Jot

Existing note apps are heavy (Electron), tied to a vendor (Apple Notes), or behave poorly on tiling Wayland compositors — they open in their own workspace, refuse to float, won't sit on top. Jot is the smallest possible knife for a specific cut: dump a thought now, find it later, never get in the way.

Single binary. ~5 MB of RAM at rest. Instant startup. One keystroke up, one keystroke gone.

sudo pacman -S --needed gtk4 libadwaita sqlite alsa-lib
curl -L -o jot.tar.gz https://github.com/Iann29/jot/releases/download/v1.7.0/jot-v1.7.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
tar -xzf jot.tar.gz && cd jot-v1.7.0-x86_64-linux && ./install.sh

Drops jot into ~/.local/bin, the desktop entry into ~/.local/share/applications, the icon into ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps. Make sure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH.

yay -S jot-bin     # prebuilt binary

sudo pacman -S --needed gtk4 libadwaita sqlite alsa-lib rust
git clone https://github.com/Iann29/jot.git
cd jot && ./scripts/install.sh

Grab jot-v1.7.0-x86_64-windows.zip from the latest release, unzip it anywhere, and run jot.exe.

It's a portable build: the whole GTK4 + libadwaita runtime lives in that folder, nothing is installed and nothing is written to the registry. Deleting the folder removes the app; your notes stay put. Don't move jot.exe out of the folder — it resolves its DLLs, icon theme and GSettings schemas relative to itself.

Optional, for the before/after GIF compare editor:

winget install Gyan.FFmpeg

ffmpeg isn't bundled (it would roughly double the download), so the compare editor looks for ffmpeg and ffprobe on your PATH and tells you what's missing if they aren't there. Restart Jot after installing.

Not on Windows: the Super+R screen-region GIF recorder is Linux/Wayland only — it drives wf-recorder, slurp and wl-copy, which have no Windows counterpart. GIF export from the compare editor works fine. The window is also fully opaque (the transparency slider is hidden — per-pixel alpha isn't wired up in GDK's win32 backend yet), Esc minimizes instead of hiding, and Alt+F4 / the close button saves and quits.

Where things live:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\jot\notes.db     SQLite database (WAL mode)
%LOCALAPPDATA%\jot\images\      Pasted / dropped images
%LOCALAPPDATA%\jot\backups\     Daily snapshots (last 7)
%LOCALAPPDATA%\jot\jot.log      Runtime log
%APPDATA%\jot\config.toml       Window size, theme, font, Groq API key
%LOCALAPPDATA%\jot-panic.log    Last crash message (if any)

$env:GSK_RENDERER = "cairo"
.\jot.exe

Jot ships with a window-rule snippet — floating, centered, pinned across workspaces, rounded — plus a global Super+N toggle keybind:

cp data/hyprland/jot.conf ~/.config/hypr/jot.conf
echo 'source = ~/.config/hypr/jot.conf' >> ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf
hyprctl reload

After that, Super+N toggles Jot from anywhere.

# Toggle Jot from anywhere
bind = SUPER, N, exec, pgrep -x jot >/dev/null && hyprctl dispatch focuswindow ^(com\.amageweb\.Jot)$ || jot

# Window rules — float, center, pin to all workspaces, give it a fixed size
windowrulev2 = float,        class:^(com\.amageweb\.Jot)$
windowrulev2 = center,       class:^(com\.amageweb\.Jot)$
windowrulev2 = pin,          class:^(com\.amageweb\.Jot)$
windowrulev2 = size 820 620, class:^(com\.amageweb\.Jot)$
windowrulev2 = rounding 14,  class:^(com\.amageweb\.Jot)$

for_window [app_id="com.amageweb.Jot"] floating enable, sticky enable, resize set 820 620, move position center
bindsym $mod+n exec pgrep -x jot >/dev/null && swaymsg "[app_id=com.amageweb.Jot] focus" || jot

Jot can transcribe speech into the editor using Groq Whisper Large v3 Turbo. Free for low volumes ($0.04 / hour), and Groq runs Whisper at ~216× real-time, so a 15-second utterance is transcribed in well under a second.

1. Get a Groq API key at console.groq.com/keys.

2. In Jot, open Settings → Voice, paste the key, click Save.

3. Click the mic in the header. Talk naturally — pauses between sentences become chunk boundaries. The text streams in chunk-by-chunk while you speak.

4. Click the mic again to stop. The final chunk flushes through; the editor goes back to "Saved …".

The key is stored in plain text at ~/.config/jot/config.toml. Audio is sent over TLS to Groq and is not stored on disk by Jot.

Jot bundles a tiny screen-region recorder so you don't need Kooha for clips to drop into chats and PRs. The mini-overlay is title-matched as Jot Recorder so Hyprland can rule it independently of the main window.

Setup (one-time) — install the helpers:

sudo pacman -S --needed wf-recorder slurp ffmpeg wl-clipboard

Use it:

1. Press Super+R (or click the ● button next to the mic in the header).
2. Drag with slurp to pick a region — Esc cancels.
3. The mini-overlay appears bottom-right with the timer. Click Stop when you're done.
4. ffmpeg's two-pass palette pipeline converts the MP4 to a sharp, small GIF. The file lands in ~/Videos/gif/jot-YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS.gif.
5. From the overlay you can Save as… elsewhere, Copy the GIF to the system clipboard (paste into Slack/Discord/web apps), open it in your default viewer, Re-record, or Close.

Defaults: 24 fps, libx264 ultrafast capture → palette-aware GIF with Sierra2_4a dithering. The Kooha-killer.

The first non-image, non-empty line of every note becomes its title automatically. Notes are saved ~400 ms after your last keystroke.

Use the tag field above the editor to group notes into tabs in the sidebar. The color swatches next to it add a visible strip to each note row, including search results.

Reusable snippets can be written as:

{copy}
message or command to copy
{/copy}

Once saved, the snippet renders as a copy block with a clipboard button while the raw text remains in the note for export and sync-safe storage.

~/.local/share/jot/notes.db          SQLite database (WAL mode)
~/.local/share/jot/images/           Pasted / dropped images
~/.local/share/jot/backups/          Daily snapshots (last 7)
~/Videos/gif/                        GIF recordings (one per session)
~/.config/jot/config.toml            Window size, opacity, theme, font, Groq API key
~/.local/share/applications/jot.desktop
~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/jot.svg
~/.cache/jot-panic.log               Last panic message (if any)

cargo run                    # debug build
cargo run --release          # production build
RUST_LOG=jot=debug cargo run # verbose logs
cargo clippy --all-targets   # lint
cargo fmt                    # format

The interesting bits:

• src/window.rs — UI: header bar, sidebar list, editor, autosave, voice + image plumbing
• src/db.rs — SQLite layer (single connection, WAL mode, migrations)
• src/app.rs — single-instance toggle + GTK application setup
• src/themes.rs — light/dark CSS swap, follows the system color scheme
• src/markdown_tags.rs — single-pass scanner that applies gtk::TextTags for bold/italic/code/headings/lists
• src/transcribe.rs — mic capture + VAD + Groq Whisper client
• src/gif_recorder.rs — slurp + wf-recorder + ffmpeg pipeline with subprocess RAII guards
• src/recorder_window.rs — mini overlay UI (Recording / Converting / Done)
• src/image_canvas.rs — pan/zoom image preview (single WidgetImpl::snapshot)
• src/export.rs — markdown export with image bundling
• src/dark.css / src/light.css — the look (rounded, glassy, transparent)

The scripts/ folder ships helpers for keeping README assets fresh:

scripts/capture-screenshot.sh hero --seed hero
scripts/record-gif.sh paste-image 8

The screenshot script backs up your real notes.db before swapping in a curated seed, and restores it on exit (or Ctrl+C).

MIT — see LICENSE.

• GTK 4 and libadwaita — the toolkit
• Groq — fast Whisper inference
• cpal — cross-platform audio capture
• grim and wf-recorder — screen capture
• The Hyprland and Sway communities, for showing that a Linux desktop can feel good