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

2026-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

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</a> 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</code> 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</a> for the really official ones, and GNOME Circle</a> 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</a> (and Aeon</a> and Silverblue</a> before it). I couldn't find a traditional Fedora package, though there is a Debian package</a>. 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</code> from a notes app is key to using it to write posts for my Zola</a> blog. The process is the same for a Hugo</a> 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</a> 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.