A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Protesilaos Stavrou’s excellent post on triggering an Emacs popup from anywhere in your system. It’s perfect for Org capture and other things you might want to do when you’re in some other app. I have something similar specialized to Org capture and Phil in the comments said he also has a few bespoke popups. The advantage of Prot’s framework is that it’s easy to invoke any Emacs command from outside of Emacs.
Grant Rosson liked the idea but found that Prot’s Linux based code didn’t port directly to macOS and he presented the code for the minimal changes required to get things working on a Mac. Despite what some folks seem to think, Mac users are a significant portion of the Emacs community so his changes are welcome for those of us using macOS.
Rosson gives some examples of commands other than Org capture that may give you some ideas. What I really like about Prot’s and Rosson’s frameworks is that they help you move as many chores as possible into Emacs. A lot of that simply boils down to being able to enter text in a reasonable—by which I mean Emacs—environment.
If you’re a Mac user and interested in being able to popup a temporary Emacs frame to do whatever you need to do, take a look at Prot’s video and Rosson’s post. You’ll be glad you did.