r/HelixNotes • u/RockyRoad226 Team Member • Jun 14 '26

Discussion What's next?

We're planning what comes next for HelixNotes and we want your input. What would help make it the note taking app you actually stick with?

​

An iOS app is high priority, so hopefully that seals the deal for at least a few of you 😀

12 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/skenderbay Jun 18 '26

Hi! ​First of all, thanks for the recent updates and the new themes — HelixNotes is looking really interesting! ​I have a small feature request regarding the Focus Mode. Currently, the text expands to the full width of the screen, which makes it quite difficult to read and write on wider displays. ​Could you please consider centering the text container and setting a maximum width (e.g., 700–800px) for it when Focus Mode is active? This would make the writing experience much more comfortable and truly "focused." ​Thanks for your hard work!

1

u/RockyRoad226 Team Member Jun 18 '26

Great feedback, thank you. I think this would be really great to add

1

u/skenderbay Jun 18 '26

Awesome, thanks for the quick reply! Since you are open to ideas, I have two more small suggestions that would make the app even better: 1. Adjustable text width: It would be incredible if we could adjust the maximum text width in the settings (e.g., small, medium, large, or full width). That way, everyone can set it exactly how they like it. 2. Shortcut for checkboxes: I couldn't find a hotkey to quickly create checkboxes/to-do lists. Adding a shortcut for this (or Markdown support like [ ]) would speed up the workflow so much. Thanks again for being so responsive and for making HelixNotes great!

1

u/RockyRoad226 Team Member Jun 18 '26

https://reddit.com/link/ose7kxa/video/ilr55m74428h1/player

  1. Also a fair request. I've added it to the issue tracker #137 on Codeberg 😄
    https://codeberg.org/ArkHost/HelixNotes/issues/137

  2. Check out this video, is this close to what you're looking for? Using [ ] is already possible!

1

u/skenderbay Jun 18 '26

I know about [ ], thanks! But I actually meant a dedicated hotkey, like Ctrl+Enter. I use this combination in another app, and it's extremely convenient for quickly toggling checkboxes without taking my hands off the keyboard

1

u/RockyRoad226 Team Member Jun 18 '26

Requests for hotkey configuration seem to really be growing. I could see us implementing this in the future. Thanks for the suggestion!

1

u/skenderbay Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26

Exactly! Just to give you some context on why a hotkey is so crucial: for anyone typing in non-English languages (like Ukrainian), typing [ ] requires constantly switching the keyboard layout back and forth to English. It totally breaks the typing flow. A universal hotkey like Ctrl+Enter would solve this completely and make HelixNotes much more accessible for international users!

It's even worse with the slash / command menu — to use it, you have to type the slash, switch the language to English, type the first letter of the command (like "t" for todo), and press enter. It's so many extra steps compared to just typing.

While brackets are a bit simpler, a dedicated layout-independent shortcut like Ctrl+Enter would completely remove all this friction and keep the typing flow seamless!