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Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers

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Re: Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers

#131

Post by fastball »

jonatanheyman wrote: post #69
hoistbypetard wrote: post #62

Initial thoughts: 1. It looks beautiful and useful. Very nice work! 2. I love the math sections. 3. I was shocked how large the download was. 4. It's chewing enough memory between the GUI and the (3!) helper processes that I will probably continue to use BBEdit for this kind of thing. I think it will be useful to a lot of people... I like it and could see myself using it sometimes even if it feels too heavy to keep i…

Yeah, large file sizes and some RAM overhead is a drawback that comes with Electron apps. However, it would never have been possible for me to make Heynote for all of Mac, Windows and Linux, on my spare time and within a reasonable timeframe, without Electron. Also, the CPU usage overhead for Heynote is minimal. It's one of the apps I use the most, and it's never among the programs that have used the most CPU. Yes, 2…

Consider Tauri[1] as well. It uses the native WebViews on the various platforms instead of bundling Chromium.

FWIW, we also have an Electron app, in part because the integration with native APIs (which we use) is fairly full-featured with Electron. But if I was greenfield starting an app today I'd probably try Tauri. For your app it looks like you're not trying to do too much outside the WebView so might be worth checking out.

[1] https://tauri.app/

Re: Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers

#132

Post by fastball »

Cool app! Reminds me of Quiver[1], which is the note-taking app I used throughout my college degree with varying amounts of success. It is also in part what inspired me to build my own note-taking app, as it opened me up to the idea that there are still a lot of unexplored modalities in the note-taking / knowledge-management space.

[1] https://yliansoft.com/

Re: Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers

#133

Post by jsdalton »

jonatanheyman wrote: post #130
jsdalton wrote: post #109

This is just outstanding. It's so exactly what I wish for out of a scratch pad. My feature request to add to your pile (possibly a lonely one, since maybe it's just unique to how my brain works): I really want a scratch pad like this to have UX that supports "inverted" order. Meaning, new blocks get added to the top of the page instead of the bottom. The blocks naturally flow in descending order of creation rather th…

Happy you like it :). I get the idea of the "inverted order". I wonder if it would be enough to make it configurable so that C-Enter inserts a new block before the current one + Heynote sets the cursor at the beginning of the buffer at startup (instead of last which is the current behavior)?

Yeah I was thinking similar. And/or a separate shortcut key that opens a new block at the very top of the page (regardless of where the current cursor is positioned).

Re: Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers

#134

Post by evnc »

I love this! Simple and solid execution. I've been wanting to build something similar for some time now, might fork and play around with it. Thank you for open sourcing it!

I've started using Obsidian with a new note for each day and separating "blocks" with a Markdown horizontal rule (`---`) to achieve something similar, but this is much cleaner.

The strength of such an approach is making capture extremely easy -- new block, start writing, no thinking about where this goes and how to fit it into pre-existing structure. I find that if I'm trying to do that, then by the time I find where my idea goes, I've lost the idea.

The downside, of course, is finding things again. The ability to tag or title a block and search by tag or title would be great. More ambitiously, it would be cool to experiment with incorporating LLMs and embeddings to automatically tag, summarize, categorize, cluster etc. your blocks.

There's a lot of different directions one could take this, but I'll echo the sentiment of others to refrain from adding too many features and losing the original appeal of simplicity. :)

Also: How do you handle performance when the buffer gets very large?

Re: Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers

#136

Post by divbzero »

jelder wrote: post #118

The Slack use case highlighted on the front page would be better if Slack markup was an available syntax. Slack is not really Markdown, so composing messages in Heynote won't have high fidelity. One thing that often trips me up is that links and code formatting cannot coexist: [`method_name`](https://github.com/example/example/blob/main/src/foo.rs) Would be rendered by most Markdown engines as a link with fixed-width…

I agree with the use case, but also wonder if it’s more on Slack, Jira, etc., to try harder to adopt Markdown.

Re: Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers

#137

Post by dceddia »

This looks awesome! I love the blocks idea. I’m gonna download and give it a try.

I see lots of comments about Electron (per usual here haha) and I just thought I’d shout out Tauri if you hadn’t run across it. It’s basically Electron-but-in-Rust and uses the system webview instead of Chromium, so bundle size and memory usage is reduced a bunch.

I took a look at the code and it looks like you haven’t got a ton of Electron-side code so if you felt like playing with Rust it might not be too hard to swap. I have a video editing app that I started building with Electron and then switched to Tauri midway and it’s been pretty nice.

I hope it’s clear this isn’t a request and please feel free to disregard this comment entirely :)

Re: Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers

#138

Post by f0rmatfunction »

jonatanheyman wrote: post #64
cyberge99 wrote: post #58

A few suggestions: On Macos a menubar item would be nice to pop the app up. Also, expanding the Language set to include bash and a few other common languages would be ace. Finally, if you remove the canvas background or set it to the same as the app background color, it will eliminate the white flicker when you resize the app window. If I get time, I may take a look and put in a PR.

Yes, I'd like to add more languages. It's currently limited to what Lezer ( https://lezer.codemirror.net/ ) supports . However I just found this repo ( https://github.com/withfig/lezer-bash ) which seems to be Lezer grammar for bash, so I can probably use that for bash syntax support. > Finally, if you remove the canvas background or set it to the same as the app background color Will look into that. Thanks! > On Mac…

Would love to see support for Swift as well!

Re: Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers

#139

Post by kposehn »

QuinnyPig wrote: post #123
kposehn wrote: post #105

...I wish this was on iPad too! Very cool to see and I'll try it on Mac.

Seconded! Of course, then I’d want sync. This is pretty close to what I want Drafts.app to be.

Good point about sync. Probably could use iCloud Drive or Google Drive for data.
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