QuickNote

A tiny always-on-top scratchpad that lives in your system tray and never forgets a word.

Always-on-top dark-mode notepad for Windows. One global hotkey to summon it, one to hide it, autosaves every keystroke. Native Win32, ~2 MB, no installer, no telemetry.

QuickNote

A scratchpad for the things you'd otherwise lose in the gap between tabs.

You know the moment — someone reads out a confirmation code, you spot a flight number, you have a thought mid-meeting and there's nowhere to put it. Notepad is too much ceremony. Sticky Notes wants you to log in. Your browser tab gets closed. So the thought goes.

QuickNote is the smallest thing that fixes that. A single window, dark, always on top, summoned and dismissed with one hotkey from anywhere on Windows. Whatever you type is saved while you type it. Close the window, restart your PC, come back tomorrow — your text is still there, exactly where you left it.

That's it. That's the whole app.

What it does

• Hotkey from anywhere: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+N shows or hides the window. Picked deliberately not to clash with Discord, Slack, OBS, or anything else you probably have running.
• Always on top — until you don't want it. Minimize and it tucks itself into the system tray. Hotkey or tray-click brings it back.
• Autosaves continuously. Every keystroke is committed to disk a moment after you stop typing. Notes live as plain UTF-8 in %APPDATA%\QuickNote\note.txt — yours to back up, sync, or open in any other editor.
• Dark by default. Calm to look at, light on your eyes at 2 AM.
• One file. No installer. No services. No background updaters. Drop the .exe wherever, run it, done.

What it doesn't do

No accounts. No cloud. No telemetry. No ads. No formatting toolbar. No tabs. No "Pro" tier. It is a rectangle you can type in.

Under the hood

Written in Rust on top of the Win32 API directly — no Electron, no Chromium, no GPU frameworks. The whole binary is around 2 MB and uses a few megabytes of RAM. It does one thing.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
• About 2 MB of disk space.

Verifying your download

A SHA256SUMS.txt is included in the download. The binary is unsigned (no paid code-signing certificate), so Windows SmartScreen or your antivirus may give you a "publisher unknown" warning the first time. Check the hash if you want to be sure you got the file I uploaded.