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 (green) follows your mouse.
Hold the wheel and drag right → left	Snip and add it (blue) to the notes already following you.
Quick wheel click anywhere	Drop the following notes where they are.
Wheel click on a note	Delete it.
Hold Shift	Freeze the following notes so you can reach them.
Ctrl+V anywhere	Every new snip is also copied to the clipboard, ready to paste (turn off with Copy snips in the control panel).
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.

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. You can edit that list from the tray icon under Ignored apps….

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.

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.
• Linux: DontForget-linux-x86_64. Run chmod +x on it, then start it inside your X session.

Control panel (Windows)

Double-click control.cmd (needs PowerShell 7) to start, stop or restart the app, toggle start with Windows, choose apps, games and websites to skip, change settings, or rebuild it. 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 --clear    delete all notes
dont-forget --reload   re-read the settings file
dont-forget --quit     stop it

Games are detected by their library folders, including Steam games running through Proton. Website skipping is Windows-only for now. Settings are stored in ~/.config/dont-forget/settings.ini, with the same keys as on Windows.

Build

Run cargo build --release with Rust. On Windows, the x86_64-pc-windows-gnu toolchain works without Visual Studio, and settings are stored in %APPDATA%\DontForget\settings.ini. The Linux build needs no system libraries beyond glibc, because it talks to X11 directly. tools/linux-build.sh builds it inside WSL.

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).	Same.
CPU	Any 64-bit processor. 0% while idle.	Same, 0% while idle.
Memory	About 2 MB idle (1.9 MB private, 1 MB in Task Manager), or about 3 MB with a websites list, which loads UI Automation.	About 3 MB resident idle.
Disk	One 444 KB .exe, with nothing to install.	One 574 KB binary.
Extras	PowerShell 7 for the optional control panel.	None.

Each 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. 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.