Don't Forget

A screenshot that follows your mouse, so you never forget the details. Hold the mouse wheel and drag over part of the screen. That piece stays next to your cursor while you work.

How to use it

Do this	What happens
Hold the wheel and drag left → right	Snip. The note (amber) follows your mouse.
Hold the wheel and drag right → left	Snip and add it (violet) to the notes already following you.
Ctrl+Alt+S, then drag with the left button	Snip with the keyboard, for touchpads or apps where wheel-drag is off.
Quick wheel click anywhere	Drop the following notes where they are.
Wheel click on a note	Delete it.
Ctrl+Alt+Z	Bring back the last deleted note. After Delete all notes, it brings back all of them.
Ctrl+Alt+H	Hide all notes (for screen sharing, say). Press it again to show them.
Hold Shift	Freeze the following notes so you can reach them.
Click a note	Options: follow or pin, opacity, size, copy, delete. You can also drag it to move it and scroll on it to resize it.

Every new snip is also on the clipboard, ready to paste with Ctrl+V (turn off with copy_snips=0).

Your notes are kept. Close the app, restart your computer or sign out, and your notes come back where they were. If a screen is gone by then, they move onto one you still have.

Games are left alone. In games (anything Windows recognizes as a game, anything installed in a Steam, Epic, GOG, Xbox, Riot, Ubisoft, EA or Rockstar library, or a full-screen DirectX game) your mouse wheel works exactly as the game expects. You can switch Don't Forget back on for a specific game in the control panel.

A quick wheel click still works normally in other apps when no notes are following you. Apps that use wheel-drag themselves, like SolidWorks and Blender, are left alone.

Websites can be skipped too (Windows). Add sites like youtube.com in the control panel and the wheel works normally on them in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc, Zen, LibreWolf, Waterfox and Floorp.

Make it yours

Right-click the tray icon and open Look to pick:

• Colors: Amber and violet (the default), Green and blue, Coral and teal, or White and gray. The first color is for a left-to-right snip, the second for one that adds to the stack.
• Frame: solid, dashed or dotted.
• Thickness: thin, normal or thick.

For any other colors, put them in the settings file, e.g. snip_color=#FF4FA3. The same menu has Snip now, Hide notes, Restore deleted note, Pause, Start with Windows and Keep notes after restart.

Download

Grab the latest build from Releases. It's one codebase with one native binary per OS:

• Windows: DontForget-windows-x86_64.exe. Run it and it sits in the tray. There's nothing to install. Windows may say the app is from an unknown publisher, because it isn't code-signed. Click More info, then Run anyway.
• Linux: DontForget-linux-x86_64. Run chmod +x on it, then start it inside your X session.

Settings

Everything is in one text file: %APPDATA%\DontForget\settings.ini on Windows, ~/.config/dont-forget/settings.ini on Linux. Open it from the tray menu with Edit settings file…, and changes apply when you close Notepad.

Key	Default	What it does
after_capture	follow	After a snip, the note follows your mouse, follows until you click (drop), or stays where you snipped it.
hold_ms	250	How long to hold the wheel before a snip starts without moving.
copy_snips	1	Also put every new snip on the clipboard.
keep_notes	1	Bring notes back after a restart. With 0, the saved notes are deleted when the app quits.
snip_color, add_color	#FFB400, #9B7BFF	Frame colors of left-to-right and right-to-left snips.
outline	solid	solid, dashed or dotted.
outline_width	2	Frame thickness, 1 to 6 pixels (at 100% display scaling).
snip_key, hide_key, restore_key	Ctrl+Alt+S, Ctrl+Alt+H, Ctrl+Alt+Z	Keyboard shortcuts: any of Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Win (Super on Linux) plus a letter, digit or F1–F24. Leave one empty to turn it off.
ignored_apps	SLDWORKS,blender,FreeCAD,acad	Process names where the wheel is left alone.
ignored_sites		Websites where it's off, e.g. youtube.com,github.com/settings.
block_games	1	Stay out of games unless they're listed in allowed_games.
allowed_games		Games where it works anyway.

Where your notes are stored: each note is a PNG in %APPDATA%\DontForget\notes (~/.config/dont-forget/notes on Linux), next to notes.ini, which lists where each one sits. The last 20 deleted notes are kept there too, for undo. Nothing leaves your computer.

Control panel (Windows)

Double-click control.cmd (needs PowerShell 7, and comes with the source code) to start, stop or restart the app, toggle start with Windows, choose apps, games and websites to skip, change the look and other settings, or rebuild it. Changes apply right away. control.cmd -Status prints the current state.

Linux

It runs in the background of your X session and is controlled from the terminal:

dont-forget             start
dont-forget --status    is it running, how many notes
dont-forget --snip      snip now: drag with the left button
dont-forget --hide      hide all notes, or show them again
dont-forget --restore   bring back the last deleted note
dont-forget --clear     delete all notes (--restore brings them back)
dont-forget --reload    re-read the settings file (changes apply right away)
dont-forget --quit      stop it (notes are kept)

Kept notes, undo, the keyboard shortcuts, hiding notes, copying to the clipboard and the look settings all work as on Windows. If your desktop already uses one of the shortcuts, the app says so when it starts. You can then pick another key in the settings file, or bind dont-forget --snip to a key in your desktop's keyboard settings. Games are detected by their library folders, including Steam games running through Proton. Skipping websites is Windows-only for now, because browsers on Linux don't share the page address with other apps. On Linux, a note is deleted with a wheel click or its × button, a right click switches it between following and pinned, and scrolling on it resizes it.

Uninstall

1. Right-click the tray icon and choose Exit. If Start with Windows is checked, uncheck it first.
2. Delete the exe.
3. Delete %APPDATA%\DontForget to remove your settings and saved notes.

Build

Run cargo build --release with Rust. On Windows, the x86_64-pc-windows-gnu toolchain works without Visual Studio. The exe icon and version info are only added when a resource compiler is available (rc.exe with the MSVC toolchain, or windres). The Linux build needs no system libraries beyond glibc, because it talks to X11 directly, and tools/linux-build.sh builds it inside WSL. Pushing a v* tag builds both binaries on GitHub Actions and publishes a release, with notes taken from CHANGELOG.md.

Requirements

	Windows	Linux
System	Windows 10 (1703 or later) or 11, 64-bit. On Windows 10, notes have square corners.	x86-64 with glibc 2.35+ (Ubuntu 22.04+, Debian 12+, Fedora 36+), an X11 session with the XTEST and SHAPE extensions (standard on Xorg), and 24 or 32-bit color. Wayland isn't supported yet.
Mouse	Any mouse with a clickable scroll wheel (middle button), or a touchpad with the keyboard shortcut.	A mouse with a clickable scroll wheel.
CPU	Any 64-bit processor. 0% while idle.	Same, 0% while idle.
Memory	About 2 MB idle, or about 3 MB with a websites list, which loads UI Automation.	About 3 MB resident idle.
Disk	One exe of about 400 KB, with nothing to install. Saved notes take about as much as PNG screenshots of the same size.	One binary of about 700 KB. Saved notes as on Windows.
Extras	PowerShell 7 for the optional control panel.	None.

Each open note holds its snip as an uncompressed image, so it adds roughly width × height × 4 bytes. An 800×500 snip adds about 1.6 MB.

How these were measured

Release build v0.2.0 on a 20-thread Intel laptop running Windows 11. Startup takes about 12 ms until the message loop is ready (84 ms on a cold first launch). The app was then sampled idle for 30 s with no notes open: 0 ms of CPU time without a websites list, and 15.6 ms (0.003%) with one. v0.3.0 used 1.9 MB of private memory idle. Linux was measured under Xvfb in WSL2 (Ubuntu): 3.1 MB resident (192 KB anonymous), 0 CPU ticks in 30 s, and roughly 0.2 s from launch until the control socket answers.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.