A major update to Notes, a free, open source, and cross-platform note-taking app written in Qt, is available to download.
Mentioning/recommending this app is made a little difficult by the fact its name is also its function — that and Apple’s own notes app is also called simply ‘Notes’. Regardless, Notes is a solid tool that handles the basic needs of note taking well with search and native markdown support.
And in its latest version, it’s now even better.
Notes 2.0’s New Features
The new Notes 2.0 release adds a ream of new features, bug fixes, and UI improvements. The biggest is surely the introduction of hierarchically organisation using nested folders, and tags. This makes it much easier to segment your notes into silos that make sense to you.
For example, I may have a top level “blog post ideas” folder, with nested folders for “omgubuntu” and “omglinux” within, and I could use tags such as “how to”, “review”, “list”, and so on to further arrange my literary ambles.
You can also now pin notes to keep your most important thoughts/todos/ideas within reach. There’s a new settings window that lets you choose from light, dark, or sepia themes, as well as change between different fonts, change font size and/or width of text.
Want to sync your notes via a cloud provider? You can now change the database path to do this, which is a big boon and better than locking your stuff into a specific service by default.
As Notes is a Qt app it probably looks best on a KDE desktop rather than the GNOME one I’m taking my screenshots from. And the macOS-style window borders used by default won’t be to everyone’s tastes (an option to switch to a native system frame is included, fwiw).
Linux isn’t short of note-taking apps. There’s something to suit all kinds of needs and preferences. Notes, being cross-platform, Qt-based, and offering custom database path, has unique selling points of its own.
You can download the latest version of Notes for Windows, macOS, and Linux (as an .appimage, binary builds may follow once the developer works through some packaging issues) from GitHub or or the project homepage.