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Show HN: Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app that doesn't suck

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Re: Show HN: Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app that doesn't suck

#41

Post by TeMPOraL »

fabiospampinato wrote: post #28
stephenr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the app isn't bloated > I can bear the start-up latency and the RAM usage as long as app is overall quick after that. Error. Does not compute.

There's the bloat of apps like Notion.so giving you a calendar and a kanban board, and there's the bloat of the apps that use 100mb of ram more than the optimal. I can bear the latter, not the former.

Reverse for me, because the former is at least providing features that give some value; even if not for me, then for some users people, and who knows, maybe I'll be using them in the future. Electron is pure unadulterated waste. And since the app isn't "bloated", by not including a calendar and a kanban board, I might need to use another Electron app for calendar, and yet another Electron app for kanban, and then I have to throw out my computer and buy one with more RAM.

This is not a dig at you specifically, but Electron (and to large extent, the whole modern web) makes me think that some developers believe theirs is the only software users will run. But users run many programs simultaneously, and all this unnecessary bloat adds up, resulting in frustration, lost productivity, and unnecessary quick turnover of perfectly good hardware.

Re: Show HN: Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app that doesn't suck

#42

Post by fabiospampinato »

avinassh wrote: post #37
fabiospampinato wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) LaTeX math support I'll probably add this with the next release, on the first release I focused on the features I'm personally interested in. > 2) Notes in custom directory That's actually supported, your notes can be stored anywhere, that's really the main feature of Notable, that it's just a pretty frontend for a directory containing your notes, the directory can be set arbitrarily and changed later on. Btw I'…

> Btw I'm versioning my Notable notes and attachments (which Typora doesn't support) via git too, the data directory is just a regular directory. that is interesting. How does it handle sync and merge between git repositories?

The synchronization is taken care of by Dropbox and I'm only making commits from my laptop so I'm not really merging from other repos.

Putting a git repo inside Dropbox is discouraged though as conflicts may arise.

You could also for instance publish your data directory to github, accept PRs and everything else, as soon as the files on disk change Notable detects the changes and updates itself.

I'm not sure if that answers your question, let me know if it didn't.

Re: Show HN: Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app that doesn't suck

#43

Post by shscs911 »

fabiospampinato wrote: post #35
shscs911 wrote: post #33

My only issue with Notable is the absence of an Android app and sync across devices. I'd love to use it as my daily driver, if not for these features. Really love your UI. I'm currently using Joplin " rel="nofollow">https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/>

You can kind of get both today if you put your data directory inside Dropbox and then edit your notes with any available text editor. It's definitely not the same thing though. Maybe I will make a mobile app for this in the future.

It'd be really great if you could use something like Nextcloud for sync, instead of proprietary services.

Re: Show HN: Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app that doesn't suck

#44

Post by fabiospampinato »

buckysock wrote: post #38
fabiospampinato wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the bloat of apps like Notion.so giving you a calendar and a kanban board, and there's the bloat of the apps that use 100mb of ram more than the optimal. I can bear the latter, not the former.

Notion was so bloated it barely worked on my iphone 6+. Insta-deleted.

They even added some kind of spreadsheets to Notion :S

Re: Show HN: Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app that doesn't suck

#45

Post by avinassh »

fabiospampinato wrote: post #31
avinassh wrote: post #29

What exactly is the attachments feature and how does it work? And how are these saved? Also, what do you mean by 'no WYSIWYG'? Since you render ir in Github Flavoured MD?

> What exactly is the attachments feature and how does it work? And how are these saved? You select some files to add to your notes and they get copied to your data directory, a reference to them is also added to the note using Markdown front matter. > Also, what do you mean by 'no WYSIWYG'? Since you render ir in Github Flavoured MD? The rendered note is not the editor, the editor let's you actually edit the source.…

That explains, thank you!

I have installed and using it. I have a feature request: Dark Theme.

Re: Show HN: Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app that doesn't suck

#46

Post by fabiospampinato »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #41
fabiospampinato wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the bloat of apps like Notion.so giving you a calendar and a kanban board, and there's the bloat of the apps that use 100mb of ram more than the optimal. I can bear the latter, not the former.

Reverse for me, because the former is at least providing features that give some value; even if not for me, then for some users people, and who knows, maybe I'll be using them in the future. Electron is pure unadulterated waste. And since the app isn't "bloated", by not including a calendar and a kanban board, I might need to use another Electron app for calendar, and yet another Electron app for kanban, and then I h…

I see your point of view, but also if you absolutely don't need a kanban board and other such features the app becomes more difficult to use. Regarding the RAM as long as there's enough available I think it makes no difference performance-wise if I have 5gb or 2gb free.

From my point of view as the developer of the Electron app in question I get to reuse the components I spent considerable time developing and a cross-platform app almost for free.

Btw for this specific case Electron might not beed too bad of a choice RAM-wise, I checked it earlier the RAM usage of Notable and Evernote and amazingly Evernote, which is native, was using about 100mb more on my system (mid-2014 MBP). Maybe partially because at the end of the day you're going to need an HTML renderer to render those notes anyway.

Re: Show HN: Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app that doesn't suck

#48

Post by fabiospampinato »

avinassh wrote: post #45
fabiospampinato wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly is the attachments feature and how does it work? And how are these saved? You select some files to add to your notes and they get copied to your data directory, a reference to them is also added to the note using Markdown front matter. > Also, what do you mean by 'no WYSIWYG'? Since you render ir in Github Flavoured MD? The rendered note is not the editor, the editor let's you actually edit the source.…

That explains, thank you! I have installed and using it. I have a feature request: Dark Theme.

Yeah that's actually in my todo list [1]. If I can find a dark version of the CSS GitHub is using for Markdown files it should be easy to implement.

[1] https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable/blob/master/.todo...

Re: Show HN: Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app that doesn't suck

#50

Post by fabiospampinato »

drannex wrote: post #40
fabiospampinato wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately there are no mobile apps for Notable, but you could put your notes into Dropbox and edit them using any of the already existing text editors.

Why couldn't you repackage this for diy "server" usage and ensure that it's mobile friendly? That would solve that problem.

I could make a web-app out of it, but it's a non trivial change which I don't personally had the need for, so I haven't implemented it yet.
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