Sticky notes

A sticky note is a small handwritten sheet stuck to the top-right corner of one pane. It says what nothing else on screen can: why this pane exists, or what you want done in it. It's the first thing you read when you come back to a wall of panes.

Press Alt+S in a pane, type, and press Enter. Click the paper to edit it. Alt+Backspace peels it off, and Alt+S right after brings the words back. Right-click the paper to push a pin through it: a pinned note puts 📌 on its tab and on its row in the left bar, so it can call you back to a tab you aren't looking at.

Each pane holds one note, and notes survive a restart. An agent can leave one on its own pane through the MCP tool leave_note, with a title and up to ten words. The house rule for both: ten words, a shouty title, pinned only when it needs eyes.

Technical has the keys, the limits, the agent's side, and where notes are saved.

Notes

A note has optional title, text, a saved tilt and a pinned flag. Only agents write titles; a note you write is one piece of handwriting. Posting to a pane that already has a note replaces its words on the same paper.¹

Keys#

While you're writing, the note takes every key. Once it's posted it takes none, and Esc reaches the program in the pane as usual. A peeled note's words are kept: the next Alt+S opens them selected, so typing replaces them. The note holds 160 characters. A note half-written when the window closes is saved as far as you got. Alt+S is taken by the pane, so the shell underneath never receives it.

Pins#

Only right-click sets or clears a pin, and posting or editing leaves it alone. A pinned note shows 📌 on its tab, or 📌2 when several panes in the tab have pinned notes, placed before the agent badges so it keeps its spot. The left bar shows 📌 on the task row, and a folded branch rolls it up.

How it looks#

• Handwriting in Caveat, on paper coloured from the pane theme's text hue, never square: each note leans between 2.4° and 5.8°, and keeps its lean through restarts.
• 28 % of the pane's width, between 128 and 200 px, up to four rows before the text shrinks.
• Drawn through the pane's barrel curve, so it sits flat on the curved glass.
• Panes smaller than 250 × 190 px don't show a note, since it would cover the terminal.

Notes from agents#

An agent posts with the MCP tool leave_note. The server must be on with writes allowed: the Writes switch in the MCP control panel, or TD_MCP_WRITE at launch. See MCP server.

Too long is refused, with the count: note is 14 words; a sticky holds 10 or fewer — say what happened or what you need, not how it went. Success reads posted — the note is on pane 4121's glass. An agent's note is an ordinary note once posted: you can edit, pin or peel it, and a note the agent cleared comes back with Alt+S. list_panes reads every note back, on each pane's line as · 📝 title — text and in its note field.

Where notes are saved#

On the pane's entry in the session layout, ~/.config/terminal-delight/sessions/<session>.toml, beside its working directory: note = { title, text, seed, pinned }. Posting, peeling and pinning each save it.

What would prove this wrong#

A posted note that swallows Esc, or any other key, breaks the rule the feature is built on: once it's on the glass it annotates the pane and never gets in the way of what runs in it.