LaTeX Stickies 1.4.4

Blockquotes, which have never looked quite right.

Quoted text is inset from its bar again. The rule that indented it was written one class too shallow and lost to the editor's own line reset, so quoted text sat hard against the bar with no breathing room at all — and a quote long enough to wrap had no hanging indent, so its second line started under the bar instead of under the text above it. Both fixed by the same change.

Nested quotes are drawn as nested. > and >> used to render identically: same bar, same indent, same everything. Each level now indents further and draws its own bar, up to three — past that the indent would eat the width of a sticky note.

Nothing else changed. Notes, storage, permissions and the launcher are untouched by this release.

Install

npx latex-stickies@latest

or download the .dmg below (Apple Silicon). It is signed but not notarised, so the first launch needs right-click, Open.

LaTeX Stickies 1.4.3

One fix here matters more than the rest: on macOS the app could start, be refused its own notes folder, and show nothing at all — which looks exactly like a launch that failed.

The app now asks for the Documents folder. It never carried the usage description macOS needs to show that prompt, so the system denied the folder silently and the app opened no windows. Both the download and the npx install now ask properly, and a folder it still cannot read is named in a dialog that offers the Privacy settings pane, rather than nothing happening.

This is most likely to bite a fresh .dmg install, since the permission is tied to the app's signature.

Enter carries a list on. Pressing Enter after - [ ] milk gave you a bare line, so the natural next move — typing [ ] eggs — produced something that looks like a task and is not one. Bullets, numbers, quotes and tasks now continue, and a second Enter on an empty item ends the list.

A heading shows its hashes as you type it. The reveal ran a keystroke behind the parser, so ### stayed hidden while you were writing it — which is precisely when you want to see how many hashes you have.

Markers are drawn in their own grey. The #, **, backticks and the rest were almost the colour of the prose beside them. They are punctuation, and now sit behind the text they mark up.

Install

npx latex-stickies@latest

or download the .dmg below (Apple Silicon). It is signed but not notarised, so the first launch needs right-click, Open.

LaTeX Stickies 1.4.2

Caret and rendering fixes, all in the editor. Worth updating for anyone who types in code blocks or uses the arrow keys.

Arrow keys no longer skip lines. Moving or selecting up and down could fly over a whole code block, the heading above it and the table above that. CodeMirror measures one text height for the entire document, and this note is not uniform: code is smaller than the prose, headings are bigger. Vertical motion now lands on every line that has somewhere to put a caret.

Clicking a line in a code block puts the caret on that line, not the one below it, and Cmd+Right stops at the end of the line rather than running into the next one. Code and table lines were shorter than every other line, and the block's tint was inset with a margin that left a strip down each side no click could land in.

Markdown markers slide instead of snapping. The ##, ** and backticks now fade in when the caret reaches their element and slide back out when it leaves, rather than appearing and disappearing. Only the markers of the element you are actually in are shown.

The Copy button on a code block appears when you hover it, instead of sitting there permanently.

Nothing outside the editor changed: notes, storage and the launcher are untouched by this release.

Install

npx latex-stickies@latest

or download the .dmg below (Apple Silicon). It is signed but not notarised, so the first launch needs right-click, Open.

LaTeX Stickies 1.4.1

A failed launch now says so.

The command-line launcher printed "LaTeX Stickies is running" the moment it had started a process, with the app's own output discarded. A runtime that started and died an instant later -- a missing library, a half-downloaded Electron, a permissions problem -- reported success and left nothing behind to read.

It now waits to see the app survive before saying anything. If it does not, you get the exit code, the last twenty lines of the app's own output, and the path to the full log:

macOS ~/Library/Logs/latex-stickies/launch.log
Windows %LOCALAPPDATA%\latex-stickies\launch.log
Linux $XDG_STATE_HOME or ~/.local/state/latex-stickies/launch.log

This only affects npm and npx installs; the .dmg is unchanged from 1.4.0 apart from the version number.

Everything from 1.4.0 is included -- notes no longer losing text to an outside edit, emptied notes discarding themselves on close, and deleting a note leaving nothing behind.

This build is Apple Silicon only. On any platform, npx latex-stickies works everywhere.

First launch: right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again -- the build is not signed by Apple.

LaTeX Stickies 1.4.0

Notes stopped eating what you were typing.

Typing in a note while anything else touched the notes folder could revert it to the last text saved -- and that reverted text was then written back, so the words were genuinely gone rather than merely off screen. The app now identifies its own saves by their content rather than by how recently they happened, only reads the file an event actually names, and never overwrites a note that has unsaved edits: it offers the two versions instead, as a bar at the bottom of that note. An edit accepted from disk is spliced in, so the caret and undo history survive.

A save can no longer land on top of an outside edit either. Every write checks the file first and leaves it alone if somebody else has been there.

Also in this release:

Emptying a note and closing it now throws the note away, as Stickies does, instead of leaving an untitled note in All Notes for ever.

Deleting a note no longer leaves a fresh empty one behind, and the confirmation is visible -- it was attached to the note window, which is frameless and transparent, so it rendered invisibly and Delete Note appeared to do nothing at all.

A new note that reused a deleted note's filename was never written to disk. It looked saved and was gone on the next launch.

Notes are saved within a second of typing rather than only when you pause, and always when a note loses focus.

This build is Apple Silicon only. On any platform, npx latex-stickies works everywhere.

First launch: right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again -- the build is not signed by Apple.

LaTeX Stickies 1.3.9

Fixes the download. 1.3.8 shipped with a code signature that did not match the app, so macOS called it "damaged and can't be opened" and offered only a Move to Bin button. If you hit that, this build replaces it.

Opening it the first time: right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again. Double-clicking will refuse -- the app is not signed by Apple, which costs 99 dollars a year and is not worth it yet.

Everything else since 1.3.0:

Notes are plain Markdown files in ~/Documents/LaTeX Stickies, so you can grep them, sync them through Dropbox, or edit them in any editor. Existing notes are migrated automatically and the old notes.json is left untouched.

An All Notes menu, find-in-note, describe your maths in English and get LaTeX, and inline autocomplete -- the last two powered by Ollama if you have it, and silently absent if you do not. Closing a note is remembered, so you come back to the desk you left rather than to every note you have ever written.

Fixed: retitling a note could leave duplicate copies of it in the All Notes menu. If you already have duplicates, delete the extra files from ~/Documents/LaTeX Stickies -- they are ordinary Markdown files.

Windows: the app no longer lingers invisibly after its last note is closed, which also made the next launch appear to do nothing. Each note has a menu button, since a frameless window has no menu bar.

macOS: new icon, and installs from npm show the app's own name and icon in the Dock rather than Electron's.

This build is Apple Silicon only. On any platform, npx latex-stickies works everywhere.

LaTeX Stickies 1.3.8

Everything since 1.3.0.

Notes are plain Markdown files in ~/Documents/LaTeX Stickies, so you can grep them, sync them through Dropbox, or edit them in any editor. Existing notes are migrated automatically and the old notes.json is left untouched.

New since 1.3.0: an All Notes menu, find-in-note, describe your maths in English and get LaTeX, and inline autocomplete -- the last two powered by Ollama if you have it, and silently absent if you do not. Closing a note is now remembered, so you come back to the desk you left rather than to every note you have ever written.

Fixed: retitling a note could leave duplicate copies of it in the All Notes menu. If you already have duplicates, delete the extra files from ~/Documents/LaTeX Stickies -- they are ordinary Markdown files.

Windows: the app no longer lingers invisibly after its last note is closed, which also made the next launch appear to do nothing. Each note has a menu button, since a frameless window has no menu bar.

macOS: new icon, and installs from npm now show the app's own name and icon in the Dock rather than Electron's.

This build is Apple Silicon only. On any platform, npx latex-stickies works everywhere.

First launch: right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again. The build is not signed by Apple, so double-clicking will say it cannot be checked for malicious software.

LaTeX Stickies 1.3.0

Notes are now plain Markdown files in ~/Documents/LaTeX Stickies, so you can grep them, sync them through Dropbox, or edit them in any editor. Existing notes are migrated automatically, and the old notes.json is left untouched.

New: an All Notes menu, find-in-note, describe your maths in English and get LaTeX, and inline autocomplete — both powered by Ollama if you have it, and silently absent if you do not.

Windows: fixes the app lingering invisibly after its last note was closed, which also made the next launch appear to do nothing. Each note now has a menu button, since there is no menu bar on a frameless window.

macOS build is Apple Silicon only. On any platform, npx latex-stickies works everywhere.

LaTeX Stickies 1.2.0

Optional local autocomplete, and a Windows fix.

Install

Mac — download LaTeX.Stickies-1.2.0-arm64.dmg below, open it, drag the app to Applications. Apple Silicon only.

Not code-signed, so the first launch is blocked with "Apple could not verify this app is free of malware." Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, click Open Anyway. Once only.

With Node 22.12+, on any platform:

npx latex-stickies

Autocomplete

A grey suggestion appears after a pause in typing; Tab accepts it, Esc dismisses it. It runs entirely on your machine through Ollama — nothing is sent anywhere — and is off by default. Turn it on under Note → Autocomplete.

You need Ollama running and a model pulled. A small one is strongly preferred: this fires on every pause, so speed matters more than size.

ollama pull qwen2.5-coder:1.5b

Measured on a MacBook: 0.06–0.5s with that model, against 0.4–3.5s for a 14B — and the small one wrote better prose. Pick your model under Note → Autocomplete Model; installed models are listed with their sizes.

It is built for this app's subject. Typing $$\int_0^1 x^2 dx = suggests \frac{1}{3}$$; The derivative of $x^2$ is suggests $2x$.

Fixes

• Closing the last note on Windows left the app running with no window and no way back to it.
• The app now shows its own name and icon in the Dock when run from source or npm, instead of "Electron".
• Copying a note as an image no longer cuts off notes longer than the screen.

Built on Electron 44 (Chromium 152), CodeMirror 6 and KaTeX.

LaTeX Stickies 1.1.0

Notes now render as you type. There is no edit mode and no preview mode: markdown and maths render in place, and clicking into an element shows the markdown behind it.

Install

Mac — download LaTeX.Stickies-1.1.0-arm64.dmg below, open it, drag the app to Applications. Apple Silicon only.

The app is not code-signed, so the first launch is blocked with "Apple could not verify this app is free of malware." Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway. Once only.

With Node 22.12+, on any platform:

npx latex-stickies

What is new

• Live preview. Maths, tables, links, task lists and headings render while you write. Source unfolds only for the element your caret is in.
• Tables are drawn as real tables, and their cells render maths.
• Code blocks are highlighted across eleven languages, with the language name and a copy button.
• Copy as image. Right-click an equation to copy it as a PNG or as LaTeX; Cmd+Shift+C copies the whole note, however long it is.
• Formatting shortcuts. Cmd+B, Cmd+I, Cmd+E, Cmd+K wrap the selection and unwrap it on a second press.

Fixes

• Closing the last note on Windows left the app running with no window and no way back to it.
• Closing a note with Cmd+W could lose the last few words typed.
• Notes are saved atomically, so a crash or force quit cannot truncate them.

Built on Electron 44 (Chromium 152), CodeMirror 6 and KaTeX.