// OMG! UBUNTU! — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Fed up with complex note taking apps? Try Whisp for Linux
New GTK4/libadwaita app Whisp is positioning itself as the note-taking app for people fed up with note-taking apps (the best one is always the next one, right?).
Scratch that; Whisp pitches itself as “the anti-note for GNOME”, a riff on Antinote, a macOS app with a similar look and feature set. Developer Tanay Bhomia describes it as “a fluid, gesture-driven scratchpad designed for absolute speed”.
The website takes shots at the complexity of Obsidian and Notion, though Whisp isn’t out to compete with either. It’s there as a foil to complex databases, folder hierarchies and the corkboard-and-red-string complexity of obsessively cross-referenced notes.
I am a disorganised savage. Pen and post-its until the novelty wears off, then plain text files, phone notes and the occasional screed hunt-and-pecked into a draft post here on the blog.
You don’t need to give your notes a title – an idea that makes me twitch – and you don’t need save them as files. There are no folders, no tags, no organisational rules to set up either. “Just open the app and start typing instantly”, says the website.
Markdown support lets you format notes, with a WYSIWYG mode for real-time previewing. Throwing together a checklist is as simple as typing List :. Smart text expansion for dates and times (added in a recent update) lets you type :: to trigger an autocomplete dropdown: ::today, ::tomorrow, ::now.
Navigating your notes is gesture-driven. There’s no sidebar; instead, your notes exist in a swipeable carousel. Swipe left or right, click on the edges of the window or use ctrl + [ / ] keyboard shortcuts to move between them – great on touchscreens, trackpads and mice scroll wheels.
A global search matches across all your notes. Activate it from the button in the header bar or press ctrl + f. Clicking on a result jumps you straight to it.
Whisp is a scratchpad, more of a transitory jotter, not an archive; a recepticle for midnight mind vomits, meandering screeds and whatever else that would feel better said out than kept in. And there’s no risk of going mad organising since there’s little to organise with.