Iotas is a GNOME Circle notetaking app with a huge bug that won't work for Zola posting

7 April, 2026 - Categories: blogging, notetaking apps, Zola - Tags: Iotas, GNOME, GNOME apps

By Steven Rosenberg

Iotas seems like as good an app as any to create a note.

It's an "official" GNOME Circle app. Theere is no GNOME Core app for notetaking, in case you were wondering (like I was).

The notes in Iotas are stored in SQLite, not in plain text files like many other notetaking apps.

You can switch modes between writing mode and **Markdown Render. Why not both at once? That's how Folio does it, though putting the two modes together is not without its problems (chiefly with cursor placement at the end of sentences where the final word is formatted with Markdown). I'm generally OK with seeing the Markdown code when I write and only seeing it rendered when I want to. The way Iotas does Markdown Render mode looks great. But you can't do any editing there, the notable 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.

It has focus mode, which only highlights the line you're working on. Not much of a change. The app is already pretty clean in terms of its UI. It's not at all crazy looking like some notetaking apps.

But it crashes when you try to export a note. That's quite a deal-breaker. I really like the way this app works, but if I can't export a file, it's a dead end. I could copy/paste, but especially when updating an existing .md file in my Zola blog's /content directory, export is so convenient.

It does checkbox lists very well. This example looks very nice in Iotas (trust me):

How to evaluate a notetaking app

• Does it support Markdown?
• Will it export a file?
• Can it do checkboxes?
• The checkboxes are actually checkable in rendering mode. I wish that QOwnNotes had this feature

It does it with the Markdown checkbox formatting: - [ ] and crosses out the line when you "check" the box: - [x], both in writing mode and Markdown Render mode.

I'd almost just use this app for checkbox lists, though not being able to edit in Markdown Render mode is not ideal. And I still want to be able to export a file without crashing the app.

This blog post was created by copy/pasting from Iotas into GNOME Text Editor. It wasn't exported like the posts created with QOwnNotes and Folio due to Iotas crashing whenever I try it. Fixing this bug would make Iotas a contender.