SideKit Documentation

Getting started

After install, SideKit places an icon in your taskbar tray (next to the clock). The main window opens centred on your primary monitor the first time you launch it.

The tray icon is your home base

• Click the tray icon to show or hide the main window.
• Right-click the tray icon for a menu with Quick add, Settings, and Quit.
• Closing the main window with × hides it back to the tray — it doesn’t quit. Use the tray menu’s Quit to fully exit.

What’s seeded on first launch

A fresh install creates a small set of sample lists and cards (Welcome, More to try, Formatting, Window tips, Extras) walking you through the features. Delete them whenever you’ve got the hang of things; SideKit will not re-seed.

The main window

The main window has three parts:

• Title bar with pin, dock, minimise, and close buttons.
• Activity bar with one tab per sub-tool plus a Notes tab — the tabs toggle each panel in or out of view.
• Notes panel showing your lists and cards (when the Notes tab is active).

Pinning the window

The pin button in the top-right toggles always on top. Pinned, SideKit stays above other windows so you can keep notes visible while working in another app.

Docking to the screen edge

The dock button snaps the window to the right edge of your screen at full height. Click it again to undock and float freely.

Resizing

The window auto-fits to whatever’s open: hide the notes panel and a sub-tool panel and SideKit shrinks to fit. Drag the bottom edge while the notes panel is visible to set your preferred notes height — that preference sticks across toggles.

Hiding it completely

Toggle every tab off and the window collapses to just the title bar plus the activity bar. Click any tab to bring its panel back.

Notes & cards

Three view states

Each card cycles through three view states when you click it:

1. Single-line preview (most compact)
2. Three-line preview
3. Fully expanded

Editing

Hover a card and click the pencil icon, or press Ctrl+Click to enter edit mode. Click outside or press Esc to save. In Settings → Cards you can swap clicks so plain click goes straight to edit instead.

Formatting

Standard rich-text shortcuts work inside cards:

• Ctrl+B — Bold
• Ctrl+I — Italic
• Ctrl+U — Underline

Type a hyphen and a space at the start of a line to begin a bullet list. Press Enter on an empty bullet to end the list.

Add a link with [label](https://example.com). In edit mode, Ctrl+Click the blue text to open the link in your browser.

Pasting an image (Ctrl+V) inserts it inline. Image data is stored with the card and survives save/reload.

Pinning, favouriting, keep-open

Three icons appear on each card on hover:

• Pin — pins the card to the top of its list.
• Eye — keeps the card fully expanded all the time, regardless of the three-state cycle.
• Star — adds the card to the synthetic Favourites group at the top of the main window.

Reordering & moving

Drag a card by its edge to reorder within a list. Drop it onto another list’s title row to move it there.

List-level cycle

Hover a list title to reveal a chevron on the right — click it to cycle every card in that list through the same three view states. Useful when you want a uniform view of a whole list.

Lists

Creating

Click + New list at the bottom of the notes panel. Inline rename works the same way as a card — click the title, type, click outside.

Collapsing

The chevron at the left of a list title folds the list closed. Click again to expand. Useful when you have lots of lists and want to focus on one.

Reordering

Drag a list by its title row to reorder it relative to other lists.

Recolouring

Hover a list title and click the colour swatch icon to pick a new accent colour from the palette popup.

The Favourites group

A synthetic group at the very top of the workspace shows every starred card from any list, in one place. It can’t be renamed, deleted, or recoloured.

The Clipboard list

If the Clipboard sub-tool is enabled, a special Clipboard list is created at the bottom (you can drag it elsewhere). See Sub-tool: Clipboard for how it behaves.

Pop-out sticky notes

Alt+Click any card to pop it out as a sticky note that floats over your desktop. Edits in the sticky sync back to the original card live. Click the original card again to dock the sticky back into the list.

Each pop-out sticky has its own pin button (top-right of the sticky) — click it to toggle always on top so the sticky stays in view while you work in other windows. Sticky positions and pin states persist across sessions.

Quick Add

Right-click the tray icon and choose Quick add to drop a thought into any list without opening the main window. The dialog remembers the last list you used. Pin the dialog (📌 in the corner) to keep it open across multiple captures.

Press Ctrl+Enter to save. Esc closes (and saves any draft you typed). Paste images with Ctrl+V.

The activity bar

The activity bar is a single row of tabs at the top (or bottom) of the main window. Each tab toggles a panel in or out of view independently — multiple panels can be active at once.

Per-tab behaviour

• Notes tab — toggles the main notes/lists area. Hide it when you only need the sub-tools.
• Sub-tool tabs — each opens or closes that sub-tool’s panel.
• Clipboard tab is special: clicking it toggles capture on/off rather than opening a panel. A small badge shows how many cards are in your clipboard history.

Bar position

In Settings → Layout you can move the activity bar to the top or the bottom of the window.

Per-panel anchor

Each sub-tool’s panel can be anchored to the top or the bottom of the notes area, independent of where the activity bar sits. Set this in Settings → Layout next to the per-tool toggles.

Auto-resize

The window always fits its content. Toggle a panel off and the window shrinks. Toggle every panel off and the window collapses to just the title bar plus the bar.

Narrow window mode

When the window is narrow, the bar drops labels and shows icons only. Tabs always carry tooltips so you can identify them at a glance.

Sub-tool: Clipboard

The Clipboard sub-tool watches your system clipboard and records every text and image you copy as a card in a dedicated Clipboard list.

What gets captured

• Plain text (anything you copy from a browser, editor, terminal, etc.)
• Screenshots from Print Screen and the Windows Snipping Tool
• Images from right-click → Copy image in browsers and other apps

What gets skipped

• Content marked sensitive by the source app — reputable password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, KeePass) set the appropriate Win32 clipboard format and SideKit honours it
• Text that the source app has explicitly opted out of clipboard managers

Using the Clipboard list

• Click any card to re-copy its content. The card flashes to confirm. Text re-copies as text; images re-copy as images.
• Click the lock icon on a card to pin it. Pinned cards aren’t evicted when the history fills up.
• Toggle capture on/off by clicking the Clipboard tab in the activity bar. The setting persists across sessions.

History size

The default cap is 100 entries. Once you exceed the cap, the oldest unpinned cards are evicted. Change the cap (or clear all unpinned cards in one go) from Settings → Layout → Clipboard.

Sub-tool: Quick Access

Quick Access is a panel of tiles for one-click launching of files, folders, apps, and websites.

Adding shortcuts

• Click + on the panel and choose a file, folder, app, or URL.
• Or simply drag a file, folder, or URL onto the panel from File Explorer or your browser.

Shelves

Tiles are organised into named shelves. Click + New shelf to add a new group. Drag tiles within a shelf to reorder.

Tile size

Set the tile size in Settings → Appearance → Quick Access tile size. Six sizes from Tiny to XL — useful when you have many shortcuts. Ctrl+Scroll over the panel cycles through sizes inline.

Defaults on first launch

A small set of evergreen shortcuts is seeded — Calculator, Notepad, File Explorer, Paint, Control Panel, plus a few reference websites — so you can get a feel for the layout before adding your own.

Sub-tool: Hours

A lightweight time tracker. Click + Job to add a job, then click a job pill to start its timer. Click again to stop.

Sessions dialog

Right-click any job pill and choose Today’s sessions… to see the day’s log and the weekly total. Inside the dialog:

• Click any start or end time to edit it inline.
• Click the + note beside a row to attach a short note to that session.

Sub-tool: Colors

A palette picker for grabbing colour values without breaking out a separate tool. Click any swatch to copy its hex value to the clipboard.

Built-in palettes

Three palettes ship by default: Material (the 500-weight series), Tailwind, and Web Safe. These are read-only.

Your own palettes

To save your own colours, click the ⋯ menu at the top of the panel and choose + New palette. Give it a name, then click + Swatch to add a colour (or paste a hex code). You can keep multiple palettes and switch between them from the same menu.

Eyedropper

The Pick button in the top bar opens a screen-wide eyedropper. Click anywhere on screen to capture that pixel’s colour. The picked colour lands in the Recent palette automatically; if you have a custom palette selected, it’s added there too.

Sub-tool: Mixer

Per-app audio sliders for everything currently playing audio on your system. The top tile controls your system master output; below it, one tile per app (Spotify, Chrome, your DAW, etc.).

Adjusting volume

• Drag the slider on a tile to set a level.
• Scroll the wheel over a tile to nudge it up or down.
• Click the speaker icon on a tile to mute or unmute that source.

Apps appear and disappear from the Mixer as they start and stop playing.

Sub-tool: Brightness

Per-monitor screen brightness control. Built-in laptop panels and external monitors that support DDC/CI are detected automatically.

Adjusting brightness

• Drag the slider on a monitor’s tile.
• Scroll the wheel over a tile to nudge it.
• Brightness changes made via Windows are reflected in SideKit live (for built-in panels).

The first DDC/CI call on some external monitors is slow (the protocol can take several seconds to wake the display). SideKit pre-warms this in the background at startup so the panel is responsive when you open it.

Settings

Open Settings from the tray menu. The settings window is grouped into six sections.

Cards

The behaviour toggles you’ll touch most often.

• Click on a card opens edit — swap the default click-to-cycle for click-to-edit.
• New card opens as floating note — instead of inline edit, new cards appear as pop-out stickies.
• Confirm before deleting notes — adds a confirmation step.
• Show card count on list titles — toggles the small N indicator next to each list name.

Layout

Bar position and per-tool layout.

• Activity bar position — top or bottom of the window.
• Per sub-tool: Enable (whether the tab appears in the bar) and Anchor (top or bottom of the notes area).
• Each sub-tool’s own settings page (cap for Clipboard, default size for Colors, etc.) appears below this list.

Appearance

Sizes and font.

• Card preview lines — how many lines of content show in the three-line preview state (3, 5, 7, 10, 15, 20, 25).
• Note text size — Small / Medium / Large / XL.
• List header size — same scale, applied to list titles.
• Card-row icon size — controls the size of the per-card pin/eye/star icons.
• Quick Access tile size — Tiny through XL.
• Font — choose from twelve common system fonts (Segoe UI, Cascadia Code, Consolas, Georgia, Calibri, Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Times, Courier, Comic).

Storage & startup

• Database location shows the current path. Three buttons: Move notes to… (relocate the current DB), Open existing notes… (point at a DB on disk, e.g. a backup), Create new notes here… (start fresh in a new folder).
• Reset all sticky positions — clears saved sticky-note positions, useful after a monitor change.
• Start SideKit with Windows — adds or removes the auto-start entry.

Keyboard & mouse

Reference table of all built-in shortcuts. Read-only.

About

Current version, links to the SideKit website and Discord, copyright.

Keyboard & mouse shortcuts

Inside cards (edit mode)

On cards (view mode)

Anywhere in the app

Inside the Quick Access panel

Sub-tool sliders (Mixer / Brightness)

Storage & backup

Where your notes live

By default, all data is stored in a single SQLite database at:

%APPDATA%\SideKit\notes.db

You can move this file anywhere via Settings → Storage → Move notes to… and SideKit will continue using the new location. The database holds your notes, lists, sticky positions, clipboard history, time entries, colour palettes, and per-sub-tool settings.

Backing up to the cloud

To keep an automatic off-site backup, point the database location at a folder synced by OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or your sync provider of choice. Every save is replicated by your provider in the background.

Note: when the database lives in a synced folder, your data is subject to that provider’s terms and storage. SideKit itself does no syncing.

Restoring on a new machine

Install SideKit on the new machine, then use Settings → Storage → Open existing notes… to point at the database file from your backup or synced folder. SideKit will treat that file as your live store from then on.

Starting fresh in a new location

Use Create new notes here… to open an empty database in a folder of your choice (e.g. a separate work-vs-personal split).

Privacy

SideKit is a local-first app. It makes no network connections, collects no telemetry, and sends nothing off your machine.

• All notes, lists, settings, clipboard history, and sub-tool data live in a single SQLite database on your own disk.
• Crash logs are written locally to %APPDATA%\SideKit\crash.log and never transmitted.
• The Clipboard sub-tool captures clipboard text and images locally only. Reputable password managers can opt out of capture via standard Win32 clipboard formats; SideKit honours them.
• Updates are distributed via the Microsoft Store; SideKit does not check for updates itself.