BetterStickies Free v1.2.0

A note is no longer a single sheet. This release adds pages behind tabs, search that reads every one of them, an image lightbox, and a hub that can stay out of your way. It also carries a long round of fixes across formatting, file shortcuts, dates, translations, and Linux desktop integration.

Version 1.1.0 was never published here, so this is the first update since v1.0.0 and folds in that release as well. One item under Changed needs action if you wired up KDE shortcuts by hand.

⚠️ Before you downgrade

If you go back to an older version after using note tabs, opening and saving a tabbed note there permanently removes its other pages. Older builds understand only one page per note: they will show the page that was open and, the next time that note is saved, write it back as the whole note. The other pages are not recoverable afterwards, not from Trash, and not by upgrading again.

If you plan to downgrade, export any multi-page notes first (Menu → Export handles all pages), or copy their other pages into notes of their own.

What's New

Note Tabs: up to three pages per note

Add a page from the Add Page button in the note's footer (or its right-click menu) and a slim tab strip appears, one tab per page. A shopping list, a set of meeting notes and a scratchpad can share one window instead of three. Each page keeps its own text, scroll position and undo history. Tabs name themselves after the first line and rename as you type; double-click to pin a name of your own, and drag to reorder.

Notes you already have are untouched and show no tabs at all. The strip only appears once you add a second page, and disappears again when you close back down to one. Closing a page moves it to Trash as a note you can restore, so nothing is ever thrown away.

Page shortcuts (Ctrl+PgDown / Ctrl+PgUp / Ctrl+Shift+N)

Move to the next and previous page, or add a page to the note you're in. All three appear under a new Pages section in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts and can be rebound or switched off.

Search reads every page

Search used to see only the page a note happened to be showing, so anything on your second and third tabs was invisible to it. It now covers every page of every note, including hidden notes and pages you have never opened. A note matching on two pages appears as two results, each labeled with its note and tab name (Groceries › Weekend), and opening one takes you to that page with every occurrence tinted in the note's own color. The highlight is purely visual and never becomes part of the note.

Double-click an image to enlarge it

Double-click an inline image (or right-click and choose Open Image) to open it centered at original resolution, scaled down only if it is bigger than your screen. Small text in pasted screenshots becomes readable without resizing the note. Dismiss with Esc, Space, Enter, a click anywhere, or by switching windows.

Start with the hub hidden

Hiding the hub used to last only until you quit. A new Start with the hub hidden option in Settings → Appearance keeps it in the system tray from launch, so BetterStickies can sit quietly in the background. This is particularly useful if you add it to your startup applications. Notes still open as normal.

Changed

• The free version now has exactly one limit. The separate caps on reminders and animated GIF backgrounds are gone, so you can set both on every note you have. What remains is a shared budget of 4 slots, with each extra tab using one. Existing users over the limit lose nothing: extra notes become read-only, and deleting a note (or closing a tab) unlocks them again
• Reminders are now a strip on the note instead of a chip in your text. A reminder used to sit inside your content as a small image, so it could be selected, copied and deleted like ordinary text. It now has its own row between your text and the footer, so it cannot be edited away by accident, never lands in an export, and never travels with copied text. The footer bell shows its status by color, and Edit and Remove live in the reminder's own menu. Existing reminders are migrated automatically
• The footer steps out of the way while you type. The formatting row used to sit on top of the line you were writing. It now stands down as you type and returns the moment you move the mouse. Arrow keys and shortcuts do not hide it
• A color picker built for the app. About half the size of the old one and identical on KDE, GNOME and Windows. It offers a grid of 40 colors, a row of your recent picks, a saturation and brightness square with a hue slider, and a hex field. It works fully from the keyboard and announces itself to screen readers, and unlike the old one it is translated into all 11 languages
• File shortcuts use crisp, theme-matched icons instead of emoji. File types are recognized the way your file manager recognizes them, so images, audio, archives, documents, programs and source code each get their own icon, where 42 common types used to collapse to a single paperclip. The icon is no longer part of the shortcut's name, so it stops turning up in exports, search results and reminder titles. Shortcuts you already have keep working; drag the file in again for the new look
• A Help window replaces the first-run guide notes. It never counts against the note limit, so a new free user starts with the whole allowance. It shows the app's real button icons rather than emoji stand-ins, covers this release's features, and names the shortcut you actually have bound, saying nothing about one you have switched off
• All dialogs share one visual design system. The same spacing grid, type scale and flat button style everywhere, with destructive actions (Delete Forever, Empty Trash, Remove Image) shown in red so they are recognizable before you click. Search and Reminders get card-style tables with whole-row hover, and Reminders shows status as tinted pills with a count summary ("3 overdue · 5 upcoming")
• The app introduces itself as "Better Stickies". Window titles, the hub, tray tooltips, About and Help, launcher entries and store listings, in all 11 languages. Nothing technical changes: your data, launchers and scripts keep working untouched
• Text copied between notes adopts the destination note's style. Plain text takes on the destination's font, size and color instead of dragging the source note's along. Deliberate styling such as custom colors, highlights, titles, links and code blocks still travels. Text copied into other applications lands in that app's own defaults
• The footer color button is purely a highlight tool. It now colors only what you select or type next, exactly like the bold button. A note's default text color is changed in Note Settings only
• You can now donate by PayPal. Buy Me a Coffee and PayPal sit side by side. Community → Reddit opens r/BetterStickies, and Developed by links to the developer's Reddit
• Menus and dialogs use themed icons instead of emoji. Emoji rendering depended on whichever font your system had, and looked different or broke across platforms
• Button labels are no longer heavy. Button text was bold everywhere, which read as noticeably heavier than intended with some desktop fonts
• The hub's font setting is labeled "Hub Font". It used to say "UI Font", which suggested it changed the whole interface when it only ever set the hub's own font
• Arabic: the app is called Better Stickies. The Arabic interface titled the hub and tray icon with a generic "sticky notes" while note windows already used the product name
• The Insert Link window has been tidied up. The two fields are now the same width and the window is smaller for it. Whether an address is usable is still obvious, but the field only turns red once you click away, instead of flashing at every half-typed address
• The Snap launcher entry and the Flathub listing are fully localized. Launcher search keywords were expanded too, across AppImage, Snap, Flatpak and Arch (sticky notes, post-it, memo, checklist, to-do)
• The user guide has been refreshed. Two new pages, Note Tabs and Pasting Content, cover features that had no documentation at all, and Getting Started is now a genuine overview that links out instead of re-teaching every topic
• ⚠️ Hand-wired KDE shortcuts need updating. The app's D-Bus service name changed from org.betterstickies.App (path /org/betterstickies/App) to com.betterstickies.BetterStickies (path /com/betterstickies/BetterStickies). The bundled command script and the app's own global shortcuts were updated automatically, but a KDE custom shortcut wired by hand against the old name has to be pointed at the new one
• Windows: cleaner Task Manager grouping. The note window title and the executable's file description now carry the product name instead of generic text

Improved

• Notes, reminders and trash are all protected the same way. Automatic backup copies and safe writes now cover every kind of data the app stores, not just notes, with daily snapshots as a longer-term net. A damaged, truncated or emptied file is set aside as a rescue copy instead of overwriting the last good version
• Every date in the app reads in your language. Note headers, search results, reminders and exports now use your own month names, your region's clock, and the day and month in the order your language writes them. They used to be English month names on an English 12-hour clock, with a month-first short form that reads as the wrong date nearly everywhere outside the United States
• Exported files are no longer half in English. The header, the Created and Modified labels, page headings and the image list all follow your app language
• Titles, fonts and colors stay in proportion permanently. Text that is not deliberately styled now follows the note's font, size and default color, including across restarts. Titles scale with every font change instead of freezing at whatever size the note had when they were created. Font changes are instant now, even on large notes
• Long to-do lines wrap under their own text. This works at every nesting level and in right-to-left notes, and the alignment keeps up when you change the note's font. Existing checklists pick it up automatically
• The system tray guidance is translated, including the instructions for desktops without a usable tray. That is the one moment the app refuses to do what you asked, which is exactly when you need to be able to read it
• Hover popups have properly rounded corners and sharp previews. Image and PDF previews are decoded at your screen's real pixel density, and a file edited on disk shows its updated preview rather than a stale one
• Link hover tooltips no longer cut off long addresses. Long addresses and paths wrap and show in full
• Trash rows are recognizable. A trashed note describes its first page with content and says how many pages it has ("Groceries · 3 pages"), which is also what tells you how many slots restoring it needs. A single closed page is labeled "closed page"

Fixed

• The Export and Choose Background Image windows are readable again. On some systems they opened as an almost entirely black panel, with the folder list, file name and column headings invisible
• The "Premium Version" heading in About is readable in the light theme
• Deleting a multi-page note no longer skips the confirmation when the page you are on happens to be blank. The check now looks at every page, and a note you gave a title but have not typed into is not deleted silently either
• Closing a tab no longer destroys it. It now asks first and moves the page to Trash, where it can be restored as its own note
• Exporting a note with tabs now includes every page, each under its own heading. Text and Markdown exports previously saved only the visible one
• Pasting Markdown over selected text no longer swallows the formatting. Task lists, fenced code and tables all convert whether or not you paste over a selection
• Read-only notes are genuinely read-only. Dragging in a file, Ctrl+scroll, flipping text direction, renaming a link and renaming the title are all refused, and controls that would do nothing are greyed out
• Locked notes no longer toggle checkboxes when clicked
• A ☐ or ☑ in the middle of a line no longer hijacks clicks. Only a checkbox leading its line toggles
• The Todo button no longer drops a checkbox into code blocks
• Checking off the last task in a nested list no longer leaves an indented leftover line
• Undoing a ticked-off task now takes one step instead of two
• Pasted checklists line up straight away, instead of only after the note is reopened
• Text pasted with a hanging-indent style, such as bibliographies and citation lists, no longer sticks out past the note's edge
• Code blocks in reopened notes work again without touching them first, follow the app theme across restarts, and survive deleting into their edges
• Markdown export keeps code blocks intact, as proper fenced blocks with their content verbatim
• Enter at the end of a title no longer leaves hidden heading formatting behind, and a title turned back into normal text no longer returns after a restart
• Applying Note Settings no longer wipes formatting from selected text
• Formatting buttons now toggle off anywhere in styled text, and light up accurately for the selection
• "Auto" theme now gives light-system users light code blocks and dialog accents
• Undo right after opening a note can no longer revert its setup
• Dragging a file shortcut inside its own note now moves it instead of leaving a duplicate
• Dropping a file onto an existing shortcut no longer breaks that shortcut in two
• "Remove Link" no longer deletes the first word of the link's text, and now removes the shortcut's styling along with the link
• Renaming a link no longer loses its icon, and a link with mixed formatting inside it no longer comes back mangled
• A file name containing < is no longer corrupted, and can no longer be used to disguise a link to somewhere else
• Copying a file shortcut no longer pastes a stray box, or a broken image, in front of the name
• Text typed after a link no longer arrives as an empty link when pasted into a Markdown editor
• Pasting a file over selected text now replaces it, as paste does everywhere else
• Dropped images that cannot be read no longer vanish without a trace. You always get a shortcut to the original
• Dropping a file the app cannot reach now explains how to grant access, once per drop rather than once per file
• Files on Windows network shares work again
• Tooltips no longer swallow parts of your own text. A note titled "Fix the <div> parsing bug" showed as "Fix the parsing bug"
• The explanation on a read-only note is finally readable. It was being wiped the instant you moved the mouse onto the note
• A pinned note no longer offers to rename its title and then refuse
• Checkboxes and radio buttons in settings windows have their tick and dot back
• Note shortcuts no longer fire while you are renaming a tab
• Confirming "Exit Better Stickies?" now actually exits. It previously closed only the hub bar, leaving the app running with no way to reach it
• Closing the hub can no longer hide it into a tray that is not there any more
• Starting BetterStickies when it is already running now tells you so, and points you at the tray icon
• Creating a note with a global shortcut no longer pops the hub open, and the new note takes keyboard focus so you can type immediately
• Holding down a global shortcut no longer creates a burst of notes
• Global shortcuts that fail to register now say why, such as "already in use by another application" or "needs a modifier such as Ctrl, Alt or Shift"
• More keys work as global shortcuts (Space, arrows, Home/End, Page Up/Down, Insert/Delete, Enter, Tab, Esc), and a shortcut with no modifier is refused up front instead of silently discarded
• Rebinding a shortcut no longer breaks "Reset to Defaults", and buttons and paste messages now show the shortcut you actually configured
• A shortcut switched off in a synced settings file stays off, as does every other saved on/off value, including a note's pinned state, the reminder sound, and snap-to-grid
• Notes and the hub no longer vanish after a monitor change, including when only an ungrabbable sliver is left on screen
• Resizing a note no longer stops at an invisible wall at a monitor seam or panel edge
• KDE: notes no longer clutter the taskbar and Alt+Tab, and no longer depend on a command-line tool that is not part of Plasma
• Other Linux desktops (GNOME, XFCE): notes are marked as accessory windows, which window lists conventionally skip
• Windows 11: notes and the hub no longer sit inside a grey frame
• Windows: notes can be dragged by their edges again, and hovering an inactive note reliably shows its title bar
• Windows: notes containing non-ASCII text no longer risk a startup crash
• Snap: reminders now actually make a sound
• Logging out, or quitting with Ctrl+C, no longer risks losing your last edit
• Double-clicking the system tray icon no longer misbehaves
• The reminder-creation dialog, the keyboard shortcuts window, the color picker's swatch names and a dozen other strings now actually translate. They had never reached translators at all
• The backup-recovery notice speaks your language and follows your theme
• Deleting all notes no longer re-triggers first-run onboarding
• Trash restore errors are reported accurately instead of guessing at the cause
• Pasted reminder chips can no longer delete or edit another note's reminder
• Nested checklist indentation now scales with the note's font
• Always-on-top persists immediately, instead of waiting for some other change to save it
• Screenshots from very old deleted notes no longer pile up on disk forever
• A damaged or hand-edited notes file can no longer make the app request huge amounts of memory
• The licence text now ships with the app, readable at the root of the AppImage, next to the app in the Snap, and in the standard system location on Arch
• Wayland: the app shows its own icon and groups reliably in the taskbar. AppImage, Snap and native package installs used to fall back to a generic icon

Removed

• The color picker's screen eyedropper (it does not work under Wayland) and its "Add to Custom Colors" wells, whose job the automatic recent-colors row now does
• The Insert Link preview box, which took up a third of the window to show you the text you had just typed