MemoDesk

1. Overview

MemoDesk is a notepad built on a canvas instead of a page. Each tab is a board, and each board holds shapes. Every shape is a small text editor, so a board can be anything from a scratch pad of sticky notes to a project wall with statuses and due dates, a diagram with labelled connectors, or a reference sheet you keep open beside your work.

This guide describes the app as it behaves today. Features still to come are listed under Not Yet Available rather than described as if they worked.

2. Starting Up

Install MemoDesk from the Microsoft Store.

• Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit)

MemoDesk opens on a start screen rather than a blank board, so nothing is created until you say what you want:

• New board for an empty canvas.
• Open board… to pick a .memodesk file.
• Start from a template — Kanban board, weekly planner, or brainstorm map. A template is only a head start: what you get is ordinary shapes you can change or delete, and nothing about the board afterwards remembers it began as one.
• Recent lists the boards you last worked on, with the folder each is in and when it changed. Boards you have deleted or moved drop off the list rather than offering to open something that is not there.

If MemoDesk was closed with boards open, it reopens those instead and you go straight back to work. The start screen also returns when you close the last board, so there is always somewhere to start from.

3. The Window

4. Boards & Files

A board is saved as a single .memodesk file. That file is a small database rather than a flat document, which is what makes revision history possible.

• New (Ctrl+N) opens another tab.
• Open (Ctrl+O) loads a .memodesk file into a new tab.
• Save (Ctrl+S) writes the active tab, prompting for a location the first time.

Open tabs are remembered between runs, so closing and reopening MemoDesk brings your boards back. Launching MemoDesk while it is already running focuses the existing window instead of opening a second copy.

5. Adding & Editing Shapes

Adding a shape

Click a palette tool, then either:

• Click the canvas — the shape appears at its default size with its top-left corner where you clicked; or
• Press and drag — the shape is created when you release, sized to the rectangle you dragged. Dragging up or left works as well as down and right.

The palette disarms afterwards. Hold Shift while placing to keep the tool armed and add several in a row. New shapes cycle through five soft fill colours so a fresh board does not come out monochrome.

Editing a shape’s text

Double-click it, or select it and press F2.

• Ctrl+Enter commits, and so does clicking away.
• Esc abandons the edit and restores the previous text.

To load text from a file, right-click a shape and choose Import text file…. The shape grows to fit the content.

6. Formatting Text

Select a shape and use Format ▸ Text, or the toolbar:

Formatting applies to every selected shape at once, and the whole change is one undo step rather than one per shape. Making text bigger or bolder can push it past what the shape holds, in which case the shape grows to fit, exactly as it does when you type too much.

7. Widgets

A shape’s outline and its contents are separate things. A widget is an ordinary rectangle whose contents happen to be a checklist rather than text — so it moves, resizes, groups, snaps, links, takes a style and carries properties exactly like any other shape. Place one the same way: pick the tool, click the canvas.

Edits inside a widget commit when you leave the field you are editing, and each commit is one undo step. Widget contents are searched like any other text, so search and the filter reach inside a checklist item, a code snippet, a bookmark’s title or a table cell — and the outline names a widget after its own contents for the same reason.

How widgets behave

• Click straight into a field and type. A widget’s fields are real controls, so they take a single click — no double-click, and no need to select the shape first. The shape does become selected, so the properties panel, the outline and Delete all follow what you are typing into.
• Grab the border to move it. A widget reserves a band between its controls and its outline; the pointer shows a move cursor there and an I-beam over a field, so the two areas are told apart by looking.
• Double-clicking a widget does not open a text editor — widgets draw their own editors. On an image, double-click picks a new file instead.
• Pictures are stored inside the board file. Copying or backing up the single .memodesk file takes its images with it, and the original on disk can be moved or deleted afterwards. Images larger than 5 MB are downscaled on import so one photo cannot make a board unwieldy — MemoDesk says so when it does, and your original file is never modified.

8. Moving Around the Canvas

The toolbar has − and + either side of the current percentage. Clicking the percentage itself goes back to 100%, which is the quick way out after Fit has left you on some awkward number.

Zoom runs from 10% to 400%. Below about 40% shapes draw in a simplified form without their text, which is what keeps large boards responsive — nobody reads shape text at 20% anyway. Scrollbars appear only when something sits outside the current view, so an off-canvas shape is always reachable without hunting for it.

9. Selecting, Arranging & Grouping

Selecting

• Click a shape to select it alone.
• Shift+click or Ctrl+click to add or remove one from the selection.
• Drag on empty canvas to rubber-band everything the box touches.
• Click empty canvas, or press Esc, to deselect. Delete removes the selection.

Shapes and links are selected separately: picking a link clears the shape selection, and vice versa.

Stacking, align and distribute

Right-click any shape for the arrangement menu. If the shape you right-click is not already selected, it becomes the selection first, so the menu always acts on something you can see.

• Bring to Front and Send to Back. With several shapes selected they move as a block and keep their own relative order.
• Align (two or more selected) — Left, Right, Top, Bottom, Center Horizontally, Center Vertically, all to the selection’s own bounding box.
• Distribute (three or more selected) — horizontally or vertically, with equal gaps. The outermost two shapes stay put and anchor the span.

Snapping

While you drag or resize, edges and centres snap to those of nearby shapes and a dashed guide shows the line being matched. The tolerance is measured on screen rather than on the board, so snapping feels identical at any zoom. Resizing only snaps the edges you are actually dragging, so the opposite edge cannot drift.

Grouping

Grouping does not create a container object. Instead, the other selected shapes become children of the front-most one — which means any shape can act as a group, and a group is still a normal shape you can edit and style.

• Group (two or more selected) parents the rest under the front-most shape.
• Ungroup releases a container’s direct children.
• Collapse group hides the children — they disappear from the canvas and stop responding to rubber-band selection, leaving just the container. Expand group brings them back.

Moving a container moves everything under it. Ungroup, Collapse and Expand only appear on shapes that actually have children.

10. Links

A link is a connector between two shapes. Both ends attach to the shape rather than to a fixed point, so links reroute themselves as either shape moves or resizes — there is nothing to reconnect.

To draw one, click the Link tool at the bottom of the palette, then drag from one shape to another. Releasing anywhere that is not a different shape cancels without creating anything. Hold Shift to keep the tool armed for several links in a row.

Right-click a link for:

• Routing — Straight, Bezier (the default, a smooth curve) or Orthogonal (right-angled elbows).
• Arrow — None, Forward (the default) or Both.
• Edit label… and Delete link.

Double-click a link to type a label directly on it. Enter commits, Esc cancels. To delete a link, click it and press Delete.

11. Properties & the Outline

Properties

Properties on the toolbar opens a panel for the selected shape. It edits one shape at a time; with several selected it says so rather than guessing which value should win.

Changes apply when you leave a field or press Apply — one undo step per commit, rather than one per keystroke. Saving while the caret is still in a field commits first, so nothing you have just typed is left out.

The outline

Outline on the toolbar lists the board’s shapes as a tree, nested by group. Each row shows the shape’s name — its title, else the first line of its contents, else what kind of shape it is — with the status beside it and a coloured pip for Medium priority and above. Clicking a row selects that shape and scrolls the canvas to it, which is the quickest way to reach something you cannot currently see.

12. Finding Things

Filtering one board

Filter on the toolbar opens a bar for free text, status, minimum priority and tags. A shape must satisfy every field you fill in — “Priority at least Medium” includes High and Critical.

Turning the Filter toggle off clears the filter rather than just hiding the bar — a board dimmed by an invisible filter would be the worst of both.

Searching every board

Search (Ctrl+F) searches all open boards and every board file this installation has opened or saved. Open boards are searched from memory, so unsaved edits are findable too.

Pick a result and choose Go to shape, or double-click it: MemoDesk opens the board if it is not already open, selects the shape and scrolls to it.

13. Appearance

Shape styles

Right-click a shape and open Style for four presets:

Board background

Background on the toolbar sets the surface for the active board: Solid (one colour), Gradient (one colour to another), Dots or Grid (a pattern over a base colour, with its own colour and spacing), or Image (a picture scaled to cover the board).

The background belongs to the board, not to the app theme, so a light board stays light in dark mode.

14. Exporting & Printing

File ▸ Export ▸ As PNG Image… writes the whole board out as a picture, and File ▸ Print… puts it on paper. File ▸ Export ▸ As PDF… is the same print path with Microsoft Print to PDF chosen for you.

All of them give you the whole board at full detail, not the part you happen to be looking at — it does not matter where the canvas is scrolled or how far out you are zoomed. The board background comes along, the selection outline does not, and there is a margin around the outermost shapes.

Printing scales the board down to fit the page but never blows it up past its real size, so a four-shape board prints as a small diagram rather than as four enormous rectangles.

15. Pinning a Shape to the Desktop

Right-click a shape and choose Pin to desktop to lift it out of the board into a small window of its own. The window has no title bar and no taskbar button: it floats above other windows, so a note stays readable while you work in something else.

• Move it by dragging anywhere on the note.
• Edit it by double-clicking, exactly as on the board.
• Resize it from the grip in its bottom-right corner — the shape on the board changes size to match.
• Unpin it with the small close button in its top-right corner, or by right-clicking the shape on the board and choosing Unpin from desktop.

How a pinned note behaves

Right-click the shape — on the board or on the note itself — and open Pinned window:

• Always on top keeps the note above other windows. It is on when you pin; turning it off lets the note sit on the desktop and be covered like any other window.
• Opacity fades the note, from 100% down to 40%, for a note you want present but not loud.
• Click through makes the note ignore the mouse: clicks, drags and right-clicks all land on whatever is behind it. Use it for something you want to read while working in another app.

A pinned note always opens fully on screen, on the monitor the shape is on. If the shape sits near an edge of the board, the note is nudged back inside that monitor’s working area rather than opening half off the desktop.

16. Reminders & the Notification Area

Reminders

Give a shape a Reminder in the properties panel — a date and a time — and MemoDesk tells you when it comes round, through a notification from the tray.

• The time accepts 14:30 or 2:30 PM, whichever your Windows region uses.
• Pick a date and leave the time empty and the reminder is for 9am. If the time cannot be read, the same applies rather than losing the day you chose. The line under the field always says which moment will be used — read it if in doubt.
• Clicking the notification opens the board and takes you to the shape.
• Changing the time arms the reminder again. A reminder is only ever announced once.

The notification area

MemoDesk keeps an icon in the notification area — the tray, next to the clock — for as long as it is running.

• Minimising the window puts it there instead of the taskbar. Pinned notes stay on the desktop, so you can put the board away and keep the notes.
• Click the icon to bring the window back. Launching MemoDesk again does the same thing rather than opening a second copy.
• Right-click the icon for Show/Hide, New board, your recent boards, and Exit MemoDesk. Exit is the same as closing the window: it asks about unsaved boards and takes the pinned notes down with it.

If the icon is not next to the clock, Windows has put it in the hidden-icons overflow behind the ^ arrow; drag it out to keep it visible.

17. Revision History & Settings

Revision history

Every save adds a revision inside the .memodesk file. History on the toolbar lists them; pick one and choose Restore to bring it back into the current tab.

Restoring never deletes anything — saving afterwards simply adds the restored state as the newest revision, so you can always go forward again.

Settings

About on the toolbar shows the version and build number of the copy you are running, read from the program itself so it can never disagree with the binary.

18. Keyboard & Mouse Reference

Keyboard

Ctrl+S, Ctrl+N and Ctrl+O work even while you are typing in a properties field or a widget. The others belong to whatever you are typing into.

Mouse

19. Not Yet Available

These are known gaps, not defects:

• Rotation. Shapes carry a rotation value in the file format, but there is no handle to set it yet.
• Proportional group resize. Resize handles act on a single shape; selecting several shows an outline but no handles.
• Bulk property editing. The properties panel edits one shape at a time.
• Reminders while MemoDesk is closed. Reminders are only watched for boards that are open, and MemoDesk has to be running — minimised into the tray counts. Announcing a reminder from a closed app needs something that outlives it.
• Reminders in the notification centre. A reminder appears as a notification, but Windows does not keep it in the notification centre, so a missed one is gone from there. The reminder itself stays on the shape.