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.

Noctes is developed at RamonRemo/noctes. Suggestions and bug reports are welcome in its issues.

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

Deleting a sheet in Noctalia's widget editor deletes its note too, the next time the service reads settings.toml. A sheet this machine never had, and every known sheet vanishing at once (a reset settings file), are never taken for a deletion.

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, and hidden from the widget editor.
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.
font_path	string	PatrickHand-Regular.ttf	Font the note is drawn in. Plugin-relative, absolute or ~; empty uses the shell font.

A sheet holds only what belongs to the paper. The colour belongs to the note and is picked in the panel; opacity and theme following are plugin-wide. Text longer than the paper is cut to the lines that fit and ends in "...".

IPC

noctalia msg plugin remo/noctes:service all desk            # note and sheet together
noctalia msg plugin remo/noctes:service all new "buy milk"  # note and sheet, with that text
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 stick work      # give the note keyed "work" a sheet
noctalia msg plugin remo/noctes:service all gather          # bring sheets off a disconnected output
noctalia msg plugin remo/noctes:service all reload          # re-read notes.json

stick is for a note that has a key but no sheet on this machine, such as one from a synced notes.json. gather also runs by itself once the outputs have held still for a few seconds after one comes or goes, so a monitor that drops its link for a moment as the session locks moves nothing, and once per start, so a sheet parked by an earlier run goes back; see Notes.

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, written through notes.json.tmp and a rename so a crash cannot leave half a file. Writes are debounced onto a two second tick. A notes.json that does not parse is renamed to notes.json.unreadable-<time> and reported, never written over. The plugin's data directory also holds tilt.state, sheets.json (the sheets this machine has seen) and homes.json (where gather moved sheets from).

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. Each change is written beside it as settings.toml.noctes-new, checked with noctalia config validate, and renamed into place only if it passes, so the shell never loads a file it would reject. Commands hold a lock on the settings directory, so two at once cannot undo each other. It touches only desktop_widgets entries whose type is remo/noctes:note, and the plugin's own plugin_settings block is read, never written.

Once per start the helper also cleans up after older versions: it removes settings on noctes' own sheets that noctalia config validate reports as unknown, and deletes the settings.toml.bak-noctes and settings.toml.bak-noctes-<date> backups that 0.19 and earlier left beside the file. Nothing else beside settings.toml is touched.

Monitors. A sheet on an output that is no longer connected is drawn nowhere, so it is moved to a connected one, and goes back when its own output returns.

Process spawned. python3 tools/noctes-widget, for the above (it runs noctalia config validate itself), 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.