Trash & Recovery

When you delete a note, it goes to the trash, not gone forever. You can restore it anytime.

Deleting a Note

Click the Delete button (X) in a note's header. A confirmation asks whether to Move to Trash, with the option to Cancel. Pressing Enter moves the note to the trash (you can always restore it from there), and Escape cancels. On a Mac it appears as a standard macOS alert (an always-on-top note, or a note with a reminder, keeps the app's own box).

You can also delete a note from Search: select its card and click Delete above the preview, press Delete, or right-click the card. The same confirmation and trash rules below apply.

Empty notes skip the confirmation and go straight to trash. A note counts as empty only when every one of its pages is empty and you haven't given the note a title (a page you've named counts as non-empty too, even before you type into it), so a multi-page note still asks even if the page you happen to be looking at is blank
Notes with reminders always ask for confirmation and warn you that the reminder will be deleted for good: restoring the note later doesn't bring it back. Here Enter cancels, so click Move to Trash to go ahead
Multi-page notes say how many pages go to the trash with the note
To stop being asked, tick Don't ask me again in the confirmation and click Move to Trash (Cancel leaves it as it was). This turns off Confirm before deleting notes, in the All Notes section of Menu > Settings… > Notes, where you can switch it back on. The confirmation always appears for notes with reminders though, just to be safe, so it offers no checkbox there

Closing a Page

Closing a page of a multi-page note sends it to the trash too, with the same confirmation. It comes back as its own note rather than as a page of the note it came from. Completely empty pages close without a trash entry.

Opening the Trash

Open the hub's Menu and click View Trash. The number beside the Trash heading (and in the window's title) shows how many notes are in the trash.

The Trash dialog with deleted notes

Each deleted note is a card, like the ones in Search:

Its color, as a small swatch
Its title. A note you never named shows when it was created, in italics
Its first two lines, from the page you were on or else the first page that has anything on it, so a note deleted while showing a blank tab is still recognizable. A note holding only a picture says Image only
How long ago it was deleted (e.g., "1 minute ago", "3 hours ago", "2 days ago")
A badge with how many pages it has, if it has more than one ("3 pages")
A "closed page" badge instead, if the entry is a single page you closed rather than a whole note
Hover over a card to read the note's text in a tooltip

Notes are sorted newest first. The note you just deleted appears at the top. Selected cards are tinted in the note's own color.

Restoring a Note

Select a note in the trash and click Restore (or press Enter). The note reappears on your desktop with all its content, colors, and settings intact, even if it was hidden when you deleted it.

You can select multiple notes at once (hold Ctrl and click, or Shift+Click for a range) and restore them all together. The button shows how many you've selected: "Restore (3)".

Reminders

When you delete a note, its reminder is removed permanently. Restoring the note brings back the content but not the reminder. You'll need to set a new one.

Permanently Deleting a Note

Select a note in the trash and click Delete Forever. This is permanent and can't be undone.

Any images, screenshots or sound clips attached to the note are also deleted from your computer at this point (a clip another note still uses is kept).

Emptying the Trash

Click Empty Trash, the red words at the top of the window opposite the heading, to permanently delete everything in the trash at once. A confirmation dialog shows the count before proceeding.

How Long Are Deleted Notes Kept?

BetterStickies keeps up to 300 deleted notes. If you go over that, the oldest ones are automatically removed to make room. For most people, this is more than enough.

Free Version

The trash works the same in the free version. The only difference: you can't restore a note unless it fits within the free limit of 4 notes (tabs count toward the limit; a multi-tab note needs one free slot per tab). Delete or trash an active note, or close a tab, to make room.