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.

The recording and every picture below come from a fresh, isolated profile with invented notes; nothing personal appears in them.

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 the pointer away and it is gone again.

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. Right-click for the rest.

Colours and fonts, per note or for all of them. The dot on a hovered note's toolbar opens a row of swatches — one click and the note changes colour. The full palette, your own colours and the font live in Preferences, once for every note or overridden on a single one. New notes can take a random colour so a cluster reads at a glance.

Saved as you type. Notes live as 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 to Dropbox — or anywhere rclone goes — so you never lose a note. The optional xnote-cloud-backup helper takes an encrypted, authenticated snapshot of every note (XChaCha20-Poly1305 under a key that only your passphrase or a one-time recovery code can unwrap) and appends it as a recovery kit to a Dropbox folder, any of the storage services rclone speaks, or a mounted path; an hourly user timer keeps it current. On a new machine, xnote-cloud-backup import latest and the recovery code bring everything back. The provider sees ciphertext and metadata — device name, timestamps, sizes, cadence — never a note.

rclone config                          # once: a remote called "dropbox" (or any provider)
xnote-cloud-backup init                # passphrase + a recovery code, shown once
xnote-cloud-backup backup              # first snapshot; CLOUD_REMOTE=dropbox:xnote-backup in cloud-backup.conf
systemctl --user enable --now xnote-cloud-backup.timer

Back where you left it. Wayland forbids an application from placing its own windows, so the companion XNote Placement GNOME Shell extension does it from the compositor side: every note returns to the position, monitor and workspace it had, on every login. apt install xnote brings it along as a recommendation.

At home on GNOME. Native Wayland, libadwaita styling that follows your theme, and an optional StatusNotifierItem tray menu.

Install

Ubuntu 26.04 — from the APT repository

Add the repository once and XNote updates with everything else:

curl -fsSL https://apt.globalentry.systems/setup.sh | sudo sh
sudo apt install xnote

setup.sh installs the signing key and the suite for your release; read it first if you prefer to do those two steps by hand — it is short. Only amd64 packages for 26.04 are published today. The package conflicts with, replaces and provides xpad, and on first launch XNote moves the notes it finds in ~/.config/xpad to ~/.config/xnote. It recommends gnome-shell-extension-xnote-placement, so the placement extension comes along; enable it once after your next login:

gnome-extensions enable xnote-placement@spencercnorton.github.io

Other platforms — from source

XNote is tested on Ubuntu 26.04 with GNOME Shell 50. Building it requires:

• GTK 4.10 or newer
• libadwaita 1.5 or newer
• GtkSourceView 5
• GLib/GIO 2.66 or newer
• Pango and GdkPixbuf development files
• Autoconf, Automake, Libtool, Gettext, and a C compiler
• Go 1.26.8 or newer only when building xnote-cloud-backup (older releases contain a security flaw in the archive parser used during restore)

Other recent Linux distributions should work when they provide compatible libraries. XNote does not directly link against X11 libraries.

On Ubuntu, install the development dependencies:

sudo apt install build-essential autoconf automake libtool intltool gettext \
  autopoint pkg-config autoconf-archive libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev \
  libgtksourceview-5-dev libglib2.0-dev libpango1.0-dev \
  libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-dev

To include the encrypted-backup helper, install a Go 1.26.8-or-newer toolchain. The checked-in installer is the same checksummed Go 1.26.8 archive used for release builds (it installs under /opt and needs root there):

sudo ./ci/install-go-toolchain.sh
export PATH="/opt/xnote-go-1.26.8/bin:$PATH"
go version

Without a suitable go executable, the desktop application still builds but xnote-cloud-backup is omitted. An older Go fails closed; the build never downloads a replacement toolchain or module dependencies.

Then build and install:

git clone https://github.com/spencernorton/xnote.git
cd xnote
NOCONFIGURE=1 ./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make -j"$(nproc)"
sudo make install

Run xnote to start the application. Existing Xpad notes under ~/.config/xpad are migrated to ~/.config/xnote on first launch when the XNote directory does not already exist.

scripts/build-deb.sh builds the same .deb the repository publishes, and the source tarball beside it.

Documentation

• Deployment and operations guide — setup, configuration, verification, upgrades, recovery and troubleshooting.
• Releasing — public builds, release checks and private deployment boundaries.

The user guide covers the things the screenshots do not:

• First run — the first note, autostart and where Xpad notes go
• Notes — the toolbar, the context menu, colours, fonts, close versus delete
• Preferences — every page and what each setting changes
• Tray — the StatusNotifierItem menu and what happens without one
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Command line — driving the running instance with --new, --show, --hide, --toggle, --quit
• Backup and recovery — xnote-cloud-backup from init to restore on a new machine
• Troubleshooting

docs/development.md maps the source tree, the tests and the release model; CHANGELOG.md lists every release. The man pages xnote(1) and xnote-cloud-backup(1) install with the package (their roff source is in doc/). Placement on Wayland is the XNote Placement extension's job; its README explains how.

Where your data lives

Path	Purpose
~/.config/xnote/	Live notes, in plain text: one content-* (the words, with formatting tags) and one info-* (size, colour, font) per note; default-style holds Preferences; cloud-backup.conf configures the backup helper; server is the socket a running instance listens on. Honours $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.
~/.config/autostart/xnote.desktop	A symlink, created and removed by Preferences → Startup → "Start XNote automatically after login"
~/.local/share/xnote-backup/	The backup helper's state: keyfile.json (the master key, wrapped by your passphrase and again by the recovery code), head.json, snapshots/, remote-status.json, backup.lock. Honours $XDG_DATA_HOME.
<CLOUD_REMOTE>/<device>/kits/<snapshot-id>/	Off-box recovery kits, one per backup, append-only; the helper never deletes remote history
xnote-cloud-backup.timer, xnote-cloud-backup.service	systemd user units installed by the package, disabled until you enable them; the timer runs xnote-cloud-backup sync hourly

Nothing leaves the machine unless you configure a backup remote; then only encrypted recovery kits do, and the provider can observe their metadata (device name, timestamps, sizes, item count, cadence) but never a note. Live notes are plain text under ~/.config/xnote — protect that directory with the same care as the notes themselves, and keep the recovery code somewhere separate from the computer.

Contributing and support

• Bugs and feature requests: open an issue. Questions: Discussions.
• Security reports: private vulnerability reporting — see SECURITY.md. There is no e-mail address; that is deliberate.
• Pull requests are welcome; read CONTRIBUTING.md first — changes are reviewed and merged on GitHub, then shipped in tagged releases.
• If XNote saves you time, you can support its development.

Development

make check                                                                # what CI runs: the GLib unit tests
cd cloud-helper && GOFLAGS=-mod=vendor GOPROXY=off GOTOOLCHAIN=local go test ./...   # the backup helper
dbus-run-session -- tests/wayland-smoke.sh /usr/bin/xnote                 # end to end, under a headless Weston
python3 tests/public-check.py                                             # what every public release must satisfy

./configure --enable-debug=most builds with -Wall -Werror, as CI does; docs/development.md maps the tree.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later © Spencer Norton

XNote is a descendant of Xpad, forked from its development tree after the 5.8 release, and inherits its GPL-3.0-or-later licence. The public history keeps every upstream commit up to the baseline commit — which is why the contributor list shows Xpad's authors — and everything after it is XNote; see the comparison. NOTICE and AUTHORS carry attribution; the BinReloc code in src/prefix.c and src/prefix.h is LGPL-3.0-or-later (src/COPYING.LESSER).

---

Helios · BitAgent · XNote · XNote Placement · SnipSnap · Conductor · NorviOS · Indigo · Road Track · norvitech.com