Quick capture from anywhere
Tray icon, global hotkey and desktop shortcuts for capturing a note without switching windows.
Quick capture means: an idea hits you while you are in a browser or a meeting, and a fresh WebF1 Pad note is one click or one keypress away, without touching the mouse to find the app.
The tray icon
When WebF1 Pad runs, it lives in the system tray (next to the clock). Right-click it for:
- New note, opens a fresh tab in the pad.
- Show WebF1 Pad, brings the window to front.
- Quit, closes the app (state is preserved; everything restores on the next launch).
The global hotkey
Settings → Shortcuts lets you record a system-wide hotkey (for example
Ctrl+Alt+N). Pressing it in any application brings WebF1 Pad to front
with a fresh note. A second hotkey can be recorded for a new chat, it
requires AI chat to be enabled.
Whether the hotkey can register depends on your platform:
| Platform | What works |
|---|---|
| Windows | Tray and hotkey always work. |
| Linux · X11 | Tray and hotkey always work (any launch). |
| Linux · Wayland | Tray works wherever your desktop shows tray icons (GNOME needs the AppIndicator extension). The hotkey needs a desktop implementing the GlobalShortcuts portal with a one-time confirmation: GNOME 47+ (Ubuntu 25.04+; 24.04 predates it), KDE Plasma 5.25+, Hyprland, but not sway/wlroots. The app must be launched from the application menu / dock of an installed copy; a terminal launch (pnpm dev:tauri, --fg) is refused by the portal with an explanation, that is the portal’s security model, not a bug. |
The universal fallback: your desktop’s shortcuts
If your desktop has no shortcut portal (sway, GNOME 46 and older, anything else), bind the command line instead, the desktop launches the app itself, no portal involved:
- GNOME: Settings → Keyboard → Custom Shortcuts
- KDE: System Settings → Shortcuts
- sway:
bindsymin your config
Bind a key to:
webf1-pad --new(or webf1-pad --new-chat for a fresh AI chat). WebF1 Pad must keep running
for the tab to open in the running instance; if it is not running, the
command launches it with a fresh note. One GNOME-46-and-older quirk: when
the app is already running, the desktop shows a “WebF1 Pad is ready”
notice instead of focusing the window (those GNOME versions give launched
apps no legitimate way to take focus, click the notice or the taskbar to
bring it up). GNOME 47+ and KDE focus properly.
After the capture
The new note is an ordinary tab: autosave writes it as you type, and crash recovery keeps it safe if the app never gets saved explicitly. See Getting started for the rest of the flow.