what you were typing in.

If you'd rather they hover above everything, menu bar → Keep Pads On Top.

Everything lives in one plain JSON file:

~/Library/Application Support/Tearoff/pads.json

Your goals, the pad geometry, and every day you've torn. No network calls, no accounts, no telemetry, no analytics — the app has no networking code at all. Back it up, edit it, or delete it to start fresh. If the file is ever unreadable, Tearoff moves it to pads.json.corrupt and starts empty rather than overwriting it.

rm -rf /Applications/Tearoff.app
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Tearoff

If you enabled Open at Login, remove it in System Settings → General → Login Items first.

swift test                                  # 30 tests over the model and store
./build.sh                                  # → dist/Tearoff.app, universal
./build.sh --fast                           # this machine's architecture only, for iteration
./build.sh --install                        # replace /Applications/Tearoff.app and launch
TEAROFF_SHOT=docs/pads.png swift run -c release Tearoff   # regenerate the README screenshot

Two AppKit details worth knowing before you touch PadPanel.swift:

• .canJoinAllSpaces puts pads on every Space and .fullScreenAuxiliary draws them over full-screen apps. Both look like bugs to the user.
• .fullScreenNone sounds like the fix for that and is a trap: it stops the panel from appearing at all. The working combination is [.stationary, .ignoresCycle] at kCGDesktopIconWindowLevel + 1.

Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.