Quiver – The Programmer's Notebook | Hacker News Reader

Quiver – The Programmer's Notebook

happenapps.com

70 pointscoldtea61 comments

Having a personal notebook is a game changer. If you don't have yet, I highly recommend, tool is not that important...

I just use Emacs and Markdown. It's like my permanent memory, and it's public: https://github.com/azer/notebook

I even got a pull request once about a note on parenting :) Specifically about coding, the best thing is, I can quickly open a note within my editor.

For example, I forget some rules about Bash all the time. Instead of Googling the same thing over and over, I open the bash programming notes with a few key presses, check the rule, close the note. This happens really fast as I use Emacs for both coding and taking notes.

Apart from it being a bunch of Markdown files, what tools do you use with it?

I keep trying org-mode but keep getting annoyed that it isn't Markdown. I'd love to find a Markdown equivalent.

I use org for only budget planning and project management files, markdown for the rest. They're both useful I think, so you don't have to choose one of them...

i had the opposite experience; after org, i’m annoyed that markdown doesn’t support tangling code blocks.

>For example, I forget some rules about Bash all the time. Instead of Googling the same thing over and over, I open the bash programming notes with a few key presses, check the rule, close the note.

I use cheat as in pip install cheat which works in Bash itself. Lots of popular cheats and you can add your own.

I use Quiver for everything.

However it does have its limits (Mac Only) and development has stalled.

I've tried things like emacs with org-mode in the past but it just didn't click for me. I like the simplicity of the Quiver format, just JSON blobs with markdown in them.

For me a notebooking tool needs to have vim keybindings, tagging, searching, inline image support, syntax highlighting and preferably portability.

These threads seem to pop up every 2 - 3 months, and I'm always intrigued at what other people are using, but I just haven't seen anything that matches what Quiver can offer, even if it has some flaws

"Updated: Dec 19, 2017" Stalled? Everything has limits, which are the ones you found? I am not related to the app, nor a user. I am simply curious.

The Dec update was a couple of minor bugfixes. It had been a long time since the previous update, and there haven’t been new features for ages. It is quite featureful, so this isn’t egregious, but it is indicative of an app that you’d have to say is, at best, in caretaker mode now. There are a ton of unaddressed bugs at https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/issues.

Also the iOS version had been in beta for a long time, and was eventually released in attenuated form (a free read-only notes viewer).

I’m not writing this to bag the app at all. It’s still my primary note-taking app. But on present evidence I don’t think anyone would say it has a great future.

Quiver got a lot right, at least for me, and hit a kind of sweet spot between the overwhelming closed-platform-centricity of Evernote, and the minimalistic text-oriented note apps. And it was for the most part nicely implemented - performant, very mac-idiomatic, and with lots of nice usability touches. I still have ambitions to build apps based on its notebook files, just because I want to continue using it for my notes now, but suspect the app itself has a limited lifespan.

I like Quiver, use it every day, but it's development has kind of stalled/stopped for a couple of years, and it has some significant limitations. It's search capability is limited, and it can't do search and replace. At all. In any form. I had never seen a text handling program that couldn't replace text, but Quiver now has this distinction. If you need to do this, you have to open up Quiver's JSON in an actual text editor.

Is it open source?

No, it's not.

The stalling has been a shame. I like it so much (and have been so insecure about my likely long-term macOS use) that I keep having stabs at writing versions on various platforms using the same file format. But so far I keep having to shelve them for more urgent stuff.

It’s stalled and with some unfortunate bugs in the change detection that can (and have, for me) lead to data loss. I love the cell structure and note organisation, but Quiver makes me nervous and I don’t use it anymore except as a temporary cache for ideas and snippets.

Speaking of cell structure, could not Jupyter fill the void? It also works on cells, accepts Markdown, LaTeX, and code from various languages.

Jupyter doesn't support search as far as I can tell, so you can't tag and search for notes.

Happy to be proven wrong though

I've tried lots of docs tools, but the one I've found works best for me is a self-hosted Dokuwiki.

Dokuwiki stores it's output in text files (not in a database) so installation is as simple as unzipping an archive, and a cron job to copy the docs directory to s3 weekly takes care of backups.

As a plus, you can easily allow collaboration since it is a wiki after all. Needless to say, you can use it on any platform with a Web browser.

Lack of support for markdown is the only shortcoming, but the wiki syntax is easy enough to learn.

Have you tried installing one of the markdown plugins?

the quiver dev(s) decided that converting characters/integers to emojis and adding bizarre hidden characters was a good idea for some reason? i spent an hour tracking down why the messages i was submitting to a queue weren't working and it ended up being the fact that i saved it in quiver. try snippetslab instead.

Too bad it's Mac-only, it would not fly well with collaboration.

Would love to have a similar UI but self-hosted alternative.

I bought and used Quiver, but I'm slightly concerned about the lack of (frequent) updates. With many apps this is not much of a concern for me, but if I'm going to store much of my data in one, it does matter. As such, I've been, once again, working on moving away from this app into something more basic/generic to avoid lock-in.

FWIW, my needs/paranoia might not be relevant to others, and FWIW Quiver is a nifty app. Still, I do wish I can save others the trouble I went through to get my stuff into this app and then getting it out of that.

And FWIW, the storage format is quite amenable to export if you're comfortable with programming, so that's a definite plus for Quiver.

(I had issues with the search functionality, and that was enough for me to move away)

Nobody has mentioned Wiki.JS yet, so thought I'd share this: https://wiki.js.org/. I've just started using it and am pretty happy with it so far. It reads markdown files from a git repository every 5 minutes and only adds two comments to the top of each file for navigation purposes. You can edit files in the editor of your choice and just git push it back to the origin master, and then Wiki.JS will pick it up within 5 minutes. Or you can edit files directly in the browser through the Wiki.JS interface - and this has full access control mechanisms in place to secure content. Very cool.

I use zim-wiki. http://zim-wiki.org/ It's open source and uses a text based file format.

I use Typora https://typora.io/ which has most of the functionality including Markdown, Code blocks with syntax highlighting, LateX segments, and is more importantly free and cross platform.

It has recently added file list preview and tree view like functionality. Only missing on tags which are tricky because they break its pure markdown flat file philosophy.

It's a shame Typora doesn't spend a little time editing their site copy English. I could tell right away the creator isn't a native English speaker, but he could probably get someone in the Typora community to give the copy a once-over.

What are you talking about? Everything on https://typora.io/ is in English, support (http://support.typora.io) is in English, and Github issues (https://github.com/typora/typora-issues/issues) is mostly English.

I think the author speaks better English than you, or, at least, types it.

It's incorrect English in many places. Right on the landing page, for instance:

Replace them with a real live preview feature to help you concentrate the content itself

If you don't know what's missing from that sentence [hint: it's a missing preposition], you are probably not a native English speaker. There are numerous other examples. It's important that apps like this have good English copy.

"* Only free during beta."

If the tools provides good value, charging for it should be OK as long as it is reasonable. The caveat I place is that the data should not held hostage.

Of course, I just cited that because @trengrj said:

"..., and is more importantly free and cross platform."

It's been in beta since Feb 2015, and now is up to version 0.9.9.13.5. So looks like they're in no hurry to 1.0 yet :)

Since Quiver is only usable on Apple platforms, I've instead started using Boostnote. It doesn't quite have the same featureset, but it's still a great way of collecting formatted notes and storing them on Dropbox/GDrive.

Yep, boostnotes is pretty good. VSCode w/ some markdown extensions is pretty much the same and is what I use.

I've glossed over their website and can't figure out if it's opensource or not

GitHub: https://github.com/BoostIO/Boostnote

I came here to say just this. Boostnote isn't 1:1 from what I can tell at a cursory glance of Quiver's features but I've enjoyed its progression even if I barely use it. I've had a rudimentary workflow of just text files in TextWrangler that should honestly get dumped into boost but I'm too lazy to even save the documents most of the time (80-90% of it is temporary ideas) much less properly categorize them.

I use Quiver every day. I really like the way I can organize my notes and projects. However the main issue I have with this software is the absence of synchronisation between devices: I can’t browse on my iPhone what I wrote on my Mac.

I have the Quiver app loading my library from Dropbox and therefore have just read on my iPhone what I wrote on my Mac.

I use MoinMoin for that (https://moinmo.in/) it's pretty awesome (and portable).

Right now I just run the whole thing out of a Mercurial repo (it's easy to use the MoinMoin codebase as a sub-repo [1]), but I'm planning to do a setup with a container so that the data can directly live in any (Dropbox) folder or repo.

[1] https://moinmo.in/HowTo/Run%20Moin%20from%20a%20Mercurial%20...

Seems interesting and something I need. But it is available only for Mac?

> Seems interesting and something I need. But it is available only for Mac?

Yes, which is ironic because the app is packaged using Electron, which is supposed to be cross-platform.

The developers should have developed this app using native libraries instead to offer a good performance.

> the app is packaged using Electron, which is supposed to be cross-platform.

No, it's a native mac app. It does make use of webviews and an embedded javascript editor (Ace IIRC) to implement the multiple cell types per note. But it's definitely a mac app (quite idiomatically so in many ways).

Probably at some point the plan was to support other platforms as well, but development got stalled for whatever reason...

> the app is packaged using Electron

Native developers just can't win anymore. Here someone wrote a native application for macOS using native widgets and getting native performance, and all Hacker News can do is complain that it's Electron-based when it's not.

Seriously, if we're at the point where you just can't tell if it's native or Electron, I think it's time for the anti-Electron brigade to come to an end.

Not part of the anti-Electron brigade (native is, ceteris paribus, superior, but at a cost that can't always be justified), but

> if we're at the point where you just can't tell if it's native or Electron

We're really not. I don't know where the parent here got this daft idea, but you can be sure it wasn't from actually trying Quiver. It's gobsmackingly obvious that it's a true Cocoa app.

I will try to explain why I don't want to pay for note taking apps. Just an insight, I am probably wrong. Why ramble on like this? Maybe there is someone who can point me to a nice app that I can use.

The problem with most these apps is that I can't just point at a directory where the app should organise my files. I am not looking for something that saves my files to some strange (proprietary) format in an invisible place (some OS's app-data directories/online service). Putting files in folders is a problem that has been solved, it is called a file-system and all OS-s have it.

I want to work with a directory of markdown files like so:

- Easy to use on all my devices - Copy-paste images directly (biggest feature over a code-editor) - Proper code-highlighting and Markdown support support and generally easy to look at and use - Use normal directory structure for organisation - Sync using my normal tools (iCloud, Dropbox, etc), hence pointing at a dir - Search based on tags of some sort would be ok, but can't really see the use over directory structure

Apparently the top 2 requirements won out. I say 'apparently' as I ended up using Apple Notes for note taking as it is the easiest to use on all my devices and it does image copy-pasting very well. The only down-side is that there is no directory to point to at and it lacks proper support for code.

In reality I don't really feel the need to take code notes enough. I just put stuff in the `README.md` of a project that I needed the snippet for in the first place.

So I already have most of the features that I find relevant from a free part of my computer OS and phone OS (Apple Notes). Notes works very well, there is sync, pasting images works like a charm and when I really need a small code-snippet I can live with plain-text in monospace without code highlighting. Therefore I don't want to pay $1.5 (Bear) or any other amount of money per month.

I would pay a set price though for working with MY directories, but not ~$40 (Ulysses), rather than a monthly fee.

Especially pasting images from my clipboard is a must have feature for me. I'd also want to be able to work seamlessly from computer to phone to computer, etc. The last requirement being why just using Atom with git is not a good fit.

The Quiver format is very simple

https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/wiki/Quiver-Data-Format

Just some files organised in directories from a root you have stored on disk, with a simple JSON structure to describe a document.

You might find one of the Notational Velocity forks to be exactly what you're looking for:

http://notational.net

http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

(nvALT adds Markdown support and a few interface adjustments)

Point whichever NV you use to a directory of txt or markdown files in your Dropbox. NV is nimble and lightning quick, and it excels at super-fast search. Don't even bother with tags, just search.

Wouldn't a customizable version of http://devdocs.io/ have been a better sell?

Speaking of which, imagine combining that with a search tool that could also see what windows you had open and which one was in focus and the search tool could ask your text editors and IDEs to tell it what language was in use at the current cursor position and use that for filtering results.

So I press meta + space on my keyboard and a search box overlay pops up on my desktop.

The search box talks to my text editor and IDE windows and learns that currently I have an IDE open with Python 3 code in focus and aditonally I have two HTML files and three JavaScript files open.

I type date.

First result is Python 3 date module documentation from the official Python 3 docs of which I have a local copy.

Second result is HTML5 date element documentation from MDN of which I have a local copy.

Third result is JS Date object documentation from MDN of which I have a local copy.

Furthermore there are results of local copies of Stack Overflow questions about Python 3, HTML5 or JS that talk about “date”.

That’d be quite nice.

Maybe you can look at http://docsify.js.org

I would love something like this to replace Evernote, but being able to synchronize my notes between work and home is what keeps me locked in.

Also, can one of these apps add the ability to cross-reference notes? I used Wiki On A Stick back in the day and being able to cross reference notes was a killer feature for me.

I stopped using it because of all the hoops you have to jump through to get it working on modern browsers.

Looks neat!

I've been using Vim and Vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki to scratch a similar itch. I wish I was more consistent in using it though.

Vimwiki in a repository makes it easy to share between workstations (and different platforms).

I've only recently started using it but if you're looking for something similar but cross platform and open source I recommend: https://boostnote.io

All the core features you would needs from a notes app for developers. It even has iOS/Android apps.

Did a quick google search to see if there was anything similar to Quiver that is open source and you beat me to it on posting it :D. How's the experience been using boostnote?

If you are looking for native yet cross platform note taking, take a look at https://scribbleton.com/.

No association with it, just happy user.

i am using org-wiki on emacs. Quiver looks comfy but mac only. https://caiorss.github.io/org-wiki/

I am use FSNotes, it’s free and with iOS client in beta. https://github.com/glushchenko/fsnotes

Is this an Electron app? If so, can it be ported to Windows and Linux?

No. It has a simple & documented file format (https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/wiki/Quiver-Data-Format) so an equivalent could be built, but it's very much a Cocoa app so a port wouldn't be very feasible.

I believe it’s native Mac.

Wow this looks great!

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