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I've been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years

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Re: I've been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years

#241

Post by rcdwealth »

mdhughes wrote: post #82

Why, so have I, and so has every other programmer on Earth. https://mdhughes.tech/thoughtpy/ This has been mostly used as my engineering notebook, in lieu of stacks of Moleskines. Simple command-line tool for editing and searching, a pipeline to any Markdown app for display, and DropBox for syncing, that's all I needed. I could also use it on mobile with Pythonista, with some changes to get a DropBox path and open it…

so well said. So many people programmers, but not having their own way to handling notes.

Re: I've been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years

#243

Post by jammygit »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #102
Pepe1vo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the sentiment against Electron, there are horribly bloated applications out there which are a direct consequence of how (badly) Electron was built and designed. However, this particular application appears to work exactly as intended and uses all of 150MB of RAM and 0.1% CPU on my (admittedly quite beefy) laptop. Maybe, just maybe, this is actually a pretty well-built application? I understand if someone won't…

Your comment snapped me out of the RAM-obliviousness in which I usually live and work. I know memory is plentiful on modern PCs, but 150 MB of RAM for a note-taking app!?

It’s not the ram for me but how long electron apps take to open that gets me

Re: I've been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years

#244

Post by jammygit »

mostlyjason wrote: post #47

Just signed up for a Standard Notes subscription today. How does this compare? Seems they are both e2e encrypted with Markdown and code highlighting. Standard notes also has rich text and todo list plugins.

Happy standard notes user. I wish each app was native mind you, but for a single dev project that would be insane

Re: I've been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years

#245

Post by jamesgeck0 »

dangus wrote: post #230
jamesgeck0 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think it matters very much what underlying frameworks are being used, especially to the end user. Every Electron text editing app I've used has noticeable input latency and hitching compared to native on my system. > If it's so easy... It's practically part of the human experience to have opinions about technology you haven't personally developed. The author can build their software however they want. I jus…

If you have no plans to try this product I wonder why you claim it has performance issues or should have been architected in a different way, and why you're wasting all of our time by vocalising assumptions about an application based on its underlying technology. I haven't been able to find any other five-platform markdown based note taking app with plugin support and cloud sync, so I'm still awaiting your link to a…

> I wonder why you claim it has performance issues

It's true, I haven't tried it. Perhaps this solo dev has succeeded where large teams with more resources have failed.

> I'm still awaiting your link to a superior native alternative

Sorry; I thought you wanted one that I'd written. I've used SimpleNote for years. It's got dozens of clients, many of them native; I use NValt, Resoph Notes, and the official iOS client. It supports markdown. It doesn't support plugins, but you didn't want that until just now.

> If you can detect the input lag in Visual Studio Code

I use VSCode extensively for a large Angular project on a Macbook Pro with a 4K screen. I get trivially reproducible hitching, often when autocomplete kicks in. It doesn't require superhuman senses to see. The console is also easy see lag on; just use it to edit a commit message with vim during a rebase. Character input speed is easier to notice if you've been using Sublime or Vim immediately beforehand. It's not a deal-breaker; VSC is unparalleled for Angular development. I wish it was snappier, though.

Re: I've been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years

#246

Post by test6554 »

I worked on a markdown flash card app briefly because so many accounting terms referenced other terms in their definitions. By linking flash cards together I could quickly jump between flashcards to review unfamiliar terms.

Rather than wikipedia where everything about a subject is recorded, flash cards were meant to be a distilled set of facts for a single term from a single course or textbook you were studying.

I overhauled my models when I realized that the same field or subject (which I organized into Decks) used the same term in two different contexts to mean different things. That also meant I could not reference cards simply by name in the markdown. So I updated all links to reference by id rather than name. So I had to build some UI to select cards by name and generate links.

Then I hit a wall when I realized I would need a good way to encode and render math formulas and that's when my hobby project died.

Also, in the end, I found that having such quick linked access to knowledge I was studying made me less likely to remember the material, not more. I relied too heavily on the cards and the ability to just click on a term I didn't remember.

Re: I've been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years

#247

Post by throwmex »

scarejunba wrote: post #227
throwmex wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> free riders will come eat the server resources that's not the way to address a user whether paid or "free rider" as you call them.

This is a startup forum, dude. He’s talking more to fellow creators than users. We prefer this.

It sounds right from a tech speak. But the question remains if he will treat the paid customers with this same attitude.

Re: I've been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years

#248

Post by test6554 »

nathan-io wrote: post #223
scarface74 wrote: post #140

Should I be as impressed as I am that one guy has an app that works on 5 different operating systems even if he is using a cross platform framework or has cross platform front end development become that easy? Whichever it is, great job! I don’t need something like this right now, but I am favoriting it just in case I do later.

I certainly am. The only thing I disagree with is the lack of a web client. It just seems like you could save a ton of work by starting with the web client, then create desktop versions via something like todesktop.com. Then you're spending less time on updates - it's just one desktop version, and the iOS + Android versions are just consuming data from your API anyway. Love the BYO CouchDB feature - very interesting!

A web client seems like it would incur hosting and other costs.

Re: I've been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years

#250

Post by gremlinsinc »

nepeckman wrote: post #109
EForEndeavour wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment snapped me out of the RAM-obliviousness in which I usually live and work. I know memory is plentiful on modern PCs, but 150 MB of RAM for a note-taking app!?

Its a note taking app that renders HTML. Arguably, this is an ideal case for an electron app. 150 MB for a internet connected, syncing, HTML rendering note app doesn't seem unreasonable to me

Checkout vnote, found it today actually.. checks all the boxes. Seems pretty good and built using c++ https://github.com/tamlok/vnote
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