Linwood Butterfly is a single-developer open source note-taking and drawing app available on Android, Windows, Linux, and the web. Version 2.5, codenamed “Crimson Red” and released on April 5, represents a substantial update that restructures the experience from the ground up, with a focus on personalizing your workflow.

Templates get a complete overhaul

The most visible change affects page templates, which are now organized by category with a dedicated “Core” section for built-in options. New templates arrive, including dotted, simple ruled, grid, and red-ruled variants, each with dark mode versions. Existing templates have been refreshed to use pure black and white backgrounds, and many now appear as presets in the document background settings too.

Keyboard and touch controls, your way

You can now assign custom keyboard shortcuts to any app action through settings. Worth mentioning is the “hold” mode: configure a key to temporarily switch tools, such as holding E to grab the eraser and returning to your previous tool when you release it.

On touchscreens, version 2.5 introduces customizable double and triple taps that map directly to tools in the toolbar. To avoid conflicts, the context menu moved from double-tap to long-press.

WebDAV rewritten, plus more

The WebDAV sync and backup module has been rewritten to improve stability and reliability.

Version 2.5 also adds stroke styles to geometric shapes, supporting dashed and dotted lines. The polygon workflow got simpler, too: there’s no separate edit mode anymore, just long-press an existing polygon to modify it. Smaller improvements cover file handling, PDF rendering, and presentation mode. For technically inclined users, an internal log viewer is now available, keeping a history of the last three sessions.