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/v1.6.0/jot-v1.6.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
tar -xzf jot.tar.gz && cd jot-v1.6.0-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

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