FreeStickies

Free, offline sticky notes for macOS that float on your desktop.

Why

The sticky-note apps I tried wanted a monthly subscription for something this simple. So I built one that costs nothing, needs no account, and keeps every note on your Mac.

FreeStickies is vibe coded with Claude. Not a line of it was written by hand.

Features

• As many notes as you want, each in its own frameless window that stays above other apps.
• Gets out of the way. The toolbar hides when a note is not focused, so you only see what you wrote.
• Transparency two ways. Fade the background down to 0% for text that floats on the desktop, or dim the whole window.
• Rich text: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, fonts, sizes, text colour, and alignment.
• Lists: bullets, numbers, indent and outdent with Tab.
• Three-state checkboxes that cycle from to-do to in progress to done, with a progress bar that appears on any note with a checklist.
• Make each note yours: any background colour, adjustable corner roundness.
• Lock a note against accidental edits, collapse it to its title bar, or duplicate it.
• Copy as Markdown, plus a live word and character count.
• Lives in the menu bar. No Dock icon.
• Nothing is lost. Notes, positions and sizes are saved as you type and come back after a restart.

Shortcuts

Keys	Action
⌘N	New note
⌘B, ⌘I, ⌘U	Bold, italic, underline
Tab, Shift-Tab	Indent, outdent

Install

1. Download FreeStickies.dmg from the latest release. It runs on Apple Silicon Macs (M1 and later).
2. Open it and drag FreeStickies to Applications.
3. The first time you open it, macOS says it cannot check the app for malware, because it is not notarised by Apple. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway. You only do this once.

Build it yourself

git clone https://github.com/hussaintrawadi/stickies.git
cd stickies
npm install
npm run dist

That creates dist/FreeStickies.dmg, with the app icon made from icon.png. On an Intel Mac, this builds an Intel version. To try it without building, run npm start.

Where your notes live

Everything is in one JSON file on your Mac:

~/Library/Application Support/free-stickies/free-stickies-notes.json

There is no sync, no account and no network access. Back that file up if your notes matter.

Project structure

File	What it does
main.js	Electron main process: windows, the menu bar icon, saving notes
preload.js	The small, isolated bridge between each note and the main process
note.html	The whole note UI in one file: HTML, CSS and JavaScript
build-dmg.sh	Builds dist/FreeStickies.app and a styled DMG
package.json	App manifest and scripts

Each note window runs with contextIsolation on and nodeIntegration off, and only talks to the main process through the functions in preload.js.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Keep it offline and dependency-light: the app has one runtime dependency, Electron, and that is on purpose.

License

MIT. Built by Hussain Trawadi, vibe coded with Claude.