Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers

Oh, I haven't seen orgmode before, so I don't know what its features are. I'm not planning to add evaluation of code blocks (apart from Math blocks that is) due to the complexity it would add.

Love this. This is exactly what I need. I have been using a WhatsApp group with just me, for this purpose, until now.

Feature requests: - arch package

- would really like the results of the math to be in buffer.txt and in Ctrl+a and copy.

- changing font and color theme(I like the Nord one right now though!) Please keep it minimally colored as it is now so that changing color is just a simple matter of configuring a handful of colors as opposed to custom css. That would make it too complicated.

- support for images and media in markdown blocks would be nice to whatever extent possible. I would love it if you could copy the way vscode markdown works. Ctrl+v an image in the editor and it inserts the markdown for it and saves the image to a file. Markdown preview would be nice but I understand if you think that's out of scope.

- timestamp for blocks. especially would be nice if you could store createdAt updatedAt in the line with the infinity symbols in buffer.txt to make it easily extractable using grep and cut.

- saw that you mentioned downthread that you're working on reloading the file so that we can back it up with git or whatever. Would love that!

- is mobile possible? Through Cordova or something

Thanks for making this!

This looks fantastic. I will definitely give it a spin. I've been tracking what I call "computational scratchpad" apps for a while now but haven't found one that fits my environment/workflow yet. Maybe Heynote will. Here are some others that I've looked at:

* https://soulver.app Granddad of them all, Mac-only, proprietary, expensive

* https://numi.app Mac-only, proprietary, semi-expensive. Has a Github and claims to be MIT-licensed but I don't see how you could build a working application with what's in the repo.

* https://calca.io Windows- and Mac-only, proprietary, not expensive, nice docs.

* https://notepadcalculator.com Web-based, not open source, hosted but uses local storage. You can optionally create an account to sign in and have your notes saved in plaintext on his server.

* https://github.com/bbodi/notecalc3 Web-based, open source, self-hostable. But it seems to save your document in the URL string itself, which means the URL gets updated with almost every keystroke. Worth it for quick calculations and very small notes, I guess.

* https://numpad.io Web-based, hosted, not open source. Also stores entire doc in URL, but doesn't update the URL bar the whole time you're typing.

* https://numbr.dev/ Web-based, hosted. Has a Github but is not open source and the repo does not have all the bits needed to self-host it. Stores entire doc in URL.

* https://github.com/metakirby5/codi.vim Vim/NeoVim plugin that is less like a "smart notepad" and more like Jupyter but with results printed on the right side of the screen instead of in a cell below. Supports lots of programming languages.

Congrats! I really like this. I use Boop on Mac now for my "scratchpad", but the separate blocks here is really ideal for me - the one thing that was a problem for me with Boop is that it was a single buffer and all the helpful commands (not solely stuff like formatting but helpful things like "decode JWT) ran against the whole buffer. Great work!

I would consider Emacs to be the granddad of "computational scratchpads". Being able to run a repl in a buffer, tangle code blocks in org-mode, create buffers against which to run code, etc. Plus the calculator is fire.