Getting Started

BetterStickies puts sticky notes on your desktop — quick notes you can see at a glance without opening an app.

The Hub

When you launch BetterStickies, a small floating bar appears on your desktop. This is the hub — your home base for managing notes.

Screenshot coming soon

The hub bar showing the five icon buttons: +, search, bell, menu, and hide

The hub has five buttons:

Button	What it does
+	Create a new note
Search	Find any note by typing
Bell	See all your reminders
Menu	Access settings, export, trash, help, about, and more
Hide	Minimize the hub to the system tray

You can drag the hub anywhere on your screen. To bring it back after hiding, click the BetterStickies icon in your system tray.

Creating a Note

Click the + button on the hub. A new yellow sticky note appears on your screen, ready for typing.

A fresh empty note

You can also create notes with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+N — this works even when BetterStickies isn't focused.

Parts of a Note

Each note has three areas:

Screenshot coming soon

An annotated note showing the header, content area, and footer with labels

Header

The bar at the top of the note. It shows the creation date (or a custom title if you set one). Double-click the date to type a custom title — this makes notes easier to find in search.

Hover over a note to see the header buttons:

Collapse (left side) — shrink the note down to just the title bar
Settings — change this note's font, color, size, and background
Delete — move the note to trash
Pin — lock the note in place and make it read-only
Always on top — keep the note above other windows
Hide — hide this note (it's not deleted, just invisible)

Content Area

This is where you type. You can format text, add checklists, paste images, drop files, and more — see Text Formatting below.

Footer

The bar at the bottom with formatting buttons. From left to right:

Button	What it does	Shortcut
T	Title	Ctrl+1
t	Subtitle	Ctrl+2
B	Bold	Ctrl+B
I	Italic	Ctrl+I
S	Strikethrough	Ctrl+Shift+X
Todo	Add a checkbox	Ctrl+T
Link	Insert a link	Ctrl+K
Color	Change text color	Ctrl+Shift+C
Bell	Set a reminder	Ctrl+R
RTL	Right-to-left text	Ctrl+Shift+R

Moving and Resizing

Move: drag the header bar or the edges of the note
Resize: drag any corner of the note
Collapse: double-click the header bar to shrink the note to just the title bar. Double-click again to expand
Zoom text: hold Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel to make text bigger or smaller

Formatting Your Notes

Select text and click a footer button (or use the keyboard shortcut) to format it:

Bold, Italic, and Strikethrough work like any text editor
Title and Subtitle make text larger and bold — great for headings
Code block (Ctrl+M) switches to a monospace font for code snippets. BetterStickies also auto-detects pasted code
Todo (Ctrl+T) adds a checkbox. Click the checkbox to check it off (adds strikethrough). Press Tab to indent and create nested checklists

Right-click anywhere in a note for quick options like cut, copy, paste, undo, and redo. The menu adapts to what's under your cursor — see the Tips section below for details.

Pasting Content

BetterStickies handles a wide range of pasted content automatically. Where most note apps support one or two paste types, BetterStickies detects and converts eight different content types on the fly.

Just press Ctrl+V and BetterStickies figures out the rest:

Screenshots — paste images directly from your clipboard
Files and folders — drag or paste file paths as clickable shortcuts with file-type icons
Code — multi-line code is auto-detected and styled in a monospace code block (no need to mark it manually)
Markdown — raw markdown text (from .md files or GitHub) is converted to rich formatting automatically
Rich text from the web — content from emails, web pages, and documents keeps its formatting (bold, italic, headings, lists, links) while adapting to your note's font and colors
URLs — automatically turned into clickable smart links with icons
Plain text — everything else pastes normally

Use Ctrl+Shift+V to bypass all detection and paste as plain text. If code detection gets it wrong, Ctrl+M toggles the code block off.

Customizing a Note

Click the Settings button in any note's header to change:

Font and font size
Note color and text color
Background image — set a photo, pattern, or GIF as the note's background
Background opacity — make the background more or less transparent
Note size — set exact width and height

Changes apply only to that note. To change defaults for all new notes, use the hub's Menu > Settings.

Dark and Light Theme

BetterStickies dialogs and menus follow your system theme. To change it manually:

Open Menu > Settings from the hub
Find the Theme option
Choose Dark, Light, or Auto

Auto follows your system's setting. Notes themselves keep their individual colors regardless of the theme.

Hiding and Showing Notes

Sometimes you want your notes out of the way without deleting them:

Hide all notes: open the hub's Menu and click Hide All Notes
Show all notes: the same menu item changes to Show All Notes with a count of how many are hidden
Hide one note: click the Hide button in that note's header
Find a hidden note: use Search — opening a note from search makes it visible again

Deleting and Recovering Notes

Click the Delete button in a note's header. The note moves to the trash — it's not gone permanently.

To recover a deleted note:

Open Menu > View Trash from the hub
Select the note you want back
Click Restore

Keyboard Shortcuts

These work from anywhere on your system (global shortcuts):

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+Alt+N	Create a new note
Ctrl+Alt+S	Open search
Ctrl+Alt+H	Show/hide all notes

All shortcuts are customizable in Menu > Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts.

System Tray

BetterStickies lives in your system tray (the small icons near your clock). Right-click the tray icon to:

Show or hide the hub
Create a new note
Show or hide all notes
Open search or settings
Exit the app

Clicking the tray icon toggles the hub's visibility.

Tips

Hover for help — most buttons, settings, and options have tooltips. If you're not sure what something does, just hover over it — the header buttons, hub buttons, settings sections, and even the date in the header all show helpful descriptions
Smart right-click menu — the right-click menu inside a note changes based on what's under your cursor. Right-click a link to see link options, an image to change its size, or a reminder chip to edit or remove it. On KDE or Windows, you'll also see desktop/activity options
Hover over links — web links show a styled URL tooltip. Image and PDF links show a thumbnail preview right where your cursor is
Note glow — when you hover over a note, it glows with a soft border that matches the note's text color
Live preview — in Note Settings, dragging the opacity or line spacing slider updates the note in real time so you can see the result before closing the dialog
Drag images onto Settings — you can drag an image file directly onto the Note Settings dialog to set it as the background (no need to click "Choose Image")
Search and Trash previews — hover over notes in the Search or Trash dialogs to see a longer content preview. In Search, hover over the date column for full timestamps
First-run guide — on first launch, BetterStickies creates two guide notes with a quick tour. You can access them again anytime from Menu > Help

Auto-Save

Everything saves as you type — no save button needed. BetterStickies also keeps automatic backups in case anything goes wrong. See Backing Up Your Notes for details.

About & Updates

Open Menu > About from the hub to see the current version, check for updates, find community links (Discord, Reddit, GitHub), or support development.