jot

A tiny, native notepad for Windows. Minimal, translucent, Markdown-friendly, styled with the Alacritty palette. Written in Rust with egui.

• Borderless window with a thin title bar and adjustable translucency
• Tabs in the title bar (like WezTerm): several files in one window, hidden when only one is open
• A keybinds overlay on F1
• Line numbers, word wrap (on by default, toggleable), any installed font at any size
• Live Markdown: # Title is a big heading as you type, plus bold, italic, code, quotes, lists, tasks, links
• Focus mode: chrome hidden, centered column, everything but the current paragraph dimmed
• Find, open/save, drag and drop, unsaved-changes prompt, CRLF and UTF-8 handled

Download

Grab jot.exe (or the zip) from the latest release and run it. It is a single file, no installer needed. Windows may show a SmartScreen warning because the exe is unsigned: choose More info, then Run anyway.

Keys

Key	Action
Ctrl+T / Ctrl+N, Ctrl+W	New tab, close tab
Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab, Alt+1 to Alt+9	Next / previous tab, go to tab
Ctrl+O / Ctrl+S / Ctrl+Shift+S	Open file(s) in tabs, save, save as
F1	Show all keybinds
Ctrl+Shift+B	Tab bar: auto, always, never
Ctrl+F, F3 / Shift+F3	Find, next / previous match
Alt+Z	Toggle word wrap
Ctrl+Shift+F (Esc to leave)	Focus mode
F11	Fullscreen
Ctrl+Scroll, Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0	Font size, reset
Ctrl+Alt+Up / Ctrl+Alt+Down	Opacity
Ctrl+Shift+L	Toggle line numbers
Ctrl+Shift+M	Toggle Markdown styling

Markdown styling is on for .md files and for new, unsaved documents.

Config

~/.config/jot/config.toml, created when you change a setting and reloaded when edited:

font = "IosevkaTerm Nerd Font Mono"   # installed family name, or a path to a .ttf/.otf
font_size = 18.0
opacity = 0.92                        # 0.3 to 1.0
word_wrap = true
line_numbers = true
tab_bar = "auto"                     # auto (only with 2+ files), always, never
focus_column = 72.0                   # focus mode width in characters

Build

Needs Rust (MSVC toolchain) and the Visual Studio Build Tools.

cargo run --release -- notes.md todo.md   # every file opens in its own tab
pwsh ./scripts/install.ps1     # release build -> %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\jot + Start Menu shortcut

Performance

Measured on a release build (RTX 4060 Ti, Windows 10):

	Small file	3 MB Markdown file
Window ready	~0.15 to 0.35 s	~0.15 s
Memory	~225 MB	~790 MB
Idle CPU	~0%	~3%

Most of the memory is the GPU driver and wgpu, not the text. The renderer is wgpu on DirectX 12: the OpenGL renderer is smaller but cannot do a translucent window on Windows. Files over 1 MB open with Markdown styling off.

Notes

• The document lives in a plain String inside egui's text widget, which is very fast for notes but lays the whole text out each edit, so multi-megabyte files will feel slower.
• Markdown markers (#, **) are dimmed, not hidden.

MIT licensed.