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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

#71

Post by zoomablemind »

krsdcbl wrote: post #63
fabiospampinato wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being native isn't everything. As I mention in the readme I couldn't find an app that ticked all the boxes I'm interested in, which are: notes are written and rendered in GitHub-flavored Markdown, no WYSIWYG, no proprietary formats, I can run a search & replace across all notes, notes support attachments, the app isn't bloated, the app has a pretty interface, tags are indefinitely nestable and can import Evernote not…

I feel you on this, but for me the solution has been really simple so far: just a dedicated notes folder + good ol' atom. Ticks all the boxes & uses nothing but my default workspace

Second that. Markdown is about lightweight, requiring just a text editor and a few neurons to memorize the markup.

Markdown already handles 'attachments' via tag for image or HTML anchor for other file types. Prettify via CSS.

Global search and replace indeed needs an extra effort. If faced with such a need, I'd just use any of active IDEs already installed, well, Atom should do.

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

#72

Post by mettamage »

How about a notetaking app that also handles stylus input? IMO any note-taking app that doesn't suck handles stylus input gracefully as I make many notes that aren't easily expressable via UTF-8 text.

And I could figure out how to do a TIKZ-like style of drawing schema's but using stylus input is way faster.

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

#73

Post by oelmekki »

Hi Fabio,

Congratulations on Notable, it's very slick, and exactly the kind of note taking app I was after.

I'm mostly concerned about keeping my data offline these days, so Google Keep and Evernote were no fit for me. I take tons of notes every day, and ended up using the note app from Kontact (the PIM suite for KDE), mostly because I'm a heavy KDE user and it was properly integrated with Akonadi (KDE's PIM backend). But it is very raw, especially compared to Notable.

Given Notable data is just plain text, it means I can get it indexed by Baloo (KDE's desktop search), so it's perfect for me. Thanks a lot :) And nevermind Electron haters, having an app in an AppImage, released on github, so that I can subscribe to release's RSS feed and just download/drop the update if I want to is furiously awesome.

One suggestion : I would love, when I create a new note when having a Notebook selected, that this new note is automatically added with this tag (currently, manually importing data from Kontact is painfully long). Autocompletion of tags could do too.

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

#75

Post by powerslacker »

tetek wrote: post #74

went to GitHub, checked that it's js, closed the tab

Same. The part of Markdown applications that sucks is that they use Electron. Markdown is supposed to be lightweight, free, and universal. If I wanted a heavy editor and file format I'd use Word or Google Docs.

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

#77

Post by sfifs »

stephenr wrote: post #25

Describing an electron app as “doesn’t suck” is pretty rich on its own, but even more so when you consider that there are several existing native macOS Markdown editors.

> Describing an electron app as “doesn’t suck” is pretty rich on its own,

That's an opinion many people hold. I personally however find the shoe-horning of "function fits form" that "native" UI on desktop forces to suck big time. Microsoft Office 365 which is a very well designed desktop app for instance is very non-native in behaviour with its ribbons, intelligent context options surfacing etc. I find that Electron apps in general tend to be much more "form fits function" and easier to use.

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

#78

Post by matwood »

mettamage wrote: post #72

How about a notetaking app that also handles stylus input? IMO any note-taking app that doesn't suck handles stylus input gracefully as I make many notes that aren't easily expressable via UTF-8 text. And I could figure out how to do a TIKZ-like style of drawing schema's but using stylus input is way faster.

Agreed. I bounce back and forth between actual paper notes and typed notes because paper has advantages for me with actual note taking.

I recently got an iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil and it's quite nice. So far I'm only using the Notes.app, and while it's not perfect it does some cool things. OCRing my handwriting and making it searchable is quite nice.

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

#80

Post by legostormtroopr »

bgdam wrote: post #68
krsdcbl wrote: post #62

I kinda don't get why people end up building electron apps to, essentially, "act like it's native". The app looks absolutely awesome, but i would have loved to just see it run in the browser, I'm kinda reluctant to install yet another memory-hog for basic tasks.

One important reason people choose to use Electron instead of opening the app in a Browser window, is that the browser blocks a lot of standard keyboard shortcuts. So for example, if you want to capture Ctrl+Tab and move to the next note, based on that, well, you can only do that in Electron. Another UX based reason, is that native menus offer a better UX than having to put buttons for each and every action inside th…

> So for example, if you want to capture Ctrl+Tab

So use a different key combo? There are plenty to choose from. I use cloud9 and it uses Crtl+[ and Crtl+] to cycle between tabs.

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