Floating Notes

Sticky notes that float over your agents.

A notes window one keystroke away, stickies that pin to the thread or project they belong to, a scratchpad for every conversation, and a markdown editor that behaves like one.

One window, three stickies, and the thread you are actually working on.

Install

From the bb plugin catalog — open Extensions, search for Floating Notes, install.

Or from a shell:

bb plugin install git:https://github.com/vburojevic/bb-plugin-floating-notes

Requires bb 0.42 or newer. No account, no API key, nothing leaves your machine: notes live in a SQLite database inside bb's own data directory.

Every note knows where it lives

A flat pile of notes stops being useful at about thirty. The list groups by scope instead: one section per project, by name, then global notes, thread scratchpads and daily notes. Every row carries a glyph and a tinted left edge for its scope — and the note's sticky card wears the same colour, so a card on screen and its row in the list read as the same object.

The chips across the top narrow the list to one project, to global notes, or to threads. Search understands operators too: tag:api, in:scratchpads, is:open, thread:current.

Notes that follow the work

Pop any note out as a sticky. Drag it anywhere, snap it to an edge, collapse it to its title bar, or drop it into reference mode — translucent and click-through until you hover it, so a checklist can sit over an agent's output without getting in the way.

A sticky can pin to a thread or to a whole project, and then it only appears while you are looking at that work. Every thread also gets a scratchpad, reachable from the thread header and the thread's side panel, that agents can append to while they work.

A real markdown editor

Formatting marks hide as you leave a line. Headings size themselves, checkboxes are clickable and roll up into a progress ring on the row, code fences get real syntax highlighting from your bb theme, and tables stay readable. [[Wiki links]] autocomplete across your notes — follow one to a note that does not exist and it gets created. Paste an image and it is stored with the note. Type #tag anywhere and it becomes a filterable tag.

Edits keep a revision history you can restore from the footer, trash holds deleted notes for 30 days, and images that lose their last reference are collected automatically.

Capture without leaving the thread

Ctrl+Shift+' opens a one-line bar over whatever you are doing. Type, press Enter, it is saved and gone. Tab switches between your Inbox and the current thread's scratchpad.

From the timeline, Save as note keeps a message or a selection with a link back to the conversation it came from. The composer's + menu inserts a note into the draft, and @note mentions resolve fresh at send time.

On a phone it becomes a sheet

Below bb's compact breakpoint the window stops pretending to be a window: it fills the viewport minus one even inset, measured from the safe area, and tracks visualViewport so the software keyboard never covers what you are typing.

Keyboard

Shortcut	Does
Ctrl+'	Toggle the notes window
Ctrl+Shift+'	Quick capture
⌘K	Command palette, inside the window
⌘N	New note
⌘F	Jump to search
⌘B ⌘I ⌘⇧X	Bold, italic, strikethrough
⌘⇧K	Insert a link

Agents and the command line

Five tools let an agent keep notes current while it works: notes_search, notes_read, notes_write, notes_trash, and notes_scratchpad — so findings land on the pad you are already watching.

The same ground from a shell:

bb notes list                  # every note, newest first
bb notes search "coupon"       # full-text search
bb notes add "Ship the v2.4 announcement"
bb notes scratchpad <thread>   # read or append a thread's pad
bb notes export ./notes-backup # markdown files with front matter
bb notes import ./notes-backup

Settings

bb → Extensions → Notes: both shortcuts, editor font size, default sticky colour, and whether quick capture defaults to the Inbox or the current thread's scratchpad.

How it fits together

app.tsx                       registrations: content script, sidebar button,
                              nav + thread panels, message action, composer menu
lib/contract.ts               the RPC contract, shared by server and app
server.ts                     SQLite + FTS5, RPC, mentions, CLI, agent tools
lib/scope.ts                  where a note lives: grouping and filtering
lib/store.ts                  one client cache for every surface
lib/frame.ts                  drag, resize, clamp and persistence for N windows
lib/editor/                   the CodeMirror 6 live-markdown editor
components/floating-notes.tsx the content-script root

Four things worth knowing before changing it:

• There is no bb React context in the content script. lib/rpc.ts speaks the plugin RPC wire format directly, typed off the same contract.
• The server owns the notes; the client caches. Every surface renders from lib/store.ts and mutates through it. Server mutations run behind a mutex.
• Theme-aware colour is light-dark() or bb tokens only — this plugin's Tailwind build has no .dark variant wired to bb's theme.
• Do not trust a Tailwind utility bb does not use itself. Our utilities compile into @layer utilities, and layered CSS loses to bb's unlayered app CSS. w-60 once computed to the container width and pushed the whole editor off-screen; size-2.5 collapsed a colour swatch to a 2px speck. Anything load-bearing lives in styles.css under an unlayered .bb-fn-* class. Measure the computed value in the running app rather than trusting the class.

Development

npm install
npm run typecheck
npm test
bb plugin build
bb plugin dev      # watch: rebuild and reload on every save

License

MIT