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Show HN: Zonote – Sticky notes with Markdown and Tabs, all in one .txt file

by zonetti on 11/9/20, 4:25 PM with 15 comments

  • by FreezerburnV on 11/9/20, 7:23 PM

    Congrats on putting something out there! It's a very hard step to take.

    Makes me think of a side project I've been poking at off and on for a little while. I had the same idea you did of having a single text file to store a bunch of notes. (which was inspired by a comment from someone who said they've been managing notes for years using a single txt file through Windows Notepad or something along that line) Though mine is more inspired by trying to do that while also giving the capability to do Zettelkasten-style note management versus sticky notes.

    The only reason I haven't completed mine is because I got "stuck" trying to code a parser that could in-place patch the AST and visual representation of the text instead of re-parsing an entire note on every character change. (at least for me, this has been extremely hard to figure out how to do correctly. Feels like an infinite number of corner cases to figure out somehow. Especially since I'm self-limiting to a pure plain text representation of everything, because I want the file to be grep-able and not lock someone into a specific UI) I find modern-day delays in UI interactions unacceptable, so I want to make something where even if you were to put an entire novel into a note with a bunch of different special elements in it that would need to be parsed, (and considering I want to offer the capability to turn a piece of text into a "comment" which is a clickable link to another note so if you ARE writing a novel you can still leave notes for yourself on things to improve) there would be zero delays when actively typing.

  • by em500 on 11/9/20, 8:37 PM

    Have you considered packaging this as a Chrome extension rather than an electron app? AFAICT this is about 80KB of uncompressed html+css+js, released as a colossal 192MB electron app. Sorry to sound all get-off-my-lawn but that seems a tad excessive for a note taker.
  • by mxuribe on 11/9/20, 6:58 PM

    Looks very interesting and quite snazzy! But...how do i install it, what are the dependencies, etc.? The little video/animated gif is nice for showing the features...but how do i run the thing? (I'm sure i'm missing something here.)
  • by epaga on 11/9/20, 4:49 PM

    Very, VERY cool - this reminds me of an app I made (primarily for myself) years ago called Mindscope https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-thought-organizer/id... (but Zonote comes with Markdown built in which is way cool)

    The main thing missing for me in Zonote would be hierarchical links between entries/tabs...or is there already a way to do that?

  • by supandi on 11/10/20, 3:15 AM

    Nicely done. Does this support colored background for different sticky notes ? Could be useful for spotting high priority notes more quickly.
  • by meagher on 11/9/20, 7:57 PM

    Looks neat!

    Similar to https://www.manifest.app