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Iotas is a GNOME Circle notetaking app that is a pretty good fit for writing blog posts

29 April, 2026 - Categories: blogging, notetaking - Tags: Iotas, GNOME, GNOME apps, Zola, front matter

By Steven Rosenberg

I originally wrote this post a few weeks ago, and since then Iotas has been updated to resolve a bug that caused the app to crash when exporting a file. With that fix and a couple of small tweaks to Iotas' Flatpak sandbox and app permissions, everything is working a lot better. That makes Iotas a contender, along with QOwnNotes and Folio, for my go-to app for static-site blog posts, general notetaking and list-making.

The rewritten review starts here:

Iotas is as good an app as any for writing notes. And after an update from the developer and couple of extremely easy fixes on the user side, I got the app to successfully export a Markdown file, both into the app's Flatpak sandbox and the rest of my /home directory.

With the bug fix and tweaks in place, Iotas is a true contender for writing posts for static blogs as well as overall notetaking and to-do checklists. At first glance, it seems like a simple app that draws on GUI elements already present in many other GNOME apps, and it kind of is that. But in a way, that's what makes it so good. There are a lot of things that developers can pull from the GTK toolkit, and Iotas manages to make an app with a familiar look and feel that is just different enough to fill a critical gap in the overall GNOME ecosystem for a notetaking app.

There are two "tiers" of official GNOME apps: GNOME Core for the really official ones, and GNOME Circle for those at the level below that. Iotas is a GNOME Circle app. There is no GNOME Core app for notetaking in case you were wondering. I was.

Iotas is distributed as a Flatpak, which is how I install most things in Bluefin (and Aeon and Silverblue before it). I couldn't find a traditional Fedora package, though there is a Debian package. I just installed Iotas on my Debian 13 desktop, and even there I opted for the Flatpak because I want the latest version, which fixes the critical (to me) bug involving file exports.

The notes in Iotas are stored in a SQLite database, not in plain text files like many other notetaking apps. This should theoretically make for a less cluttered setup since there won't be a large number files on your drive.

However, if you want to move all of the notes to another app, or just to a folder on your system, you'll have to export them. More on that below. As I say above (and below), exporting from a notes app is key to using it to write posts for my Zola blog. The process is the same for a Hugo blog — or any site that works with text files.

And like almost all notetaking apps, Iotas automatically saves your work as you go. That's a feature I really like. I had no idea that notetaking apps pretty much all do this. Again, I'm in favor. You don't think you need it, and it probably wouldn't work if you are relying on Git to provide version control for your site. I do not use version control for my sites, and it turns out that I find the auto-saving to be a very valuable feature.

Iotas is a Markdown-friendly app. You can switch modes between writing mode and Markdown Render. Why not both at once? That's how Folio does it. I'm generally OK with seeing the Markdown markup code when I write and only seeing the rendered Markdown formatting when I want to. The way Iotas does Markdown Render mode looks great. But you can't do any editing there, the notable (and useful) exception being the ability to toggle checkboxes. More on that below.

I like Iotas' presentation and even the font. I would definitely use this font in another notetaking app.

Iotas has a feature called focus mode. When turned on, it only highlights the sentence you're working on. I've used text editors that highlight the line you are working on, but I've never seen an app highlight only a single sentence. While I could see myself using this, it could be more distracting that not.

The app is already pretty clean in terms of its UI. It's not at all crazy looking like some notetaking apps.

When I first started using Iotas, it would crash when I tried to export a note. That was a bit of a deal-breaker. But since then, the export bug has been fixed, but I still needed a little tweak to make it work.

After I got the Flatpak update with the fix, I tried to export any of the available formats (PDF, ODT, HTML, MD), I got a message saying that the export failed, and there was an error opening my exported file.

So what was going on? Iotas was trying to do the export to ~/.var/app/org.gnome.World.Iotas/data/iotas/exports, and the exports directory didn't exist in the Flatpak sandbox location on my system. I created the directory in Files/Nautilus, and the exports to it started working immediately.

The Iotas Flatpak ships more locked down than many other apps. Unless you allow it, the Iotas Flatpak won’t write to your home directory outside of its Flatpak sandbox. For my blog posting, I needed to export to the blog’s content directory. I used Flatseal to add permissions for my home directory, and then I could export to the folder containing the .md files for my Zola blog.

In addition to exporting individual notes, you can select everything in Iotas and then batch-export all of the notes. I tested this, and it dropped a folder with all of my notes in the app's Flatpak sandbox (~/.var/app/org.gnome.World.Iotas/data/iotas/exports). It took a tweak to get there (more info below), and I still couldn't get the batch export into any other folder, though it's easy enough to move the folder after the fact.

Aside from writing blog posts, I’m looking for a notes app not just for general notes but also for to-do lists. And to that end, Iotas does checkbox lists very well. This example looks very nice in the app (trust me):

How to evaluate a notetaking app

It does it with the Markdown checkbox formatting: - [ ] and crosses out the line when you "check" the box: - [x], both in writing mode and Markdown Render mode.

I'd almost just use this app for checkbox lists, even though not being able to edit in Markdown Render mode is not ideal.

While I figured out exporting from Iotas, there is no way to import notes. That's not a feature I think I need, but it's nice to have. There's also no way to link notes together like in other apps such as QOwnNotes and Obsidian. Again, is this a feature I personally need? I've used it but can get along without it.

Another thing Iotas is missing is the ability to either copy a note or use a template to create a new one. I have generic TOML front matter for Zola that I need to use every time, and either making a template that includes it, or being able to easily copy a note that contains it would speed my workflow. As it is, to write a blog post, I first have to open the front-matter note, copy the contents and then start a new note with it pasted in. It's not arduous, but also not as streamlined as it could be. I understand that the nature of these notetaking apps, which save your work automatically, make save and save as functionality a moot point. But still, I'd like to somehow integrate my boilerplate TOML into my workflow in a seamless way. QOwnNotes does it.

Overall, I like the way Iotas works. I thought I wouldn't like an app that kept its notes in a database as opposed to flat files. But exporting works so well. The Markdown translates perfectly. You'd think that would be a given, but I've seen at least a couple of notetaking apps that can't manage to export without screwing it up. Iotas even makes setting the file name easy: It uses the note title and adds .md. And since note titles are user-editable in Iotas, that works perfectly.

I have another post on Iotas almost ready to go, and unless it repeats all of the information in this one, I'll be publishing it soon. So far, Iotas is my No. 1 notetaking app, and I'm not sure if something else can unseat it at this point, though QOwnNotes is close.

Later: I'm still having some issues with formatting of the front matter on blog posts created with Iotas. Or the problem could be that I'm also editing these notes/posts with Nextcloud Notes. I'm not sure yet.

What could happen: I might end up using notetaking apps for lots of things that aren't blog posting and just write posts BEFORE adding front matter. That might be the direction I take with this "project".