stickynote

A sticky notes board for your terminal. Built with Ratatui and Crossterm.

I wanted a place to dump thoughts without leaving the terminal — no browser tab, no Electron app, no sync service. Just a JSON file on disk and a TUI that gets out of the way.

What it looks like

A board with a handful of notes — the tab bar at the top, a full note card in the middle, status and hint bars at the bottom.

Edit mode gives each section its own focus and cursor. Tab cycles between Header → Content → Tags. The focused section gets a thick black border; single-line sections expand to fit top/bottom borders.

Tags autocomplete as you type, pulling from every tag already on the board. Tab fills the highlighted suggestion, Enter commits it.

Overlay mode (O) drops the selected note full-screen when you need focus.

Help (?) keeps a keyboard reference handy, themed to match whatever colour scheme is active.

Right-click a tab for quick actions: edit, change colour or border, add a tag, duplicate, or delete.

Install

You need Rust 1.85+ (the crate uses edition 2024).

From crates.io

cargo install stickynote

From source

git clone https://github.com/narqulie/stickynote.git
cd stickynote
cargo build --release
cp target/release/stickynote ~/.local/bin/

Usage

stickynote

Press n to make a note, click it to select, then hit e to start typing.

CLI flags

stickynote --board ~/work-notes.json     # use a custom board file
stickynote --theme light                 # start with light theme
stickynote --board /tmp/scratch.json --theme mono

Keyboard

Mouse

Editing

When editing a note, Tab cycles the focus between three sections, each with its own cursor:

• Header — the note title, center-justified. Type freely. Enter or Down jumps to content.
• Content — the body. Full text editing with line navigation (↑/↓), Home/End, Enter for newlines.
• Tags — inline tag management. Type + Enter to add, ←/→ to select existing tags, Backspace or Delete to remove them. Autocomplete pops up when you start typing.

Esc exits edit mode. Your cursor position and the section you were in are preserved.

Markdown

Content supports inline formatting that renders in the note view:

• **bold** or __bold__
• *italic* or _italic_
• ~~strikethrough~~
• `code` (amber on dark background)

Delimiters are stripped on hover, rendered when the note is selected.

Themes

Three built-in themes, cycled with ^R:

• Dark — dark greys, white selection border, muted hint text
• Light — light greys, black selection border
• Mono — near-black background, green accents (think old-school terminal)

Data

Everything lives in ~/.stickynote/board.json. It's plain JSON — you can read it, edit it, back it up, or version-control it. Corrupt or missing files are handled gracefully (you just get a blank board).

{
  "notes": [
    {
      "content": "Pick up dry cleaning before 5pm",
      "title": "Errands",
      "color": "#ffcc99",
      "border_style": "rounded",
      "tags": ["todo"]
    }
  ],
  "theme_idx": 0
}

To start fresh:

rm ~/.stickynote/board.json

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/narqulie/stickynote.git
cd stickynote
cargo build --release

The binary lands at target/release/stickynote. No special build dependencies beyond a Rust toolchain.

Why another notes app?

Because I wanted something that:

• Launches instantly in a terminal (no browser, no Electron)
• Survives without an internet connection
• Stores data in a format I can grep, jq, or edit with vim
• Has real mouse support — not bolted on, but first-class
• Looks decent without configuration

If you live in the terminal and want a scratchpad that feels like part of your workflow rather than a separate app, this might be for you.

License

MIT