jot

A tiny autosaving notes editor for Linux desktops, built with GTK4 and libadwaita.

Press a key, type, press Esc. It saves as you type.

• No save dialogs. Every note is saved as you type to ~/Documents/Notes/<date time>.md.
• Always fresh. Each launch opens a blank tab, and old notes never reopen. If jot is already open, launching it again adds a new tab.
• Empty notes leave nothing behind. If you clear a note, its file is deleted.
• Browse your notes in a sidebar, newest first, with a short preview of each. Click one to keep editing it.
• Rendered Markdown at the press of a button: headings, lists, task boxes, quotes, code, tables. JavaScript is off and raw HTML in a note is shown as text.
• Tabs, Markdown highlighting, and it follows the system light/dark theme.

Keys

Key	Action
Ctrl+T / Ctrl+N	New note
Ctrl+O	Show / hide the notes sidebar
Ctrl+E	Toggle rendered Markdown
Ctrl+W	Close note (closing the last one exits)
Esc / Ctrl+Q	Close jot
Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn, Alt+1…9	Switch tabs

Install

Requires Python 3, PyGObject, GTK 4, libadwaita and GtkSourceView 5. The rendered view also needs WebKitGTK 6 and Python-Markdown; without them jot still works and the preview button is hidden.

# Arch
sudo pacman -S python-gobject libadwaita gtksourceview5 webkitgtk-6.0 python-markdown
curl -Lo ~/.local/bin/jot https://raw.githubusercontent.com/omeg4-dev/jot/main/jot.py
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/jot

Set JOT_DIR to store notes somewhere else.

Hyprland

hl.bind("SUPER + CONTROL + C", hl.dsp.exec_cmd("jot"))
hl.window_rule({ match = { class = "^(dev\\.omega\\.jot)$" }, float = true, center = true, size = "720 520" })

Tests

python -m pytest -q

License

MIT