The Notes plug-in is a slide-out of quick notes, for the thing you need to write down now, before you've decided where it belongs. A note is an ordinary file in a folder of its own, and the panel shows each one with its first few lines, so you can see what you wrote without opening it. The first tile, New Note, makes a new one and opens it for typing; pasting turns whatever is on the clipboard into one.

Turning It On

Notes is one of the plug-ins, so it's off until you ask for it. Open the Settings sheet from This PC, tick Notes in the Plug-ins list, and restart Desktop Minder. A Notes tab then appears on the right-hand strip.

Making a Note

The New Note Tile

Click New Note, the tile with the green plus at the top of the panel. An empty text file is made and opens in the View, ready for you to type. You aren't asked to name it; it's named for the minute it was made, such as Note 2026-10-30 14.22.txt (with dots in the time, because a file name can't hold a colon), and if you make two in the same minute the second gets (2) on the end. Nothing ever overwrites an existing note. Rename a note afterward as you would any file.

Pasting a Note

With the panel in front, press Ctrl+V (or Shift+Insert) to make a note out of what's on the clipboard:

• Text becomes a new .txt note named Pasted Text and the moment, and opens in the View.
• A picture, such as a screenshot or one copied from a page, becomes a .png note.
• Files you copied in Explorer or a pane are copied into the folder.

You can also drag files into the panel, or right-click its empty space and choose Paste, but a panel full of notes has no empty space to click, which is why the keys work. While you're typing a new name on a tile, Ctrl+V pastes into the name instead.

Reading and Keeping Notes

The Notes List

The panel is a launcher pane in the List Top layout: each note is a full-width tile with its name on top and, underneath, a preview. For a plain text, rich text or web page note the preview is its first few lines; for a picture it's a small picture of it. The New Note tile is always first; it's a button, not a note. You can choose a note with the mouse, add more with Ctrl and Shift, or drag a band across several.

Double-click a note and it opens in the View, as any text document does, because it is one. Everything else a launcher pane can do works here too, with no special code: right-click a note for the usual file commands, rename it, drop a file in, sort the list. List Top is also on the View menu of any launcher pane, if you'd like your own folder of files shown this way.

Where Notes Are Kept

Every note is a file, in a folder named Notes inside the plug-in's own folder under PlugInData in your Apps\Cilwa folder (and so travels with your OneDrive). There is no database and no editor of the plug-in's own; Notes writes nothing at exit because there is nothing to write down. A note that has found its real home can be moved or copied out of the panel like any other file, and opens in the same text editor as any other text file.