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Show HN: CrushPaper – Open-Source Workflowy and Evernote for Writers, Students

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Re: Show HN: CrushPaper – Open-Source Workflowy and Evernote for Writers, Students

#21

Post by bazookajoes »

luckyisgood wrote: post #20

Wow, you filled a huge gap I could not believe I couldn't find a solution before, and I've searched. All I ever wanted to do on my desktop is this: 1) Select some text on the screen 2) Have the text AND the URL to the source copied to one place, without me having to manually copy and paste the URL. I am a huge fan of collecting random clippings from the web. Your app saves me just enough clicks to make it worth while…

Thank you for the suggestion and the feedback! I will do it tomorrow. I just have to decide if it should be a separate context menu item. If you have any other thoughts please let me know.

Re: Show HN: CrushPaper – Open-Source Workflowy and Evernote for Writers, Students

#23

Post by bazookajoes »

walterbell wrote: post #22

Have you considered using a CalDAV server (e.g. SabreDAV) as a backend?

I haven't thought about using a CalDAV server for this at all actually. How do you envision that working?

The backend of this is pluggable so it can use other datastores.

Re: Show HN: CrushPaper – Open-Source Workflowy and Evernote for Writers, Students

#24

Post by walterbell »

bazookajoes wrote: post #23
walterbell wrote: post #22

Have you considered using a CalDAV server (e.g. SabreDAV) as a backend?

I haven't thought about using a CalDAV server for this at all actually. How do you envision that working? The backend of this is pluggable so it can use other datastores.

http://2doapp.com uses CalDav to sync task items across iOS, Android and OSX. This works with both iCloud (Reminders) and third-party CalDAV servers, including self-hosted http://sabre.io.

If you sync a 2Do app instance with SabreDAV, you can see that the 2Do developers have added app-specific fields to the standard schema, to store text notes, audio attachments and app-specific metadata, without losing interoperability.

CalDAV clients: http://caldav.calconnect.org/implementations/clients.html

CalDAV libraries: http://caldav.calconnect.org/implementations/librariestools....

Re: Show HN: CrushPaper – Open-Source Workflowy and Evernote for Writers, Students

#25

Post by hammerandtongs »

WalterGR wrote: post #19
hammerandtongs wrote: post #16

This whole area is very underserved in how people interact with their computers, glad to see people pushing at it. You could do worse then really digging deep into emacs org-mode and learning it well. It takes what you are doing to a much higher level but doesn't exist on the web yet. Also (as mentioned elsewhere) get yourself up here https://demo.sandstorm.io/demo

This whole area is very underserved in how people interact with their computers, glad to see people pushing at it. This is something that I'm extremely interested in improving. Are there any tools other than org-mode that you have your eye on?

For the particle cross section of -

outliner

org-tangle/org-babel, literate programming and/or http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.htm...

broadly exportable format

calendar/todo/personal information management

etc etc

I'm not aware of anything else that covers that territory.

However Xiki and IPython (Jupyter now) do have some of the aspects of the "computational document" that I think of in this broader context.

Re: Show HN: CrushPaper – Open-Source Workflowy and Evernote for Writers, Students

#26

Post by hammerandtongs »

bazookajoes wrote: post #18
hammerandtongs wrote: post #16

This whole area is very underserved in how people interact with their computers, glad to see people pushing at it. You could do worse then really digging deep into emacs org-mode and learning it well. It takes what you are doing to a much higher level but doesn't exist on the web yet. Also (as mentioned elsewhere) get yourself up here https://demo.sandstorm.io/demo

It's great to see you agree on the importance of this area! I believe that when people have tools that allow them to visualize their thoughts they can become more rational as well as more productive. I like emacs org-mode too. I would like to add functionality to CrushPaper that is similar to some aspects of emacs org-mode. But, first I need more feedback on the current iteration.

It's difficult for me to give feedback as I'm too opinionated at some level (ie see my "computational document" comment). I'm also a grumpy vim/emacs diehard in general so your keybindings are never going to be to my taste.

Try to avoid the popup modal dialog boxes ie for creating a new note. Focus on fluid note editing within the document.

Alt+enter to end a note? What is the absolute most fluid way you can give the user to create a sibling?

Re: Show HN: CrushPaper – Open-Source Workflowy and Evernote for Writers, Students

#27

Post by tekacs »

bazookajoes wrote: post #7
tekacs wrote: post #3

This is nice, but the core keyboard shortcuts are (or so I find) painful and needlessly complex to use. :/ A comparison: Workflowy -> CrushPaper Enter -> Alt+s Enter -> Alt+u/b Enter + Tab -> Alt+c This feels like it was designed to be used with a mouse and keyboard shortcuts inexpertly bolted on. :) After that fix, this is a joy to use. :)

Thank you for the feedback! I think one of the major UI differences between Workflowy and CrushPaper is that CrushPaper aims to support multiline notes and quotations. I often paste snippets of code into CrushPaper but that does not seem to work well in Workflowy. In Workflowy you can create multiline notes with Shift+Enter, but then you don't seem to be able to navigate to those lines with the keyboard. CrushPaper c…

A few options:

- Enter for newline and Shift-Enter for new entry (and Alt/Cmd-Shift-Enter for new child)?

This would retain your multiline discoverability. I would be careful with Alt, as it makes CrushPaper awkward to use on Macs, where Alt+s both sends the keystroke and types 'ß' (German eszett) and similar issues abide for other Alt combinations. Since you have so many Alt shortcuts, it might be worth mapping them to equivalent Cmd shortcuts on Mac, as web apps commonly do.

- OmniFocus/Outliner on Mac use Escape to finish editing and Enter always makes a new entry. Escape might make an easier-to-hit-reliably edit key than F2 (which can be hard to hit without looking/fumbling, even for a touch typist).

Re: Show HN: CrushPaper – Open-Source Workflowy and Evernote for Writers, Students

#28

Post by luckyisgood »

bazookajoes wrote: post #21
luckyisgood wrote: post #20

Wow, you filled a huge gap I could not believe I couldn't find a solution before, and I've searched. All I ever wanted to do on my desktop is this: 1) Select some text on the screen 2) Have the text AND the URL to the source copied to one place, without me having to manually copy and paste the URL. I am a huge fan of collecting random clippings from the web. Your app saves me just enough clicks to make it worth while…

Thank you for the suggestion and the feedback! I will do it tomorrow. I just have to decide if it should be a separate context menu item. If you have any other thoughts please let me know.

Preserving rich formatting would also be nice.

Re: Show HN: CrushPaper – Open-Source Workflowy and Evernote for Writers, Students

#29

Post by bazookajoes »

luckyisgood wrote: post #28
bazookajoes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the suggestion and the feedback! I will do it tomorrow. I just have to decide if it should be a separate context menu item. If you have any other thoughts please let me know.

Preserving rich formatting would also be nice.

Thanks! Yes, I would like to do that too. Here is the outrageously long list of things I want to do with CrushPaper http://crushpaper.com/help/Future-Enhancements

Re: Show HN: CrushPaper – Open-Source Workflowy and Evernote for Writers, Students

#30

Post by bazookajoes »

tekacs wrote: post #27
bazookajoes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the feedback! I think one of the major UI differences between Workflowy and CrushPaper is that CrushPaper aims to support multiline notes and quotations. I often paste snippets of code into CrushPaper but that does not seem to work well in Workflowy. In Workflowy you can create multiline notes with Shift+Enter, but then you don't seem to be able to navigate to those lines with the keyboard. CrushPaper c…

A few options: - Enter for newline and Shift-Enter for new entry (and Alt/Cmd-Shift-Enter for new child)? This would retain your multiline discoverability. I would be careful with Alt, as it makes CrushPaper awkward to use on Macs, where Alt+s both sends the keystroke and types 'ß' (German eszett) and similar issues abide for other Alt combinations. Since you have so many Alt shortcuts, it might be worth mapping them…

Thank you for these suggestions.
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