Alexander Zeitler

Can't delete a note in PDF using Preview on macOS

Published on Saturday, March 11, 2023

While reviewing some PDF articles I took notes that I wanted to delete later on using macOS Preview app. But it didn't work as expected.

Here's the crime scene:

The most obvious things to try are hitting the backspace key (also together with ⇧ and/or ⌘). But this didn't work.

Lucky me, there's a workaround.

Open the "Inspector" using ⌘ + i shortcut:

There you can select a note and once it's highlighted, it can be removed using the backspace key:

Late 2025 Update

Since this is one of the most read posts on my blog, I would like to point out that I completely stopped using macOS since shortly after the post in 2023.

Linux has been my daily driver since 2014 and everything I've still been using macOS for, I can do on Linux since then.

Recently I've been switching from Ubuntu to Omarchy, which is the most enjoyable OS I've ever used.

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