Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app
github.com
github.com
If somebody else can justify that proposition to themselves they are more than welcome to fork the app from the last available open-source version and take the open-source path.
Open-sourcing it again is not out of the table, but I need to make the project financially sustainable before considering this.
By the way a lot of the interesting libraries used inside the app are released as open-source still, mostly under my profile: https://github.com/fabiospampinato?tab=repositories&type=sou...
How do you think about the growth/monetization trade-offs?
No further commits. However most of the core libraries I wrote for it are open-source, so in some sense it's not entirely closed.
> How do you think about the growth/monetization trade-offs?
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that.
I'm not interested in publishing so I instead focused on adding extensions for things like tags (to get closer to the Zettelkasten principle) and more features like graphs (e.g. using mermaid). I would recommend installing 'Markdown Preview Enhanced' to really improve the experience.
I also like Typora as a markdown editor. Nice in-page editing. Obsidian is good for a project overview, with the map (graph) view but it's not that great as a single-page editor tool.
I think that sounds sketchy to some people, but hear me out:
1. I couldn't stand using Evernote anymore, I couldn't find a Markdown-based alternative that I really liked, I thought I would make one for myself.
2. After the app was "done", at least enough for it to be usable for me, I released it on GitHub, essentially because open-source is my default, and shared it on the internet.
3. The app got a bit of traction and I thought I would continue working on it maybe for a bit longer.
4. At some point months of my time had been put into it, and many more months were needed before the app could start to generate some revenue (I'm ~18 months in now, and no revenue yet), so I couldn't justify releasing all the code anymore, but I still wanted to improve the app.
At this point in the story what would you do? I saw the following options:
1. Abandon Notable and move onto other projects. But why would I do that? I like working on it, and people seem to like it.
2. Rename Notable into something else and make another repo. I think this would have been considered the "fairer" option for some people here, but if you think about it it doesn't really make sense: Notable-open would still receive no further open-source commits, I would have to ask all my existing users to move to another app for some reason (breaking automatic updates), and frankly I would even need to find a new name, which I had made a logo for, bought the "notable.md" domain and registered a bunch of online accounts with that name already.
3. Releasing the code with a more restrictive license, but I don't really believe in licenses, like a license to me is not a law of nature that fundamentally forbids people from copying the entire app, making a few tweaks, and selling a competing product out of that, it just means that if I'm convinced somebody has done that, and there are laws in his/her country, and if I sue him/her, then probably I will win. For a project that has net me a negative income essentially in opportunity cost, so far at least, why would I go for that trouble?
4. The path that I ended up taking.
Do you people see any other options? Do you have any strong arguments for why I should have taken another path?
Slight rant: I'd be much more impressed if the people strongly criticizing how I spent my time, largely solely to the benefit of Notable's users and the open-source community as a whole (almost all core components of the app are standalone libraries I'm open-sourcing fully), had taken the path they are advocating for themselves.
If you want to try a not-yet final version of v1.9 you can find it here: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases It's quite stable at this point and I would trust it more with my data over v1.8, but I haven't written the new tutorial notes and built-in documentation for it yet, and I need to rewrite the search engine before releasing v1.9 final.
If you want to get a quick sneak peek about v1.9 I had recorded a video about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8ERHvuhFH8 It's about 2 months old now, and it only goes over a bunch of new features I had implemented at that point in time.
We also have a chat by the way, if you'd like to keep track of the progress more closely: https://chat.notable.app
Hopefully I'll see you back soon once v1.9 gets released, that will be a lot more exiting than the current v1.8.4.
I could name everything as `001-scene1.md`, `002-scene2.md`. But if I want to change the order, it's an O(n) operation by hand, which is painful.
Another thing is that I really want a good pen support. Many notes I take are not texts.
The reason we have so many "Yet-another-note-taking-app" is probably that everyone has a few personal quirks when taking notes, thus the requirement differs from person to person.
> My biggest problem with these note-taking apps is that there is no way to have a manual order in the file list.
This has come up a few times, I don't have anything against it, I'm just not sure how it should work exactly. Like since the app supports sorting notes by a few dimensions (title, creation date, modification date), how would a manual sort order fit into this? Would that be a separate sorting dimension? Would that work alongside the built-in dimensions? How do you know if a note is being rendered at position X because a built-in rule or because you manually moved there? How should the user remove manually-set note orders?
If you have any suggestions I'm all hears, so far I haven't been able to think of a really good solution to this.
> The reason we have so many "Yet-another-note-taking-app" is probably that everyone has a few personal quirks when taking notes, thus the requirement differs from person to person.
I can't speak for all people who made note-taking apps but I would personally agree with this.
Slight rant: part of the problem IMHO is that people have hundreds of note-taking apps to choose from, some of which even completely free and open source, and they just don't want to pay for them, often not even technical users, and if a project is not financially sustainable _eventually_ it's going to die, or it will never get to implement the features needed by those other people that will eventually end up starting new note-taking apps, maybe that's a factor that contributed to the proliferation of all these apps too.
Linux conf files often use this technique so that they can load in the right order while still making it easy for you to insert your own additions at any point: e.g. /etc/fonts/conf.d/{nn}-{slug}.conf, the numbers I have in there are 10, 10, 20, 30, 40, 45, 45, 49, 50, 51, 60, 60, 65, 65, 69, 80, 90.
You can also just add more digits after the number and disregard any neatness of scheme; 0011-{slug} and so forth will go after 001-{slug}.
I don’t say either of these are good solutions, but they’re possibilities.
I have two portable installs in different folders - one journaling. The other for work notes. The problem is that only one instance of joplin can work at a time. So to use one, I'd have to kill the other. That is the only reason I'm looking for an alternative
Can you share notes with joplin?
Can you backup to my own webdav?
Sadly there really isn't any sharing. I mean, you could possibly do it via sharing the same sync endpoint, but there is no control to what would be seen.
I used to use Joplin with Fastmail's webdav.
I really miss the old Tomboy. It was lightning fast and you could hotlink to another note just by typing its name. It had keyboard shortcuts for everything and searches were pretty much instant. But it's not maintained anymore, and the "NG" version lost the speediness of it (it was a complete rewrite)
The only thing I didn't like about it was that it was based on mono/.net and that it didn't have a CLI version. But despite using mono it was still really fast, it was just a bit of an installation hassle. I'd still use it today if it was still viable, but the lack of HiDPI support in particular makes it really difficult to use today.
One thing about Tomboy that I was a bit divided about was the lack of images. Today I use OneNote because it's basically the only thing my work supports. But I took much better notes with Tomboy as I always had to type content in my own words, whereas with OneNote I got lazy and just screenshot presentation sheets (which aren't searchable and make the database huge and slow).
I used it when it first came out, but immediately moved away when he started talking about monetization and giving up on open source. I fully understand the desire to make money. It's just that it's a notes app and it does the same thing as a gazillion similar apps. When this app goes away you've wasted your money and your time for no reason.
I don't think people understand that generally if something is financially unsustainable it will die, it's sad that even computer people don't like paying for the software they depend on.
I just couldn't justify to myself continuing working on it full-time, while still not making any revenue, and open-sourcing all of it. So far I've been working on it for about 18 months full-time and I haven't made a penny from it really, some people are generous enough to donate some money to me, but it's extremely difficult to make a living off of open-source.
If anybody doesn't feel the same way about this they are more than welcome to fork the app and take the full open-source path themselves of course.
Also (also mentioned this below), hinting that there's monetisation coming up but not specifying any details, will put potential users off.
There's so many payment models you could go for, like a monthly/yearly or lifetime license. I personally hate subscription-based services, no matter how cheap they are, I prefer to spend a bigger amount once. Other people will feel differently, but by not saying anything you're leaving this as a potential concern in a customer's mind as the price and payment model may not suit them in the future.
One thing you might consider is open the source but not legally leaving it open, so using a more restrictive license. Electron apps are never really closed-source anyway as it uses interpreted languages. Opening the source doesn't really preclude charging for it.
I wasn't saying this because I want the app for free (even though it seems to be free right now?). It was just my thoughts as a potential user. I personally have a pet peeve against electron, and what I would be looking for would be more barebones and keyboard-oriented anyway, so I won't use it either way. But I'm sure it will fit the needs of many others.
Anyway not all users/customers are the same but these are just my personal concerns when I saw this. I wasn't aware of Notable. I do wish you the best of luck though and I hope you can make it deliver a decent income!
Right, but if it doesn't make economic sense to put development time into the app in the first place you can essentially consider an app dead already. Potentially this may sound counter intuitive, but paying for closed-source software (closed because otherwise most people won't open up the wallet) may make the software you depend on _more_ sustainable than if it was open-source.
> Also (also mentioned this below), hinting that there's monetisation coming up but not specifying any details, will put potential users off.
How did you get that feeling? It probably happened that I didn't fully quality what I meant by that for the 100th time somewhere, but I tend to remember to write that the mobile app will be paid essentially.
> I personally hate subscription-based services, no matter how cheap they are, I prefer to spend a bigger amount once.
Right, I've heard this comment a bunch of times. So how much do you think you should pay Notable for hosting all your notes and attachments forever? Let's not even account for development time or anything else.
> One thing you might consider is open the source but not legally leaving it open, so using a more restrictive license. Electron apps are never really closed-source anyway as it uses interpreted languages. Opening the source doesn't really preclude charging for it.
Any binary can be patched, using Electron doesn't mean that apps are open-source.
> I personally have a pet peeve against electron, and what I would be looking for would be more barebones and keyboard-oriented anyway, so I won't use it either way.
Notable's zen mode is about as bare-bones as it gets, and if you try the shortcuts system in one of the alphas of v1.9 it's even better than vscode's in some areas.
It's easy to talk about how other people's work should be given for free when you have a source of income every month, and your basic needs are covered.
But if the author is trying to live of his work, as it's the case here, it's a decision that should be respected.
And Yes, you can disagree with him, and in that case, you can vote with your wallet by not buying it and using any other app.
I often support open-source projects financially and I would be a lot less likely to support this now that it's not. It's not just a matter of giving anything for free. It's about continity: That someone else can carry on with the app (and the data I've put in it!) if he decides to give up on it.
But like I said I don't like this particular app anyway for the reasons I mentioned so I don't use it. It would however be a big detractor for me when looking for a new app.
Especially this thing would put me off: "I've decided to figure out how to make it sustainable first before figuring out potentially how to license it, in order to make this less risky for me."
So in other words, there will be monetisation coming later, but no indication on what kind of price or payment model (think monthly, lifetime etc) he will go for. This would be a big uncertainty for me if I were to consider spending time to put my data into this thing. Who knows if I'll find the upcoming price acceptable. This and the continuity thing would make it a non-starter for me, and I assume many others too. Don't forget the market of notetaking apps is very crowded.
Building the thing that one can sell takes time you know.
> I often support open-source projects financially and I would be a lot less likely to support this now that it's not.
Do you think honestly that you would spend more on software if everything you depend on was closed source or less? It's not a matter of being greedy, it's just human nature, if one can get something for free it's way less likely that one's going to pay for it, or pay fairly for it.
> It's about continity: That someone else can carry on with the app (and the data I've put in it!) if he decides to give up on it.
I'm not sure I agree with that, if I decide to abandon Notable because it doesn't make financial sense to me, how do you think is going to continue its development? Like if something is not financially sustainable it's probably dead int he first place.
Plus this argument for an app like Notable where notes are written in Markdown and they really truly _are_ the database of the app doesn't make a lot of sense, I don't think you can get less "no vendor lock-in" than this.
> So in other words, there will be monetisation coming later, but no indication on what kind of price or payment model (think monthly, lifetime etc) he will go for.
I haven't figured out the pricing yet, it's probably going to be something around 5 bucks a month. Lifetime licenses are unsustainable, like how much do you think you should pay Notable for hosting all your notes and attachments forever?
I know, but open-source does not mean free (as in beer), and closed-source does not mean paid. They are essentially unrelated things. You can publish the source but not license it.
> I'm not sure I agree with that, if I decide to abandon Notable because it doesn't make financial sense to me, how do you think is going to continue its development? Like if something is not financially sustainable it's probably dead int he first place.
This disregards the many great free apps that are around :)
But anyway this point came from having the bad experinece of having all my notes in a system that pretty much got abandoned, and it really helped that it was open source to export my notes from its XML format. That's the main reason for that point from my side.
> I haven't figured out the pricing yet, it's probably going to be something around 5 bucks a month. Lifetime licenses are unsustainable, like how much do you think you should pay Notable for hosting all your notes and attachments forever?
Ah, like I said I didn't use the app but I wouldn't really want a note system that uses third-party servers anyway. I'd want to self-host it. With Tomboy I used to just sync its files with OwnCloud (because the built-in sync server was not great).
However that pricing comes very close to other commercial options that are highly regarded, like EverNote (7 euro/month) or OneNote (you can get OneNote on a 5 euro per month O365 subscription that also includes email hosting and 1TB OneDrive). The 'hosted' notetaking market is very competitive. I'm not looking for a hosted option myself but I do know the market (and I use OneNote in work as it's the only thing I'm allowed to use there :( )
And what has that to do with your comment about not seeing the point of closing the source when the app is still free? I've answered why releasing the code with a stricter license (or no license) wasn't a viable strategy for me in a reply to the first comment in this HN posting.
> This disregards the many great free apps that are around :)
Which apps have at least the equivalent of somebody working full-time on them for free? And how long do you think that can go on?
> Ah, like I said I didn't use the app but I wouldn't use a note system that uses third-party servers anyway. I'd want to self-host it.
Of course you do, what do you think a fair pricing for that would be then?
> However that pricing comes very close to other commercial options that are highly regarded, like EverNote (7 euro/month) or OneNote (you can get OneNote on a 5 euro per month O365 subscription that also includes email hosting and 1TB OneDrive).
I wouldn't say Evernote is highly regarded, but anyway it's not always about finding the cheapest thing out there, for example I want to write my notes with Markdown, it doesn't matter to me if Evernote or OneNote are free if I can't do that with those apps.
But I'd pay 20-40 euro for a good notetaking app with self-host capability. Maybe 50 if it's really good.
Let me just mention that with that amount of money I can buy about 2~5 fresh pizzas, if a good note-taking app provides about the same value to you maybe you don't even need one.
* Here's just one link: https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html
"Machine would suspend and resume without problem, WiFi just worked, audio did not stop working, I spent three weeks without having to recompile the kernel to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers, or deal with the bizarre and random speed degradation that my ThinkPad suffered."
But overall I've had no such issues with Linux during the last years. I use all 3 desktop platforms a lot, and my favourite was Mac, but due to Apple's constant "dumbing down" (both the OS and hardware) to appeal to the iPhone/iPad userbase it meets my needs as a power users less and less.
However its performance is amazing, it's the fastest notetaking app I've ever used. And I also really loved the lack of the concept of 'saving'. Everything you type is automatically saved.
But also: The UI. Electron apps have a very distinct "non-native" UX about them. Sure they look kinda pretty in many cases but they don't integrate well with every client OS. They all do their own UI thing, just like in the early days of Linux on the desktop.
There's a few gems that use Electron really well. VS Code comes to mind. But even Microsoft itself publishes some really poor electron apps, like Skype for Business and Teams for Mac that are horrible resource hogs.
As I mentioned there is Tomboy-NG: https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy-ng/releases/tag/v0.29 . It's a complete rewrite in a different language (Pascal with Qt).
It doesn't have the same ultra-fast feel of the old one though. And hyperlinks to other notes don't seem to update instantly like on the old one. I've tried it once but I never had that real "wow" feeling of the original.
Also suspicious that Ink is the only markdown editor not listed in your comparisons, despite being the one most similar to your project
There are hundreds of note-taking apps out there, believe it or not when I first made the comparison table I didn't know about Inkdrop, later on I learned about it of course, it should be added to the table. Adding a new app to the table isn't exactly a fun experience as you can imagine, I guess I prioritized more doing other things.
Ultimately I settled on Zettlr. It can be used as a normal notebook, and most importantly it's killer feature to me is that it allows you to paste images from your clipboard into a note, and then view that image inline in the markdown editor instead of having to switch to the rendered view to see the image. All of the other applications show a markdown ![image-filename]() link inside the note editor, requiring you to switch to the rendered view to see the actual image. The only other applications I found which can do this are: Joplin with the experimental editor, OneNote (no linux support, proprietary format), Bear Note (Apple devices only), and a few desktop note taking applications with a non-markdown format and no mobile application. With any of the markdown ones you can sync to Syncthing, NextCloud, Dropbox, etc. and then access them on your phone with the Joplin mobile application. But Zettlr just feels better than Joplin on the desktop, has some nice themes, and the editor is more refined than Joplin's experimental one.
Given this, I don't really see any reason to use Notable over Joplin and Zettlr. QOwnNotes is also good if you really don't want electron and can live without inline images. I used all four of these for quite a while before forming this opinion.
In practice this means that you should be getting better startup times with Joplin's approach, but anything that has to do with manipulating a lot of notes with an external tool is trivial in Notable, but you can't really do it with Joplin.
Plus each note in Notable contains its own metadata in the YAML frontmatter section of the note. Last time I checked Joplin just doesn't expose this at all.
I don't know enough about QOwnNotes to compare it in the same level of detail.
If you want to give Notable another spin you should probably try one of the alphas of v1.9: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases the app changed quite significantly. For one now all shortcuts are customizable like they are in VSCode, and theming too is pretty much like in VSCode, in fact I ported all themes from VSCode to Notable, they are installable via the "Theme: Install..." command in the command palette.
I usually assume these projects exist because the creator looked for a solution to their problems but couldn't find one. So it's nice to have their research presented like this instead of having to try to figure it out myself.
The only issues with the comparison table are that it takes quite a bit of time to try all the features in all the apps, if you want to add a new row you are in for a wild ride downloading many note-taking apps, and the more apps you add the less the table becomes easy to read. And of course the reader may disagree with the content in the table, but it's impossible to make everybody happy about everything.
Edit: This is nice, it's also out on linux and windows, unlike Bear which was one of the big negatives for me (day job is on Windows 10 where a note app like this is lacking). Def giving it a try.
I'd probably switch if something great came along. I liked a lot of things about Bear but the pricing model drove me away.
I tried to just use iA Writer for plain markdown but the structure/search isn't usable.
A part of me just wants something simple as http://notational.net/
That time I understood that I undermined the importance of a simple note taking app. Which drives me away for the new electron based app of the month. Because they can just stop being maintained and my content is stuck there.
The issue for it was opened in 2016 but the dev doesn't seem interested. Search and replace should be core functionality for any text or code based editor IMHO.
Notable looks good, but not sure if it can be made to do this.
It's not the prefect solution but good enough.
I haven't gotten to implementing the analogous thing but for rendered notes yet.
Soz for the rant. Great app though. Well done.
Many of the interesting features you might be referring to are available there.
Anyone have any idea why this is? I assume the ones that show up here are mostly people scratching their own itch, but are note-taking needs all that diverse?
> I couldn't find a note-taking app that ticked all the boxes I'm interested in: 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 notes (because that's what I was using before).
> So I built my own.
In either case can you provide some steps that would help me reproduce the slowness you experienced?
And you should blame that entirely on me, Electron doesn't really have much to do with this.
Machine is 2020 MBP 13" i7 32gb. Drag the window and you'll see white flash on the background. This complaint is pedantic for sure, just as a note. I was having issues with dragging the separators before but these don't seem to be reproducible currently, so perhaps it was specific to my machine.
Another note is that typing in Notable pushes my CPU to about 10%+ usage. It doesn't do this with Notes. Also the smoothness of typing in native Notes vs this app is quite apparently, everything seems more fluid on the native app (it seems like Notable is, at times, struggling to keep up with rendering).
Again I'll note I'm very pedantic about the native feel of apps and I very much dislike electron / non-native type apps, so take my criticisms with appropriate amounts of salt. Nice job on the app!
I'm on a 2014 MBP and I can indeed reproduce this issue with the last version of the app, that indeed is one of the few things Electron makes harder on the developer to remove, but I think there might be ways to fix that, I'll look into it.
> Another note is that typing in Notable pushes my CPU to about 10%+ usage.
That might be harder to fix, although on my 6yo machine I can see similar numbers when writing inside Notes as well, maybe they fixed it in Catalina or Big Sur. I can't really see any difference in smoothness, are you using an external high refresh rate display perhaps?
> Again I'll note I'm very pedantic about the native feel of apps and I very much dislike electron / non-native type apps, so take my criticisms with appropriate amounts of salt. Nice job on the app!
I know how some people have almost an ideological stance on this, don't worry about it.
Sorry for the delayed response, yes it is a 100hz external display.
General-purpose text editors are not focused on note-taking, so while apps like vscode are powerful enough that you can kind of hack on top of it and build your own note-taking app on it, it just doesn't make a lot of sense for vscode itself to support printing notes, or hyperlinking between them, or adding a tagging system, or searching all notes containing a particular attachment etc.
And vscode has been developed for way longer than most of these new apps, eventually the set of features provided by these note-taking apps you would want to use that vscode just doesn't provide, either at all or in an integrated-enough way, should grow considerably.