# Sticky Notes+: I Reworked a GNOME Notes App with Claude Code

> Pubblicato: 2026-10-13 | Aggiornato: 2026-10-13

Sticky Notes+ 0.3.0 is a fork of GNOME's Sticky Notes: data-loss fix, 20 colors, pasted images, tray icon. Here is how I built it with Claude Code.

**I use sticky notes every day, and the app I was using stopped being enough. So I forked it, fixed what bothered me and released it as Sticky Notes+ 0.3.0, working with Claude Code.**

It is a small app. I still think the way it came together shows how we work with AI at bwlab: slowly at the start, checking everything, and keeping the decisions in human hands.

## Why I revised it

The original app, *Sticky Notes* for GNOME, does the job. After years of daily use, a list of small annoyances had piled up:

- the corners were too round, so it did not look like a real post-it;
- there were only 8 colors;
- there was no tray icon;
- the "All notes" list was hard to find, because at startup only the note you had left open appeared;
- there was no "always on top" and no remembered position (on Wayland an app cannot do this on its own);
- you could not paste images.

Then, while reviewing the code, we found something worse: a data-loss bug. One unreadable note file made the whole loading step fail. On exit, the app saved its empty state and deleted all the other notes. Other users had already reported it upstream. We reproduced it on copies of real data and fixed it, with an automated test that fails if the bug comes back.

## What's new

- The data-loss bug is fixed: a broken file no longer takes the other notes down with it.
- Six open community contributions from upstream are merged: tray icon, font size, visible cursor, checklists, lists and formatting, note titles, and import/export.
- The look is closer to a post-it: nearly square corners, a thin header and a stronger shadow.
- There are 20 colors instead of 8, with dark-theme variants and a color picker in the formatting bar.
- You can paste images from the clipboard or drag them into a note. They resize with the window and are included in export and import.
- The tray menu has a "New Note" entry and the list of your notes.
- A new option shows all notes at startup.
- Email addresses get an "Open in Mail" button.
- An optional GNOME Shell extension adds "Always on Top" for each note and reopens windows where you left them.

The extension, called "Sticky Notes Extras", is optional and you install it by hand. On Wayland you need to log out and back in afterwards. The tray icon needs a status notifier host, for example the AppIndicator extension on GNOME.

## How I built it with Claude Code

Claude Code is Anthropic's coding agent. This is what it did:

- It read the codebase and the 105 upstream issues.
- It checked that the open pull requests applied to the current code.
- It reproduced the bugs on real data, always on isolated copies, with a backup before every attempt.
- It wrote the tests, including the one for the data-loss bug.
- It built the Flatpak package.
- It tried the interface in an isolated, headless GNOME Shell session, with screenshots generated by GTK. The two images in this article come from there, using example notes.

My part was the priorities and the product choices: the look, the colors, the options. I also used the app by hand. A screenshot tells you a window renders, not whether it feels like a post-it.

## What I learned

If you want to change an existing app with an agent, don't start from the new features. Start from a verified review: what the code does today, which bugs are real, which ones you can reproduce. Then add tests, so every change has a safety net. We found the data-loss bug because we ran the code on real data. Reading it, nothing looked wrong.

The decisions stay with people. The agent was fast and careful with the work, but it could not tell me how I wanted my notes to look.

---

## Credits and where to find it

Sticky Notes+ is a fork of [Sticky Notes](https://github.com/vixalien/sticky) by Angelo Verlain and Christopher Davis, released under the MIT license, which the fork keeps. The foundations are theirs, and so are the contributions from the upstream community that we merged. Thank you.

The app id is `it.bwlab.StickyNotes`, version 0.3.0. You can download the Flatpak package, [`it.bwlab.StickyNotes.flatpak`](https://github.com/bwlab/sticky/releases/download/v0.3.0/it.bwlab.StickyNotes.flatpak), from the [v0.3.0 release page](https://github.com/bwlab/sticky/releases/tag/v0.3.0). To install it:

```bash
flatpak install --user it.bwlab.StickyNotes.flatpak
```

It needs the GNOME 50 runtime from Flathub, and it runs next to the original app. A Flathub submission is in preparation.

Code, releases and issues: [github.com/bwlab/sticky](https://github.com/bwlab/sticky)