Note Note

A Linux notes workspace, available as an Omarchy shell plugin and a standalone Qt 6 application from this repository. Both run the same editor, notebook tabs, note list, autosave and providers. The default System theme follows the desktop palette; custom JSON themes are selected through the command palette. Local Markdown notes, your Microsoft Sticky Notes, OneNote and Notion pages all live in the same list.

OneNote saves fetch the current page and merge independent edits made on other devices. Conflicts pause saving for review, with a private recovery draft kept on this device. See merge behavior and limits.

Install plugin · Standalone app · Update · Shortcut · Removal · Settings · Notebooks · Providers · Writing plugins · Keys

Themes and commands

Press Ctrl+Shift+P to search commands. New Note, New Notebook, Open Settings, Toggle Sidebar, and Delete Note use the same actions as their existing controls. Available shortcuts appear on the right; Delete Note still asks for confirmation. Shortcut labels follow the central registry. Plugins can declare defaults, and Settings keybindings can override or unbind them without a plugin update. See changing bindings for examples.

Press Ctrl+Shift+P, then choose Color Theme. Arrow keys preview; Enter saves; Escape restores the previous theme. Copy JSON themes to ~/.config/notenote/themes/ and restart to discover them. See themes, commands, and plugin packages.

The standalone app includes the native display helper. Omarchy commands and custom themes require sh cpp/build.sh in the plugin folder followed by a shell restart. Without it the existing editor remains available with System colors. Theme changes preserve notes, undo history and authored colors.

Writing plugins

A plugin package can add color themes, command-palette commands with their shortcuts, editing-toolbar tools that insert or format text in the note, and providers that bring notes from a new backend. To have an AI assistant write one, give it the note-note-plugin skill: it teaches the manifest, each kind's contract and the safety rules, and it checks a package with the app's own validator. For Claude Code:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/andreivinca/omarchy-note-note.git
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r omarchy-note-note/skills/note-note-plugin ~/.claude/skills/

Then ask for what you want: "Make me a Note Note theme in Nord colors", "Add a Note Note toolbar button that inserts today's date" or "Write a Note Note provider for my Nextcloud notes". Other assistants that read SKILL.md folders take the same directory. Packages with code start disabled until you have read and enabled them; see plugin packages.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/andreivinca/omarchy-note-note.git
omarchy plugin enable io.github.andreivinca.note-note

Plugins land disabled so you can read the code first. It's QML plus small Python scripts with bundled dependencies; it talks to Microsoft Graph only after you sign in, and like every Omarchy plugin it runs unsandboxed inside your shell.

Project code is MIT-licensed; bundled components retain their own licenses, including GPL-2.0-or-later for merge3. See third-party components.

Standalone app

An installable Flatpak bundle provides the standalone app with a shared Qt runtime. See Flatpak installation and builds. After installing the build tools listed there, run ./build-flatpak.sh to create a bundle and checksum under build/dist/<version>/.

Building and running natively requires Linux, Qt 6.8 or newer (Quick, Quick Controls 2, Network and SVG image support), Python 3.9 or newer, and inotifywait from inotify-tools. Qt Multimedia is optional: it plays OneNote recordings. Building also requires CMake 3.21+, a C++17 compiler and Qt Test when tests are enabled. No Omarchy or Quickshell installation is needed.

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="$HOME/.local"
cmake --build build --parallel
./build/note-note --data-dir .

A build-tree run is given the source tree with --data-dir .; an installed one finds its resources itself. Install the binary, desktop entry, icon and resources for your user, under the prefix configured above:

cmake --install build

The app then appears as Note Note in your launcher. A second launch activates the running window. Closing puts the window away at once; saves already under way finish in the background before the app exits, and one that fails then is lost.

The standalone app follows your system colors: Omarchy themes, KDE color roles, or Qt desktop integration and GNOME/desktop portal preferences. Colors update live, with a built-in palette when no system colors are available. See system color support.

The plugin and native standalone use ~/.config/notenote/config.json and the same local notes. The standalone app keeps its own sessions, sign-ins and caches under ~/.local/state/notenote/ and ~/.cache/notenote/; sign in separately there. XDG directory overrides are supported. See standalone development and architecture for dependencies, installation, storage and testing. The Flatpak has its own settings and sign-ins under ~/.var/app/io.github.andreivinca.note-note/, with access to ~/Notes. Release archives can also be created for each host.

Update

omarchy plugin update io.github.andreivinca.note-note

Shortcut

Omarchy plugins don't register a shortcut on their own — bind one yourself:

-- ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua
o.bind("SUPER + PERIOD", "Note Note", "omarchy-shell shell toggle io.github.andreivinca.note-note")

Removal

omarchy plugin remove io.github.andreivinca.note-note

Your notes stay in ~/Notes/. Two files are left behind on purpose, since they're yours rather than the plugin's: ~/.local/state/omarchy/note-note.json (layout state) and, if you signed in to Microsoft, ~/.local/state/omarchy/note-note-ms-*.json plus the caches under ~/.cache/omarchy/note-note-*. Sign out from the sidebar first to drop the token, or delete those files by hand.

Settings

Open the menu (⋯, top right) and pick Settings to edit note-note's own config directly as JSON. (Key bindings, in the same menu, opens the same kind of page over every shortcut the app answers to — read-only.) It opens in place of your notes, saved with Save or Ctrl+S — the page stays open, so a rejected edit is still there to fix. The ✕ at its top right, Esc, or any notebook tab takes you back. The file lives at ~/.config/notenote/config.json and is pre-filled with every setting on first run.

• editor.toolbar — ordered groups of editing-tool IDs. Move IDs between the group arrays to rearrange the buttons, or into { "dropdown": "insert", "items": ["table", "link"] } to place them in Insert. Dropdowns can contain other dropdown objects to create submenus. Unlisted tools appear at the end. Insert → Insert month contains currentMonth, nextMonth (insert immediately), then customMonth (choose a month and year first), from the built-in calendar plugin (org.note-note.calendar). All three use the OS locale's week start and labels for providers that support tables. Layout changes apply on Save; see the layout examples and tool IDs. Insert → Diacritics offers lowercase and uppercase letters for the language chosen at the top of the picker, such as Romanian ă â î ș ț. The system timezone preselects it, Romanian for Europe/Bucharest, and you can pick another. Click a letter to insert it at the caret, or select it with arrow keys and Enter; see region detection.
• providers.<id>.enabled — hide a source (local, sticky, onenote, notion, or an external provider's own id) from the sidebar. Reordering the providers object reorders the sidebar tabs to match.
• providers.local.notesDir — where local notebooks live, overriding ~/Notes/ or NOTE_NOTE_DIR.
• providers.<id>.notebookTabs — true spreads a source's notebooks into a tab each across the top (the default for local notebooks and OneNote); false folds them into one tab as an expandable tree. Offered by the sources that have notebooks: local and onenote — Sticky Notes and Notion are a single flat list either way.

Notebooks

Notebooks are folders under ~/Notes/ (override with NOTE_NOTE_DIR, or the providers.local.notesDir setting); notes are Markdown files inside them. An unused notes directory starts with a Notes notebook and a short Getting started note. Existing notebooks and root notes are preserved; refreshing never recreates a deleted starter note. Notes sitting directly in ~/Notes/ show up as a "Notes" notebook. The title is stored in a front-matter block at the top of the file:

---
title: Shopping
---
milk, eggs

A note with no title shows the first words of its body in the list instead. Notes written by other editors with Windows (CRLF) line endings or a byte-order mark open the same way; saving writes Unix (LF) line endings.

Each source and notebook gets its own tab across the top; click one, or Ctrl+Tab through them. Use Alt+1 through Alt+9 to open the corresponding tab from left to right; numbers without a tab do nothing. Whether a source's notebooks spread into a tab each or fold inside a single tab is per source — the notebookTabs setting; your local folders spread by default, OneNote folds. Local notes offer New Note and New notebook at the bottom, and New section in a notebook's own tab: the folders inside a notebook are its sections, to any depth, listed before its notes and folded until you open them. OneNote offers New section in a notebook's own tab and New Note only inside each section. New section asks for the name in a small dialog. Providers supply all footer actions, including creation and account controls; every action uses the same full-width, stacked row. Lists keep their provider’s note order. Drag local notes to reorder them. Notebook trees keep their provider’s hierarchy and order, and show how many notes each holds. Right-click a note to delete it. Right-click a section — or a notebook, when notebooks share one tab — to make a section inside it, rename it or delete it. OneNote sections are renamed and deleted in personal notebooks you can edit; a deleted one goes to the OneDrive recycle bin. Every OneNote section also has Refresh, which lists its pages again now: otherwise the open page's section is listed every minute, and the others only when OneNote reports a change. It is greyed out for half a minute after you reorder that section's pages, while OneNote catches up.

The body is Markdown, rendered live and saved back as Markdown, with a formatting toolbar for headings, lists, tables, links, images and the usual bold/italic/underline/strikethrough/highlight/code shortcuts (Ctrl+B/I/U/S, Ctrl+Shift+H). Hover a link to see its destination in the bottom view bar; click the link itself to open it in your browser or the associated app. Web addresses (https://, http://, and www.) use the theme accent and an underline as you type, even when they are plain text in Markdown. Drag across a link to select it. The display styling leaves saved Markdown and cursor spacing unchanged. Type a space to continue with ordinary text after a URL. A new list item starts with ordinary text. Formatting part of a word, or text beside punctuation, saves as the HTML tag other Markdown tools also read (a<u>b</u>c, example<strong>.com</strong>) where _ or ** would not work. A local note written elsewhere that holds what the editor cannot write back as it is — raw HTML, a heading, list or code block inside a quote, a quote inside a quote, a callout — opens read-only and says what it holds, so the file is never saved shorter. Existing OneNote audio attachments, including phone recordings in 3GP format, show an inline player: a round Play/Stop button beside the recording's title, with a seek bar and the time beneath it. Opening a page downloads none of its recordings: one is downloaded the first time you press Play, and plays from the cache after that. Stop returns to the beginning. Switching notes stops playback. You can edit notes containing recordings; ordinary text edits retain the original attachment. Pasting a recording copies it, and a copy is uploaded again: a save can upload at most 3 MB per recording, under Graph's 4 MB request limit. Pasting back a recording cut from the same note moves it, keeping its attachment, unless the cut was saved first: then it is uploaded again, within the same limit. Without Qt Multimedia, notes with recordings still open and edit; the player says that playback needs it. Recording and insertion tools are not provided yet. Local and OneNote notes support tables inside table cells, including Insert → Insert month → Insert current month. Place the caret in a cell before inserting; row and column tools act on the table containing the caret. Backspace immediately after a table deletes it; undo restores the whole table. Search filters by title as you type and by body a moment later. OneNote builds a private text cache in the background and shows how many pages are searchable while it fills; searches then use the saved text. Indexing reads page text without downloading images or attachments. See OneNote search for sync and coverage details. Notion remains title-only because its API does not expose body search. In the Omarchy plugin, Detach, in the menu at the top right, turns the overlay into an ordinary window you can keep open beside your work; Back to overlay brings it back.

Providers

Every source of notes is a self-contained provider — a folder with a Provider.qml implementing one small contract: rows for the sidebar, load / save / create / remove, and a few capability flags.

• plugins/org.note-note.local/ — Markdown notebooks on disk
• plugins/org.note-note.sticky/ — Microsoft Sticky Notes
• plugins/org.note-note.onenote/ — OneNote
• plugins/org.note-note.notion/ — Notion
• services/microsoft/ — Microsoft sign-in code the two above run; each has its own app registration, token and scope, so nothing about one's account touches the other's, and signing out of one leaves the other signed in.

New external providers go in ~/.config/notenote/plugins/<package>/ with a plugin.json manifest. Review the code, enable the package in Settings, then restart. Both hosts use this shared package location. Legacy host-specific provider folders remain supported for the 1.x migration window. See the provider contract, package policy, and the minimal examples/hello/ package.

What it accesses

• Your notes on disk: ~/Notes (or NOTE_NOTE_DIR) — nothing else on the filesystem beyond its own state and cache under ~/.local/state/omarchy/ and ~/.cache/omarchy/ (plugin), or ~/.local/state/notenote/ and ~/.cache/notenote/ (standalone).
• Microsoft account, only after you sign in: Mail.ReadWrite (Sticky Notes are stored in your mailbox), Notes.ReadWrite (OneNote), and User.Read. OneNote requests Files.Read alongside Notes.ReadWrite during sign-in. This permission allows reading your OneDrive files; the provider uses it for resolving shared notebook links, notebook file listings and .onetoc2 metadata containing OneNote's custom section order. No separate local order is used. Section order loads automatically. If this permission becomes unavailable, normal note access continues with sections sorted alphabetically. Each provider's token is separate and owner-only; signing out deletes only that one. The plugin talks to login.microsoftonline.com and graph.microsoft.com; OneNote metadata downloads also use Microsoft's signed file URLs under files.1drv.com, storage.live.com, sharepoint.com or microsoftpersonalcontent.com, without forwarding the Graph token.

OneNote custom section ordering is a high-risk compatibility workaround, not a supported Graph ordering API: it uses a custom TOC parser and an unguaranteed Graph/OneDrive ID mapping. See the risk assessment. It currently supports personal OneDrive notebook packages with a unique readable .onetoc2 per folder. Section groups are flattened in their remote order. If metadata is unavailable, malformed, ambiguous or no longer matches Graph, the affected notebook's sections are sorted alphabetically and a warning is shown. Stale custom ordering is not used as a fallback. Page ordering still comes directly from Graph.

Developer-facing documentation (architecture, security rules, testing, releases) lives in docs/.

Keys

Key	Action
Esc	clear search, else close (saves first)
Ctrl+N	new note in the current notebook
Ctrl+Shift+N	new notebook
Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab	next / previous notebook tab
Ctrl+K	search
Ctrl+E	hide the sidebar, or bring it back
Ctrl+D	delete current note
Ctrl+B / Ctrl+I / Ctrl+U / Ctrl+S	bold / italic / underline / strikethrough
Ctrl+Shift+H	highlight the selection
Ctrl+↓ / Ctrl+J	next note
Ctrl+↑	previous note