Suite / XNote
XNote
Sticky notes that stay on your desktop, and stay yours.
A native GTK4/libadwaita notes app for GNOME on Wayland, descended from Xpad, with encrypted backup to Dropbox or any rclone remote.
A note is a small window with your words in it, in the colour you gave it, where you left it. XNote keeps each one as an independent window, saves every change as you type, and never sends a byte anywhere unless you ask it to. It is a GPL-3.0-or-later descendant of Xpad, rebuilt on GTK 4 and libadwaita for GNOME on Wayland.
What it does
Notes, not a notes app
There is no list to open first: each note is its own window on the desktop, sized and coloured on its own, with the first line as its title. Hover a note and a small toolbar appears; move away and it is gone.
Everything is a keystroke
Ctrl+N for a new note, Ctrl+B/I/U for formatting, Ctrl+F to search inside a note; hold Ctrl and drag to move a note, Ctrl and right-drag to resize it.
Colours and fonts, per note or for all
The dot on a hovered note's toolbar opens a row of swatches. The full palette, your own colours and the font live in Preferences, once for every note or overridden on one; new notes can take a random colour so a cluster reads at a glance.
Saved as you type
Notes are plain files under ~/.config/xnote, written atomically on a four-second tick, so a crash never costs more than the last few seconds and never corrupts a note.
Encrypted backup, anywhere rclone goes
The optional xnote-cloud-backup helper takes an encrypted, authenticated snapshot of every note (XChaCha20-Poly1305 under a key only your passphrase or a one-time recovery code can unwrap) and appends it as a recovery kit to Dropbox, any rclone remote or a mounted path, hourly. The provider sees ciphertext and metadata, never a note.
Back where you left it
Wayland forbids an application from placing its own windows, so the companion XNote Placement extension does it from the compositor side. The APT package brings it along as a recommendation.
Install
Ubuntu 26.04 — APT
Add the NorviTech APT repository once and sudo apt install xnote. The package replaces xpad and migrates its notes on first launch, and recommends the placement extension; enable that once after your next login. Commands in the README.
Other platforms — from source
GTK 4.10+, libadwaita 1.5+, GtkSourceView 5 and the autotools; ./autogen.sh, ./configure, make. A Go toolchain adds the backup helper; without one the desktop app still builds and the helper is omitted, never downloaded.
Where your data lives
Live notes are plain text under ~/.config/xnote/; the backup helper's wrapped keys and snapshots sit under ~/.local/share/xnote-backup/. Nothing leaves the machine unless you configure a backup remote, and then only encrypted recovery kits do — the provider can observe device name, timestamps, sizes and cadence, never a note. Keep the recovery code somewhere separate from the computer. The README table lists every path.
Documentation
- User guide — from first launch to
xnote-cloud-backup restoreon a new machine - Development — the source tree, the tests and the release model
- Changelog — one entry per tagged release
- Issues · Discussions · Report a vulnerability
Deployment and operations
Install, configure and verify XNote; plan authentication, backups, upgrades and recovery.