Notion.clone: open-source notes editor like in Notion
github.com
github.com
If this intends to become a real project, not only notion.clone is a bad name, it is also clear trademark violation and will be shut down very quickly.
Not really, no.
> This doesn't look like a finished product meant for the public so it's fine I think.
Not how trademarks work, AFAIK, although IANAL.
i.e. Nobody's (very few people are) going to be looking for Notion and then be happy finding this instead, it seems to me more like I might use it as well, liking Notion's editor, but not wanting all of my/plain notes in Notion itself.
Edit: I should probably add that I think people vary quite heavily in how they use Notion - I've previously been berated on HN for comparing it to Airtable, since to me the defining feature and main use is the tables/cards/database/multi-views on to the same data, but others it seems just use it for 'pages' and I suppose perhaps page hierarchy as part of that.
Just lifting the name of a product you're cloning to register a .clone TLD is simple, but it also inherently means that no one else can, and that's sort of problematic in the face of shipping something you're explicitly describing as a copy.
But this is clearly someone stretching their legs on a tech stack with an homage to Notion.so, not a competitor
I mean they literally recommend the original in the first pargraph:
> This clone tries to replicate some of the great note-taking features Notion has. If you don't know Notion.so yet, I highly recommend to check it out!
The demo is just that, a demo. There's a very clear precedent for this sort of naming for tech demos that reimplement a product in a new tech stack
Spam was a trademark, it came into common use - it was no longer a trademark.
This is amazing work and I think the main thing I see missing is navigation.
Thank you for working on this.
I'd love to use Obsidian to store notes, mostly for the note graph, but it's missing aliases[0].
Tables can be done with Markdown anyway (with a plugin to make it easier), there is a Calendar plugin, IIRC timelines are in development, though you can already do Gantt charts with Mermaid.
It depends what exactly you want, but right now it's mainly static Markdown with features like templates, bidirectional linking, etc. but community-developed plugins and new features will likely quickly enable the features you need. I have been using Obsidian for a few weeks and it's been quite nice :)
You can configure views, filtering, sorting, summary’s, and foreign keys with roll ups....
That’s not something trivial to build, however I’d be pleasantly surprised if obsidian eventually got there.
If you learn ProseMirror [1], then building on top of outline's rich-markdown-editor or tiptap (which is also ProseMirror based) should be easier. What issues are you currently running into with extending that editor?
Also, any major distinctions between prosemirror, slate.js, and draft.js?
In addition, ProseMirror is built with JavaScript, and would require writing custom code to adapt to Vue or React. Slate and Draft are both built with React, which has it pros and cons. For example, using React means on each key press it’s going to run it’s whole virtual dom diff algorithm resulting in a higher input latency [1]. ProseMirror is more performant in this case by not using React and managing its own editor state. But Slate and Draft, by using React, gets easy server side rendering.
If I were to build a clone of Typora or Bear, I’d use Slate because 1. those editors are close to what Discord has as its chat editor and Discord uses Slate 2. Slate has better markdown support out of the box.
However if I were to build a Notion clone more focused on WYSIWYG, then I’d go with ProseMirror.
I wouldn’t go with Draft in any scenario since the community seems smaller and the library is less maintained, although twitter uses it.
[1] https://juretriglav.si/what-happens-when-you-type-a-single-l...
To be clear, it is indeed a demo project only. I just like Notion, so I thought it would be fun to recreate some of its functionality.
If anyone wants to dive deeper into how the clone works, I wrote a Medium article about that: https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-build-a-text-editor-like-noti...
1. Visualize a list of addresses on a google map, by grabbing the Google Maps JS SDK and mapping over the data in a table
2. Build an customer support email portal. In eCommerce, customers sometimes miss emails or they get blocked by spam, so you could create a little table of email types, then hook it up to the API calls needed to trigger the emails to customers. Then you can give this little UI to your customer support reps so they can enter an email (maybe build a little component to search your main database by user name), then just build a little component to trigger the email
3. One feature that unlocks a whole world, allow these custom components to be re-used in the notion slash menu, so you could create custom types like an internal widget that would be only useful in your organization, then your whole team could use it. Once you allow Notion pages to be embedded inside these custom components (like building a custom tabs component, each tab with a separate notion page), you just have an amazing internal tools development toolkit
Unlike Notion, which still gets confused by a mouse middle click, and instead of opening a new tab inserts your clipboard contents wherever it feels you clicked on the page. Likely in the middle of the URL you clicked on.
But it only happens about 1/2 the time. The other half of the time it works properly, opening a new tab.
This is pretty much a complete blocker for using Notion, as randomly adding your clipboard contents (can be passwords, sensitive conversation pieces, etc) is a security nightmare. :(
However Notion is the only web application this happens for. And it happens and every time I have to use Notion, across various different OS/hardware platforms and across Firefox versions.
What's your plan to make this open-source stand out?
Patent protection would traditionally be "unlikely", however with US having been accepting (totally worthless) software patents for a few years now it might feasible. But that would probably rely on Notion having gone through the process of patenting things...