Noctes

Sticky notes on your desktop rather than in a window. Each note is its own desktop widget - a sheet of paper at a small random angle, a strip of tape on top, in a colour drawn from your Noctalia palette - sitting above the wallpaper and below every window. Writing happens in a small panel that opens when you click a sheet.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	remo/noctes
Entries	Bar widget: bar; panel: panel; service: service; desktop widget: note

Requirements

python3 on PATH. It runs tools/noctes-widget, the helper that adds, removes and tilts sheets, because a widget's rotation, its background panel and the widget entry itself are host state in settings.toml that no plugin call can write. See Notes.

Usage

The first sheet

noctalia msg plugin remo/noctes:service all desk

That puts a sheet on the focused output, tilted, coloured and bound to a note of its own. tools/noctes-widget is what writes it into settings.toml, since no plugin call creates a desktop widget.

Noctalia's editor does it too, for anyone who would rather click: Settings -> Desktop -> Widgets -> Toggle Editor, add a Noctes widget, then Done. A widget added that way appears square, grey and framed. A moment later the service notices a sheet with no note behind it and adopts it: a key of its own, a small angle, no frame.

Everything after that

Click a sheet. The panel opens on that note, and it is the only view: title, body, colour chips, and a toolbar with

• + - a new sticker, note and sheet together
• arrows - hands the desk back to Noctalia's widget editor, for dragging, resizing and rotating
• gear - this plugin's settings
• bin - deletes the note and takes its sheet off the desktop

The bar widget shows the note count and opens the panel. To open the panel from a keybind:

noctalia msg panel-toggle remo/noctes:panel

Typing lives in the panel because desktop widgets are background layer-shell surfaces and never take keyboard focus.

Colours

A note with no colour of its own is dynamic: it derives one from its key, so neighbouring sheets rarely match and each keeps its look across restarts. With Paper follows the theme on, that draws from primary, secondary, tertiary and error, each with its own on_* text role - so on a generated scheme the whole wall recolours with your wallpaper. Off, it draws from eight classic papers.

Picking a chip fixes a note's colour. Besides the eight papers there is glass, a translucent pane with a hairline edge, and black, the one sheet written in white ink. A caption under the chips always names the mode.

Settings

Plugin-wide:

Setting	Type	Default	Description
default_color	select	auto	Colour new notes get. auto leaves it to the sheet's key.
theme_colors	bool	true	Dynamic notes draw from the palette instead of the classic papers.
tilt	bool	true	Sheets sit at a small random angle. Off squares every one of them; on gives each a new angle. Rewrites settings.toml.
paper_opacity	double	0.96	How solid a sheet is. Text stays fully opaque.
save_path	string	(empty)	Folder for notes.json. Empty uses the plugin's data directory.

Per sheet, in the widget's own settings:

Setting	Type	Default	Description
key	string	(empty)	Which note this sheet shows. Generated; set it only to point a sheet at a particular note.
color	select	auto	Overrides the note's colour for this sheet.
fold	select	none	Dog-ears a bottom corner. Off by default: a diagonal can only be drawn as a staircase here, and it shows.
tape	select	auto	Whether a strip of tape is drawn, and where. auto decides from the key.
paper_width	int	220	Paper width in px.
paper_height	int	200	Paper height in px.
font_size	int	16	Body size in pt; the title is three larger. A handwriting font needs more than a UI font.
max_lines	int	14	Body lines before the text is elided.
show_title	bool	true	Draw the note title above the body.
opacity_override	double	0.0	Opacity for this sheet alone; 0 follows the plugin-wide value.
shadow	bool	true	Draw the drop shadow.
use_theme_colors	select	inherit	Force theme colours on or off for this sheet.
font_path	string	PatrickHand-Regular.ttf	Font the note is drawn in. Plugin-relative, absolute or ~; empty uses the shell font.

IPC

noctalia msg plugin remo/noctes:service all desk            # note and sheet together
noctalia msg plugin remo/noctes:service all new "buy milk"  # note only
noctalia msg plugin remo/noctes:service all open work       # select the note keyed "work",
                                                            # creating it if absent
noctalia msg plugin remo/noctes:service all move            # toggle the widget editor
noctalia msg plugin remo/noctes:service all reload          # re-read notes.json

desk, new and open all select what they touch, so pairing one with noctalia msg panel-toggle remo/noctes:panel gives a single-keybind quick note.

Notes

Files written. notes.json in save_path, or in the plugin's data directory when that is empty, plus a one-line tilt.state beside it. Writes are debounced onto a two second tick.

Noctalia's settings.toml. A desktop widget's rotation, its background panel and the widget entry itself are host state, and no plugin call reaches them - so a plugin that creates its own sheets, tilts them or takes them down has to edit that file. tools/noctes-widget does, and every write backs the file up first, runs noctalia config validate, and restores the backup if validation fails. It touches only desktop_widgets entries whose type is remo/noctes:note, and the plugin's own plugin_settings block is read, never written.

Process spawned. python3 tools/noctes-widget, for the above, and noctalia msg desktop-widgets-toggle-edit for the toolbar's move button. Nothing else.

No network access. Nothing is fetched or sent.

Font. PatrickHand-Regular.ttf ships with the plugin and is the default. Patrick Hand by Patrick Wagesreiter, SIL Open Font License 1.1, in PatrickHand-OFL.txt.

Debugging. Noctalia logs to stdout, which most ways of starting it discard. pkill -x noctalia; nohup noctalia >/tmp/noctalia.log 2>&1 & makes plugin errors visible.