A plain text note-taking system for problem solving | Hacker News Reader

A plain text note-taking system for problem solving

calculist.io

134 pointsthomascountz46 comments

Reminds me a little of [Numi](https://numi.app/). It doesn't exactly like plain text, but will happily eat it, but loves the math part. Seems this is the opposite of that, loves the text, but will happily digest math.

Why would I use this instead of org-mode (and babel) and maybe org-roam?

You should use whichever tool you prefer, of course. But it sounds like you're asking about how Calculist is different than Org-mode. The two have a lot of overlapping functionality, but Calculist is a little more friendly and approachable for non-techy people, and it has a cloud-based web version for collaboration (in addition to the local desktop version). There are other differences, but those are the main ones that come to mind.

The “more friendly” claim needs to be backed up with experience. I don’t think any of the similar products (numi, Calca, …) have reached a wider audience than Org. Excel, of course, continues to dominate the space, despite being much more complicated than all these tools combined.

The web version is not for collaboration, it’s for subscription income.

Looks great. But when solving a multi-step calculation problem, what is the unique selling point of your product vs jupyter notebook or google colab? Thanks

Calculist is more lightweight than Jupyter or Google Colab, and it's more note-taking oriented than data processing oriented. It's more of a handy thinking tool than a complete computing environment.

Very cool. I use plaintext lists for virtually everything. But generally, they're on my phone. I use Safe Notes, which allows you to encrypt individual notes. I wouldn't want to keep them in the cloud, and I use DDG browser so I'm not keeping a lot of local storage hanging around.

I would absolutely purchase this if it were packaged as an Android app.

Noted. A standalone mobile app is low on the dev priorities list right now, but hopefully we'll get to it someday.

Also, the desktop app (which will be available within the next few days) is 100% local, no internet connection necessary, and 100% private.

FWIW I've had multiple data loss issues with Safe Notes. Sometimes one notepad would spontaneously get overwritten by another. I've switched to Simple Notepad since then.

Eek.. I've been using it for a couple years and haven't run into that, but good to know!

I use WinSCP to maintain an encrypted remote directory of markdown files for notes and projects.

It's nice to let separate programs do the encryption/storage vs the editing.

I use (paid) Arq on the desktop for similar purposes, sending encrypted backups to a server I control. I don't know of a similar Android solution for self-hosted incremental backups.

I’m wondering if this is intended to become a place to publish public notebooks like observablehq.com? I think Observable benefits a lot from having lots of other people’s notebooks to use as inspiration.

Public documents will eventually be a supported feature, yes.

I can't tell how to use the defining forms at https://calculist.io/markup. These work:

    * \= 2*3
    * \(x, y) = x+y

However I'm not sure how to define a new function. Here's what I tried:

    * \: foo (x, y) = x+y  # no error
    * \=foo(2, 3)  # error

    * \:barr = 2*3  # no error
    * \=barr  # error

foo\(x, y) = x + y

\= foo(2, 3)

Thanks!

I had trouble finding documentation, is it possible to collapse/expand the text tree from the keyboard? Are there other keyboard commands?

Yes. Ctrl + spacebar to expand/collapse.

There's slightly outdated documentation on github: https://github.com/calculist/calculist/wiki/Keyboard-Shortcu...

I'm working on getting things updated now. More documentation will be available over the next few weeks.

It might be good to temporarily add a link on the main site for the documentation at https://github.com/calculist/calculist/wiki

Done. Thank you for the suggestion.

I think the term ‘plain text’ has evolved from its original meaning. Today, it seems to mean “can be opened in a text editor”.

This is very cool! It would be neat to see more examples of it in use. I didn't see any sort of example gallery.

I'm working on creating more resources now (videos, templates, better documentation, etc.), and I'll be updating the site accordingly in the coming days.

Math.js does the same thing. Demo on lucianmarin.com/num for some math, works on the phone too.

Very interesting - if it's a Desktop app it could replace my usage of Calca.

The desktop app will be released within the next few days.

Could you make a portable version for Windows? Maybe even work with PortableApps (It will increase exposure).

This is the MVP of Roam.

Roam is more oriented towards networked thought and knowledge management. Calculist is geared more towards problem solving and calculation.

Can you demonstrate how to use Calculist to solve a specific problem?

I tried the demo and expanded the items in the sample document. I saw examples of calculation! So I’d love to see examples of problem solving with Calculist.

This video gives an example of solving a basic math problem: https://youtu.be/ctSeZpJsyCk

This is not plain text. Plain text by definition is plain. It's like calling LaTeX plain text.

Calculist is plain text in the same way that markdown is plain text. Calculist is not WYSIWYG.

That's why Calculist is not actually plain text. Markdown is not plain text!

> Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text

> Markdown, the simple and easy-to-use markup language

> Markdown's syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web

It's formatted text or also called rich text.

It can be compiled to HTML and when viewed in a suitable viewer could be considered rich text, but markdown files are plaintext. Code sourcefiles are also plaintext. However, I think there should be another term (clean text?) that refers to text abscent of symbols which represent the markup. It would aid in conversation. For instance you might want to parse an HTML formatted document and be left with just the words and certain punctuation, or clean text (or something).

If code source files are plain text, I'm a bacteria.

Hi, Couldn't try as download wasn't available but seems like a great tool from reading other comments. Btw, the GitHub sources are 4 years old and so is the latest release; Are you renewing the project again?

I'm currently brainstorming a notes platform for second order thinking[1], Say like a community submitted scenarios for second-order, third-order thinking. Would Calculist be a good fit for such notes?

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/263-plan-second-order-third-ord... (Disclaimer: My platform)

Thus, representations such as SGML, RTF, HTML, XML, wiki markup, and TeX, as well as nearly all programming language source code files, are considered plain text. The particular content is irrelevant to whether a file is plain text. For example, an SVG file can express drawings or even bitmapped graphics, but is still plain text.:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_text

I'm not sure I like the analogy as a proof this can't be plain text; my professors and I would often use LaTeX snippets when communicating over plain-text mediums like e-mail -- not to later render into something nicer, but left as-is since it fit the problem domain well and allowed us to quickly communicate ideas that needed some degree of precision. Even if you're firmly in the "code can't be plain text" camp I think you'll agree that LaTeX used in that fashion still counts.

Interesting edge case, this one. Rich text is commonly called that because there is a GUI editor that transparently converts the markup to different styles.

However, that clearly doesn’t apply to markup that is common enough to become a medium of communication.

Then, the question is, where to draw the line? One could argue that markdown only provides minimal semantic structure, and as such is akin to punctuation, which hasn’t always existed in ”plain text”, either.

I think some new categories are needed. Effectively, the standard ones would be something like:

1. Unstructured text: edited and viewed in plain text editor, formatting limited to whitespace

2. Rich text: edited and viewed in GUI editor with unconstrained structured and unstructured formatting

3. Structured text: markdown, LaTeX, etc. Edited as plain text with minimal markup, viewed by rendering source document in GUI, with automatic formatting based on structure and chosen style

4a. Program code, human-written and -readable

4b. Program code, automatically generated (JS bundles, etc)

5. Machine code as binary

You are correct, my thread neighbours and the article are not. The definitions (compatible with Unicode §2.2) are:

1. Plain text: text without mark-up

2. Code and formatted/rich text (e.g. LaTeX, CSV, Markdown, HN comment): text with mark-up or conforming to a grammar with attached semantics.

3. binary (e.g. an ELF executable)

In the more distant past, when we didn't have a lot of "markup formats", "plain text format" just meant the opposite of "binary format", where "plain" was just emphasising its human readability. But I wrote my first BASIC program around the age of 7, in 1984 and the first and shortly after learnt Forth on a ZX Spectrum. So that's my perspective.

We wrote programs, which controlled a Roland DG DXY-880. That also used a plain text programing language.

I was not speaking a lot of English at that time, so mirror translating back from Hungarian, we said, "textual format" or "plain, textual format" ("síma, szöveges formátum"), to contrast its simplicity with binary formats.

(I was born and raised in Szeged though, so that could be just our regional dialect. How about you?)

Since this project is not really active, if you are looking for a modern take on fully local WYSIWYG note taking where you own the files, I highly recommend checking out my project https://bangle.io.

- It is fully local web app .. no servers no data hoarding.

- No proprietary format, it saves your notes in markdown in your computer.

- It is WYSIWYG editor so that you don't have to switch context.

Calculist is very much active.

> - It is WYSIWYG editor so that you don't have to switch context.

Funny, avoiding context switches is why I keep everything in plaintext...

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