Grug Notes, A tool for text: simple, fast, self-organizing notes

*damn.

A few more additional thoughts while anyone is looking:

I hope to get a fake demo dataset made soon. It doesn't seem all that useful when you login with nothing there. Similarity search is pretty meaningless until you have things in there. And it's cool to get a sense of how notes can build over time to something useful. As a personal crm, I'm not sure what would be easier.

Also need to make a more detailed video describing use cases, and explaining what the basic data models are.

The last day or so I've been working on more structured data extraction -- as I have more fun doing that than trying to fix a few regex issues on the front end.

fyi, I deployed a bug last night that broke the calendar. Fixed and deployed right now.

Thanks anyone for looking!

Very cool! Love the no-bullshit and concrete, to-the-point explanations. As one who tried a lot of TFT/SB apps, and built them too - I really appreciate the value of simple and focused ones. Sadly I won't use Grug as offline/onprem is a must for me, but you really set a new benchmark of what a MVP should look like.

Really inspiring. Let it bloom, and keep it up!

You must have a good napper if you have time to get into a programming mindset during their naps! Congrats!

Always excited to have more options in the PKM space. I have a couple questions — have you tried Obsidian.md? And what does grugnotes plan to use OpenAI for (besides as a development aid)

Looks like a cool app that could be very useful. Interesting work.

Suggestion:

Record a new demo video with what I am going to call "normal" contrast white background and light elements theme. Your demo is super low contrast and very dark. Hard to watch.

Take cues from the way UI colors work on computers as shipped to the average person. Nobody ships their OS with super dark low contrast everywhere. Just suggesting, if you intend to actually go to market, you might just turn off your average user.

I want to access my notes both macOS and Linux. Is this possible in the future? I haven’t watched the video yet (I’m traveling right now).

Move along then friend, it’s a wide internet with plenty of spaces more curated to your tastes. Reddit has lots of subs where 4chan-inspired humor is off limits, I can suggest them if you like. I’m sure when OP chose that name and logo he was worried about wet blankets coming to ruin the fun, well here one is.

If you’re the type to be offended by innocuous 4chan memes, you probably weren’t the target audience to begin with.

Personally, seeing a familiar, endearing meme like that actually brought me some comfort that the author was someone who was also raised online, not a bootcamp grad looking to cash in on a trend.

The idea for the grugjak image comes from the origin of the "grug" meme itself -- https://grugbrain.dev

Had no idea it was a meme, but it sold me on the fact that it really means simple (many “simple” apps are not at all simple). I like it!

Yeah, that’s my one hesitation. But proceeding until I come up with something better or have time to polish. Trying to be brutally honest with wall of text on what it is and isn’t. My normal business has always tried to present as having it together. With this, putting up every update I make each night is kinda freeing.

Data in this case being: an email address and a password.

Your concern feels overblown given that.

I think it's a good brand for a note-taking app. Many note-taking apps pitch themselves as the next evolution in your thinking, a tool that will unlock a new level of intellectual productivity. Their meme brand would be galaxy brain. Frankly, a lot of them are terrible because of their galaxy brain attitude, because by overpromising they convince you to invest a lot of time that would be better spent on something with more direct upside. The grug meme tells you that they're trying to buck that trend.

In this case I honestly trust someone with 4chan picture more.

write on hand not bad. enough usually.

note always “on-hand” when need. hehe

Caveman simplicity is the best! The “gardening” involved in many PKM apps is what has turned me away from them. I’ve started just throwing my stuff into a Markdown file on GitHub (so I can easily sync across devices). I’ve taken the same ethos to my website on GH pages (steph-inners.github.io) and use it to share knowledge that people commonly ask me about. It’s super easy to update, and Ctrl+F takes care of finding things later.

I do the same, but I have a few bash scripts to handle search, tags, date sorting, git commit/push/pull for sync, and a few other things. Works well for me, but I imagine that others would hate it.

Yes, & a light theme for very sun light-heavy environments (having a window in your office room).

Thanks, will prioritize this!

Thanks! Don’t have time for any other way!

I don’t plan a whole lot, but whisper looks fun and all other open ai stuff has been smooth to integrate. So sure, that’s a plan! In the mean time, I’ve used apple dictation when driving a couple times.

Ha! fairly certain I don't belong in any list with those other things, but thanks! also, what I said was a small stretch. I had one text box for weekly notes on my django app i made to collect my canoe building records and customer data. I did more or less start over from scratch with this. But yes, 1000% of my ideas are from making project websites 2000-2014, and from building canoes for 15 years.

Noted. I’d like to add some functionality through right click for removing or altering when ai gets things wrong. And drag and drop sorting of blocks.

I'd like to encrypt, but don't currently know the path to implementation and how it would or could work with ai features. I realize it's one of those key features that's a deal breaker for many, so depending on where this all goes I'll adjust as a priority.

I still put sensitive banking/health etc in apple notes lol. But I'm glad I at least seem honest! I am removing any admin views of note blocks so I can't even accidentally view anything, but every web person still knows it's possible with db access. Totally understand the need for guarantee. Thanks for checking it out.

Unrelated, just did a search and gmail just added end to end encryption last month!

Lol. No, he vacations in my town and bought a house like 100 yards from a studio I used to rent. I'm confident he'll buy some canoes from me at some point.

I'm not a big note taker at all either. I had a crazy covid, needed to manage a big project and 90 people over a few months. And found roam research invaluable in that process. More recently I got tired of the spinner on mobile so made this. Day to day, I use it to manage myself -- jotting down a few todo items daily. And as a personal crm, ie notes from phone calls and meetings. Basically a homepage to tell myself what to do.

appreciate kind words on the design (a process of tweaking tailwind classes til I'm not grumpy about it). at some point will get to more customization as others have mentioned things being hard to read.

It's a hat-tip to https://grugbrain.dev/

You’ll remember it haha

I have setup Joplin a few weeks ago and I really enjoy using it. AFAIK it is not as powerful as something like Notion or Obsidian, but it just works. And is already miles better than using loose txt files, like I was before.

Wow, thanks for the encouragement! I currently load all notes ever created on the one page. At some point that might not scale, but for now Ctrl f must be fastest search right?? Haha.

rad thanks. I wasn't planning any ai features, or datatypes -- but in toying with open ai it came about. I still need to add more inline methods to cast datatypes beyond people, companies, and locations. I'm working on attributes getting pulled out of notes too, so structured data is automatically created -- but not fully fleshed out yet. absolutely understand the need for local and encryption.

Yeah definitely seeing how far I can push textarea! Not sure it’s smart and the one issue I haven’t solved is the block indents on editing. But it’s ok. Still have the occasional or semi frequent rendering error when tags interfere. Hoping to stay away from content editable and any complicated editors. I use js to measure the width of spaces to set up pre so the two layers line up.

Artifact of using textarea over content editable. No good way to modify formatting of textarea, so instead I made styles fit textarea. Not exactly ideal, just where I ended up.

Logseq is awesome. But I really wanted a text box on a website.

Epic, thanks. Tweet at me or email keizo at grugnotes.com any questions, feedback or thoughts. There are lots of problems, many I’m aware of. But you already pointed out a good one I didn’t know! Will investigate.

Love htmx — literally gave me modern day skills. Still haven’t figured out npm, webpack, and how to use any js that’s not standalone

Noted. I try to keep the actual notes a little higher contrast. I don’t want any interface hence the low contrast on those things. But obviously what I like not for everyone and I’ll will add more options!

I’ll have to learn to make one. But lots of other things first.

so it pushes the text down the screen each day. grep also too advanced for me. need cmd-f. :)

Ehh, not really a pyramid schemes if there’s a reason to use the app beyond just signing up more people.

Feels like a shallow growth-hack.

It's a very poorly conceived pyramid scheme if so, since it's limited to 99 people and the revenue share only goes one referral deep

just an idea since I haven't enabled payments. open to feedback.

kind of a play, but yep I'm just an htmx fan boy. I did web dev growing up -- but haven't exactly kept up past 10 years. htmx has filled that gap for me. Also, the grug thing was a meme before htmx. I thought it was dumb, but honestly fits in every way with what I want in a note app.

Can you stop flamebaiting?

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Try it. I would think the same — but also Apple notes often blanks out when i open it on my iPhone se. I need to quit it and reopen fairly often.