Pawboard 🐾

A whiteboard on your Windows desktop. It sits behind your icons as your wallpaper, so you can
scribble notes, lists and doodles right where you'll see them.

Pawboard on a desktop: handwritten notes, a to-do list and doodles behind the desktop icons

Made with Claude (Opus 5.5). I came up with the idea and tested it, Claude wrote the code.

Download

Grab Pawboard-0.3.0-win-x64.exe from Releases
and run it. Windows 11, 64-bit.

It isn't code-signed, so Windows will warn you: click More info → Run anyway.

To quit, right-click the paw in the tray → Exit Pawboard.

How it works

Pick a tool from the toolbar at the bottom: pen, highlighter, eraser, text, lasso, or the arrow to
use your desktop normally. Right-click a tool (or click it again) for its colours and sizes. Scroll
to zoom in, middle-drag to move around, right-drag to erase. The ⌄ button shrinks the toolbar down
to just the arrow and the pen. The ☰ menu has save/open, save as picture, dark mode, backgrounds
(including your own wallpaper), Lock zoom and Start with Windows.

It saves by itself and uses no CPU when you're not drawing.

Controls


Right-click a tool, or click it again	Its colours and sizes
Scroll wheel	Zoom in / out
Middle-drag	Move around (when zoomed in)
Right-drag	Erase. With Smart erasing on (☰), the pen erases only pen ink and the highlighter only highlights
↶ ↷ on the toolbar	Undo / redo
Lasso: draw a loop	Pick up ink and text, then drag to move, drag a corner to resize, click a colour to recolour, or the bin to delete

In a text box:


Enter	New line
Esc	Done
Ctrl+A / C / X / V	Select all / copy / cut / paste
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y	Undo / redo typing
Arrows, Home, End	Move the cursor (Ctrl: by word, or to the very start / end)
Shift + any of those, or drag	Select
Double-click	Select a word
Drag the dots above the box	Move it

Privacy

No internet access at all. To catch clicks on the desktop it watches the mouse, and it only reads
the keyboard while you're typing in one of its text boxes. Nothing you draw or type is logged. Your board is saved in
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Pawboard. With Show my wallpaper on, it reads which picture Windows uses as your
wallpaper, to draw it under the board.

Build it yourself

Needs the .NET 10 SDK:

git clone https://github.com/NeatoPurrito/Pawboard.git
cd Pawboard/Pawboard
dotnet build -c Release

License

MIT. Uses perfect-freehand and
Vortice, see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.