There was an interesting point during Notable's development when the project went from an open source one to closed source [1]. While I get open source developers should be paid for the work, I am not sure how I feel about OSS projects getting some attention and then closing source
Author here, I realize how from the user perspective if the app stayed open-source and I still kept working on it full-time that would have been better, but that scenario is unrealistic, I just couldn't justify to myself working on it full-time without getting any revenue out of it and releasing everything as open-source, and I've been working on it for about 18 months now.
If somebody else can justify that proposition to themselves they are more than welcome to fork the app from the last available open-source version and take the open-source path.
Open-sourcing it again is not out of the table, but I need to make the project financially sustainable before considering this.
All of this said, I've recently found Foam hard to beat. Awesome markdown "thought web" experience built right into VSCode. Refreshing approach after years of mediocre Electron apps
Author here, commenting on the "I am not sure how I feel about OSS projects getting some attention and then closing source" part of your message.
I think that sounds sketchy to some people, but hear me out:
1. I couldn't stand using Evernote anymore, I couldn't find a Markdown-based alternative that I really liked, I thought I would make one for myself.
2. After the app was "done", at least enough for it to be usable for me, I released it on GitHub, essentially because open-source is my default, and shared it on the internet.
3. The app got a bit of traction and I thought I would continue working on it maybe for a bit longer.
4. At some point months of my time had been put into it, and many more months were needed before the app could start to generate some revenue (I'm ~18 months in now, and no revenue yet), so I couldn't justify releasing all the code anymore, but I still wanted to improve the app.
At this point in the story what would you do? I saw the following options:
1. Abandon Notable and move onto other projects. But why would I do that? I like working on it, and people seem to like it.
2. Rename Notable into something else and make another repo. I think this would have been considered the "fairer" option for some people here, but if you think about it it doesn't really make sense: Notable-open would still receive no further open-source commits, I would have to ask all my existing users to move to another app for some reason (breaking automatic updates), and frankly I would even need to find a new name, which I had made a logo for, bought the "notable.md" domain and registered a bunch of online accounts with that name already.
3. Releasing the code with a more restrictive license, but I don't really believe in licenses, like a license to me is not a law of nature that fundamentally forbids people from copying the entire app, making a few tweaks, and selling a competing product out of that, it just means that if I'm convinced somebody has done that, and there are laws in his/her country, and if I sue him/her, then probably I will win. For a project that has net me a negative income essentially in opportunity cost, so far at least, why would I go for that trouble?
4. The path that I ended up taking.
Do you people see any other options? Do you have any strong arguments for why I should have taken another path?
Slight rant: I'd be much more impressed if the people strongly criticizing how I spent my time, largely solely to the benefit of Notable's users and the open-source community as a whole (almost all core components of the app are standalone libraries I'm open-sourcing fully), had taken the path they are advocating for themselves.
Author here, it's nice to see Notable linked to on HN by somebody else! I was planning on posting about it myself after v1.9 gets released though, as pretty much everything changed since the last version available in that repo.
If you want to try a not-yet final version of v1.9 you can find it here: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases It's quite stable at this point and I would trust it more with my data over v1.8, but I haven't written the new tutorial notes and built-in documentation for it yet, and I need to rewrite the search engine before releasing v1.9 final.
If you want to get a quick sneak peek about v1.9 I had recorded a video about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8ERHvuhFH8 It's about 2 months old now, and it only goes over a bunch of new features I had implemented at that point in time.
We also have a chat by the way, if you'd like to keep track of the progress more closely: https://chat.notable.app
Hopefully I'll see you back soon once v1.9 gets released, that will be a lot more exiting than the current v1.8.4.
My biggest problem with these note-taking apps is that there is no way to have a manual order in the file list.
I could name everything as `001-scene1.md`, `002-scene2.md`. But if I want to change the order, it's an O(n) operation by hand, which is painful.
Another thing is that I really want a good pen support. Many notes I take are not texts.
The reason we have so many "Yet-another-note-taking-app" is probably that everyone has a few personal quirks when taking notes, thus the requirement differs from person to person.
> My biggest problem with these note-taking apps is that there is no way to have a manual order in the file list.
This has come up a few times, I don't have anything against it, I'm just not sure how it should work exactly. Like since the app supports sorting notes by a few dimensions (title, creation date, modification date), how would a manual sort order fit into this? Would that be a separate sorting dimension? Would that work alongside the built-in dimensions? How do you know if a note is being rendered at position X because a built-in rule or because you manually moved there? How should the user remove manually-set note orders?
If you have any suggestions I'm all hears, so far I haven't been able to think of a really good solution to this.
> The reason we have so many "Yet-another-note-taking-app" is probably that everyone has a few personal quirks when taking notes, thus the requirement differs from person to person.
I can't speak for all people who made note-taking apps but I would personally agree with this.
Slight rant: part of the problem IMHO is that people have hundreds of note-taking apps to choose from, some of which even completely free and open source, and they just don't want to pay for them, often not even technical users, and if a project is not financially sustainable _eventually_ it's going to die, or it will never get to implement the features needed by those other people that will eventually end up starting new note-taking apps, maybe that's a factor that contributed to the proliferation of all these apps too.
One solution when going with lexicographical ordering is to use a bigger step, so that you can reorder things without having to renumber all the files.
Linux conf files often use this technique so that they can load in the right order while still making it easy for you to insert your own additions at any point: e.g. /etc/fonts/conf.d/{nn}-{slug}.conf, the numbers I have in there are 10, 10, 20, 30, 40, 45, 45, 49, 50, 51, 60, 60, 65, 65, 69, 80, 90.
You can also just add more digits after the number and disregard any neatness of scheme; 0011-{slug} and so forth will go after 001-{slug}.
I don’t say either of these are good solutions, but they’re possibilities.
I had my own note taking app a while back. And that’s exactly what I realized. There will never be a mass market note taking app because of that. However, it’s also nice in way because there will be many many niche players.
Personally I have been a fan of Joplin https://joplinapp.org for note taking.
It is also markdown-based with all kinds of features and is MIT licensed.
I am a huge fan of Joplin. Love that it has both a GUI as well as terminal interface and syncs via Dropbox. I can use vim emulation in the GUI and real vim when running from the terminal.Oh - and it has a mobile app too. All libre software.
I've been incredibly happy with Joplin, to the point of a recurring subscription on Patreon. It's got everything I want: cross-platform, FOSS, sync with webDAV, and a good clean interface. I strongly recommend it.
I have two portable installs in different folders - one journaling. The other for work notes. The problem is that only one instance of joplin can work at a time. So to use one, I'd have to kill the other. That is the only reason I'm looking for an alternative
Yet another electron-based notetaking app.. There's already so many of those. And it's not even open source (anymore, since version 1.5.1). Why go to closed-source for something like this?
I really miss the old Tomboy. It was lightning fast and you could hotlink to another note just by typing its name. It had keyboard shortcuts for everything and searches were pretty much instant. But it's not maintained anymore, and the "NG" version lost the speediness of it (it was a complete rewrite)
The only thing I didn't like about it was that it was based on mono/.net and that it didn't have a CLI version. But despite using mono it was still really fast, it was just a bit of an installation hassle. I'd still use it today if it was still viable, but the lack of HiDPI support in particular makes it really difficult to use today.
One thing about Tomboy that I was a bit divided about was the lack of images. Today I use OneNote because it's basically the only thing my work supports. But I took much better notes with Tomboy as I always had to type content in my own words, whereas with OneNote I got lazy and just screenshot presentation sheets (which aren't searchable and make the database huge and slow).
> Why go to closed-source for something like this?
I used it when it first came out, but immediately moved away when he started talking about monetization and giving up on open source. I fully understand the desire to make money. It's just that it's a notes app and it does the same thing as a gazillion similar apps. When this app goes away you've wasted your money and your time for no reason.
Author here, commenting on the "Why go to closed-source for something like this?":
I just couldn't justify to myself continuing working on it full-time, while still not making any revenue, and open-sourcing all of it. So far I've been working on it for about 18 months full-time and I haven't made a penny from it really, some people are generous enough to donate some money to me, but it's extremely difficult to make a living off of open-source.
If anybody doesn't feel the same way about this they are more than welcome to fork the app and take the full open-source path themselves of course.
The problem arises when you are a dev trying put food on the table.
It's easy to talk about how other people's work should be given for free when you have a source of income every month, and your basic needs are covered.
But if the author is trying to live of his work, as it's the case here, it's a decision that should be respected.
And Yes, you can disagree with him, and in that case, you can vote with your wallet by not buying it and using any other app.
For some historical perspective, consider this. When Tomboy was new, people complained about its ‘bloat’. Why? Because it’s ‘unnecessarily’ written in .NET, and Mono was a ‘huge and bloated’ dependency.
Author here, I can add Inkdrop to the comparison table.
There are hundreds of note-taking apps out there, believe it or not when I first made the comparison table I didn't know about Inkdrop, later on I learned about it of course, it should be added to the table. Adding a new app to the table isn't exactly a fun experience as you can imagine, I guess I prioritized more doing other things.
I spent a lot of time recently looking for a good note taking app. Notable (electron), QOwnNotes (Qt), and Joplin (electron) are very similar, with a markdown format with the ability to switch to the rendered view or have them split side-by-side. Joplin has an experimental combined rendered markdown editor view but it's still a bit rough around the edges.
Ultimately I settled on Zettlr. It can be used as a normal notebook, and most importantly it's killer feature to me is that it allows you to paste images from your clipboard into a note, and then view that image inline in the markdown editor instead of having to switch to the rendered view to see the image. All of the other applications show a markdown ![image-filename]() link inside the note editor, requiring you to switch to the rendered view to see the actual image. The only other applications I found which can do this are: Joplin with the experimental editor, OneNote (no linux support, proprietary format), Bear Note (Apple devices only), and a few desktop note taking applications with a non-markdown format and no mobile application. With any of the markdown ones you can sync to Syncthing, NextCloud, Dropbox, etc. and then access them on your phone with the Joplin mobile application. But Zettlr just feels better than Joplin on the desktop, has some nice themes, and the editor is more refined than Joplin's experimental one.
Given this, I don't really see any reason to use Notable over Joplin and Zettlr. QOwnNotes is also good if you really don't want electron and can live without inline images. I used all four of these for quite a while before forming this opinion.
Author here. One practical reason to switch to Notable from Joplin is that notes in Notable are just plain files on disk, and that's extremely powerful. In Joplin instead you can only open notes one by one in the default app, the difference is that Joplin essentially copies the note out of its database, opens that in the external editor, and then synchronizes its changes back with the database. In Notable the files on disk _are_ the database.
In practice this means that you should be getting better startup times with Joplin's approach, but anything that has to do with manipulating a lot of notes with an external tool is trivial in Notable, but you can't really do it with Joplin.
Plus each note in Notable contains its own metadata in the YAML frontmatter section of the note. Last time I checked Joplin just doesn't expose this at all.
I don't know enough about QOwnNotes to compare it in the same level of detail.
If you want to give Notable another spin you should probably try one of the alphas of v1.9: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases the app changed quite significantly. For one now all shortcuts are customizable like they are in VSCode, and theming too is pretty much like in VSCode, in fact I ported all themes from VSCode to Notable, they are installable via the "Theme: Install..." command in the command palette.
I really like the comparison chart. I wish every project had that. The first thing I think when I see a project like this and there are a ton of options is "why?". This helps with answering that.
I usually assume these projects exist because the creator looked for a solution to their problems but couldn't find one. So it's nice to have their research presented like this instead of having to try to figure it out myself.
Author here. I agree with your comment wholeheartedly.
The only issues with the comparison table are that it takes quite a bit of time to try all the features in all the apps, if you want to add a new row you are in for a wild ride downloading many note-taking apps, and the more apps you add the less the table becomes easy to read. And of course the reader may disagree with the content in the table, but it's impossible to make everybody happy about everything.
Looks like a clone of Bear, which is an awesome mark-down based note app: https://bear.app/
Edit: This is nice, it's also out on linux and windows, unlike Bear which was one of the big negatives for me (day job is on Windows 10 where a note app like this is lacking). Def giving it a try.
I recently set up Syncthing on my laptops and my phone. I have always edited my notes in plain text in Vim and dumbly I would email these to myself (and reply to the email) on my phone so I could access my notes when afk. But now that I have Syncthing and Markor (a markdown/text editor) on my phone, I feel like I am in note-taking bliss.
Maybe someone here is interested in Noteless, an open-source Android note-taking app which aims to be compatible with Notable. https://github.com/redsolver/noteless
I've been on Quiver for quite a few years now — https://happenapps.com – and I am pretty satisfied. I can't say if it's been updated at all for most of that time. I just don't pay attention to it.
I'd probably switch if something great came along. I liked a lot of things about Bear but the pricing model drove me away.
I tried to just use iA Writer for plain markdown but the structure/search isn't usable.
I used to be a huge fan of quiver, until one day I was writing a very useful piece of text, later, the day finished and I turned off my computer. When I turned it back on and opened Quiver, the note was gone. And it had 0 trace of it.
That time I understood that I undermined the importance of a simple note taking app. Which drives me away for the new electron based app of the month. Because they can just stop being maintained and my content is stuck there.
There seems to be a markdown note-taking app trend... I just want to throw out there that I have been using jupyter lab as a daily journaling markdown editor for nearly a year now and am very much happy with my setup.
For me, ability to quickly expand/collapse headings/sub-headings is essential when I am working with markdown. After some effort got it working in Sublime Text.
Notable looks good, but not sure if it can be made to do this.
Been using it myself for a few years now. Mostly at work for code snippits, scripts, or commands as it has decent syntax highlighting. Synced to dropbox. Love its minimalist UI and feature set.
Would love to simply see this as a website. Why doesn't chrome make it easier to create desktop apps with a web shell? 63MB download again :(. That's like 0.1% app, 99.9% chromium + nodejs. That's why I don't install the desktop slack app. It's not an efficient user of my computer's resources. VSCode is the only electron app I have.
I've been using notable for a few months now. Its really good for a basic note taking up but clearly theres a lot more in the pipeline that excites me :)
@dang I'm Notable's author. I had planned to post on HN about the next update of the app in a few weeks, which I've been working on for about 6 months now, the current post has been made with a bit of an unfortunate timing by a user. Hopefully this will be to ok you and the other people moderating the site. The app changed quite significantly in almost all areas, it's essentially like another app that looks similar to the older one at this point, the post won't be "more of the same thing" if people will actually comment on the app, I'll try to push for a healthier discussion.
It's really striking that there are so many markdown-based note-taking apps out there. It seems like there's a new one on show HN every week.
Anyone have any idea why this is? I assume the ones that show up here are mostly people scratching their own itch, but are note-taking needs all that diverse?
I find it striking as well! At least in this case:
> I couldn't find a note-taking app that ticked all the boxes I'm interested in: notes are written and rendered in GitHub Flavored Markdown, no WYSIWYG, no proprietary formats, I can run a search & replace across all notes, notes support attachments, the app isn't bloated, the app has a pretty interface, tags are indefinitely nestable and can import Evernote notes (because that's what I was using before).
[+] [-] arpit|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/notable/notable/issues/432
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply
If somebody else can justify that proposition to themselves they are more than welcome to fork the app from the last available open-source version and take the open-source path.
Open-sourcing it again is not out of the table, but I need to make the project financially sustainable before considering this.
By the way a lot of the interesting libraries used inside the app are released as open-source still, mostly under my profile: https://github.com/fabiospampinato?tab=repositories&type=sou...
[+] [-] theobr|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/foambubble/foam
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply
I think that sounds sketchy to some people, but hear me out:
1. I couldn't stand using Evernote anymore, I couldn't find a Markdown-based alternative that I really liked, I thought I would make one for myself.
2. After the app was "done", at least enough for it to be usable for me, I released it on GitHub, essentially because open-source is my default, and shared it on the internet.
3. The app got a bit of traction and I thought I would continue working on it maybe for a bit longer.
4. At some point months of my time had been put into it, and many more months were needed before the app could start to generate some revenue (I'm ~18 months in now, and no revenue yet), so I couldn't justify releasing all the code anymore, but I still wanted to improve the app.
At this point in the story what would you do? I saw the following options:
1. Abandon Notable and move onto other projects. But why would I do that? I like working on it, and people seem to like it.
2. Rename Notable into something else and make another repo. I think this would have been considered the "fairer" option for some people here, but if you think about it it doesn't really make sense: Notable-open would still receive no further open-source commits, I would have to ask all my existing users to move to another app for some reason (breaking automatic updates), and frankly I would even need to find a new name, which I had made a logo for, bought the "notable.md" domain and registered a bunch of online accounts with that name already.
3. Releasing the code with a more restrictive license, but I don't really believe in licenses, like a license to me is not a law of nature that fundamentally forbids people from copying the entire app, making a few tweaks, and selling a competing product out of that, it just means that if I'm convinced somebody has done that, and there are laws in his/her country, and if I sue him/her, then probably I will win. For a project that has net me a negative income essentially in opportunity cost, so far at least, why would I go for that trouble?
4. The path that I ended up taking.
Do you people see any other options? Do you have any strong arguments for why I should have taken another path?
Slight rant: I'd be much more impressed if the people strongly criticizing how I spent my time, largely solely to the benefit of Notable's users and the open-source community as a whole (almost all core components of the app are standalone libraries I'm open-sourcing fully), had taken the path they are advocating for themselves.
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply
If you want to try a not-yet final version of v1.9 you can find it here: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases It's quite stable at this point and I would trust it more with my data over v1.8, but I haven't written the new tutorial notes and built-in documentation for it yet, and I need to rewrite the search engine before releasing v1.9 final.
If you want to get a quick sneak peek about v1.9 I had recorded a video about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8ERHvuhFH8 It's about 2 months old now, and it only goes over a bunch of new features I had implemented at that point in time.
We also have a chat by the way, if you'd like to keep track of the progress more closely: https://chat.notable.app
Hopefully I'll see you back soon once v1.9 gets released, that will be a lot more exiting than the current v1.8.4.
[+] [-] powersnail|5 years ago|reply
I could name everything as `001-scene1.md`, `002-scene2.md`. But if I want to change the order, it's an O(n) operation by hand, which is painful.
Another thing is that I really want a good pen support. Many notes I take are not texts.
The reason we have so many "Yet-another-note-taking-app" is probably that everyone has a few personal quirks when taking notes, thus the requirement differs from person to person.
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply
> My biggest problem with these note-taking apps is that there is no way to have a manual order in the file list.
This has come up a few times, I don't have anything against it, I'm just not sure how it should work exactly. Like since the app supports sorting notes by a few dimensions (title, creation date, modification date), how would a manual sort order fit into this? Would that be a separate sorting dimension? Would that work alongside the built-in dimensions? How do you know if a note is being rendered at position X because a built-in rule or because you manually moved there? How should the user remove manually-set note orders?
If you have any suggestions I'm all hears, so far I haven't been able to think of a really good solution to this.
> The reason we have so many "Yet-another-note-taking-app" is probably that everyone has a few personal quirks when taking notes, thus the requirement differs from person to person.
I can't speak for all people who made note-taking apps but I would personally agree with this.
Slight rant: part of the problem IMHO is that people have hundreds of note-taking apps to choose from, some of which even completely free and open source, and they just don't want to pay for them, often not even technical users, and if a project is not financially sustainable _eventually_ it's going to die, or it will never get to implement the features needed by those other people that will eventually end up starting new note-taking apps, maybe that's a factor that contributed to the proliferation of all these apps too.
[+] [-] chrismorgan|5 years ago|reply
Linux conf files often use this technique so that they can load in the right order while still making it easy for you to insert your own additions at any point: e.g. /etc/fonts/conf.d/{nn}-{slug}.conf, the numbers I have in there are 10, 10, 20, 30, 40, 45, 45, 49, 50, 51, 60, 60, 65, 65, 69, 80, 90.
You can also just add more digits after the number and disregard any neatness of scheme; 0011-{slug} and so forth will go after 001-{slug}.
I don’t say either of these are good solutions, but they’re possibilities.
[+] [-] baxtr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linuxdaemon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SweetestRug|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Icathian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novok|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vezycash|5 years ago|reply
I have two portable installs in different folders - one journaling. The other for work notes. The problem is that only one instance of joplin can work at a time. So to use one, I'd have to kill the other. That is the only reason I'm looking for an alternative
[+] [-] bedros|5 years ago|reply
Can you share notes with joplin?
Can you backup to my own webdav?
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|5 years ago|reply
I really miss the old Tomboy. It was lightning fast and you could hotlink to another note just by typing its name. It had keyboard shortcuts for everything and searches were pretty much instant. But it's not maintained anymore, and the "NG" version lost the speediness of it (it was a complete rewrite)
The only thing I didn't like about it was that it was based on mono/.net and that it didn't have a CLI version. But despite using mono it was still really fast, it was just a bit of an installation hassle. I'd still use it today if it was still viable, but the lack of HiDPI support in particular makes it really difficult to use today.
One thing about Tomboy that I was a bit divided about was the lack of images. Today I use OneNote because it's basically the only thing my work supports. But I took much better notes with Tomboy as I always had to type content in my own words, whereas with OneNote I got lazy and just screenshot presentation sheets (which aren't searchable and make the database huge and slow).
[+] [-] bachmeier|5 years ago|reply
I used it when it first came out, but immediately moved away when he started talking about monetization and giving up on open source. I fully understand the desire to make money. It's just that it's a notes app and it does the same thing as a gazillion similar apps. When this app goes away you've wasted your money and your time for no reason.
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply
I just couldn't justify to myself continuing working on it full-time, while still not making any revenue, and open-sourcing all of it. So far I've been working on it for about 18 months full-time and I haven't made a penny from it really, some people are generous enough to donate some money to me, but it's extremely difficult to make a living off of open-source.
If anybody doesn't feel the same way about this they are more than welcome to fork the app and take the full open-source path themselves of course.
[+] [-] molmalo|5 years ago|reply
It's easy to talk about how other people's work should be given for free when you have a source of income every month, and your basic needs are covered.
But if the author is trying to live of his work, as it's the case here, it's a decision that should be respected.
And Yes, you can disagree with him, and in that case, you can vote with your wallet by not buying it and using any other app.
[+] [-] FooBarWidget|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shahinrostami|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cecja|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] theobr|5 years ago|reply
Also suspicious that Ink is the only markdown editor not listed in your comparisons, despite being the one most similar to your project
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply
There are hundreds of note-taking apps out there, believe it or not when I first made the comparison table I didn't know about Inkdrop, later on I learned about it of course, it should be added to the table. Adding a new app to the table isn't exactly a fun experience as you can imagine, I guess I prioritized more doing other things.
[+] [-] the_pwner224|5 years ago|reply
Ultimately I settled on Zettlr. It can be used as a normal notebook, and most importantly it's killer feature to me is that it allows you to paste images from your clipboard into a note, and then view that image inline in the markdown editor instead of having to switch to the rendered view to see the image. All of the other applications show a markdown ![image-filename]() link inside the note editor, requiring you to switch to the rendered view to see the actual image. The only other applications I found which can do this are: Joplin with the experimental editor, OneNote (no linux support, proprietary format), Bear Note (Apple devices only), and a few desktop note taking applications with a non-markdown format and no mobile application. With any of the markdown ones you can sync to Syncthing, NextCloud, Dropbox, etc. and then access them on your phone with the Joplin mobile application. But Zettlr just feels better than Joplin on the desktop, has some nice themes, and the editor is more refined than Joplin's experimental one.
Given this, I don't really see any reason to use Notable over Joplin and Zettlr. QOwnNotes is also good if you really don't want electron and can live without inline images. I used all four of these for quite a while before forming this opinion.
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply
In practice this means that you should be getting better startup times with Joplin's approach, but anything that has to do with manipulating a lot of notes with an external tool is trivial in Notable, but you can't really do it with Joplin.
Plus each note in Notable contains its own metadata in the YAML frontmatter section of the note. Last time I checked Joplin just doesn't expose this at all.
I don't know enough about QOwnNotes to compare it in the same level of detail.
If you want to give Notable another spin you should probably try one of the alphas of v1.9: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases the app changed quite significantly. For one now all shortcuts are customizable like they are in VSCode, and theming too is pretty much like in VSCode, in fact I ported all themes from VSCode to Notable, they are installable via the "Theme: Install..." command in the command palette.
[+] [-] choward|5 years ago|reply
I usually assume these projects exist because the creator looked for a solution to their problems but couldn't find one. So it's nice to have their research presented like this instead of having to try to figure it out myself.
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply
The only issues with the comparison table are that it takes quite a bit of time to try all the features in all the apps, if you want to add a new row you are in for a wild ride downloading many note-taking apps, and the more apps you add the less the table becomes easy to read. And of course the reader may disagree with the content in the table, but it's impossible to make everybody happy about everything.
[+] [-] evo_9|5 years ago|reply
Edit: This is nice, it's also out on linux and windows, unlike Bear which was one of the big negatives for me (day job is on Windows 10 where a note app like this is lacking). Def giving it a try.
[+] [-] salmon30salmon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahaganapati|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redsolver|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imagetic|5 years ago|reply
I'd probably switch if something great came along. I liked a lot of things about Bear but the pricing model drove me away.
I tried to just use iA Writer for plain markdown but the structure/search isn't usable.
A part of me just wants something simple as http://notational.net/
[+] [-] lalo2302|5 years ago|reply
That time I understood that I undermined the importance of a simple note taking app. Which drives me away for the new electron based app of the month. Because they can just stop being maintained and my content is stuck there.
[+] [-] 21eleven|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pagade|5 years ago|reply
Notable looks good, but not sure if it can be made to do this.
[+] [-] SanchoPanda|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply
I haven't gotten to implementing the analogous thing but for rendered notes yet.
[+] [-] nullify88|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nojvek|5 years ago|reply
Soz for the rant. Great app though. Well done.
[+] [-] gaara87|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply
Many of the interesting features you might be referring to are available there.
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765482
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paultopia|5 years ago|reply
Anyone have any idea why this is? I assume the ones that show up here are mostly people scratching their own itch, but are note-taking needs all that diverse?
[+] [-] thex10|5 years ago|reply
> I couldn't find a note-taking app that ticked all the boxes I'm interested in: notes are written and rendered in GitHub Flavored Markdown, no WYSIWYG, no proprietary formats, I can run a search & replace across all notes, notes support attachments, the app isn't bloated, the app has a pretty interface, tags are indefinitely nestable and can import Evernote notes (because that's what I was using before).
> So I built my own.
[+] [-] nautilus12|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabiospampinato|5 years ago|reply