Rnote – Sketch and take handwritten notes | Hacker News Reader

Rnote – Sketch and take handwritten notes

github.com

234 pointsBrajeshwar30 comments

I used this for taking notes last semester, and I think it's the best free software option right now. The UI is intuitive and, more importantly, the drawing feels good.

The absolute best might still be Styluslabs Write, which has very nice editing capabilities and I prefer its "pencil case" tool model (you have multiple tools with colour, shape, hardness, etc.). But it's closed source, doesn't run natively under Wayland, and I like Rnote's smoothing more.

I tried a whole bunch of the these apps, and I decided that Xournal++ [1] is better than Rnote for note taking. However, I have used Openboard [2] for teaching online since 2020.

I agree that Rnote's smoothing is better, but its tool selection UX is terrible. There are three different bars (top, bottom, and side), and you often need to move your mouse/hand to all of them across the screen in order to select the right tool. In Xournal++ I can put everything on the top bar.

Xournal++ has it's own problems. Pasting an image always makes it so big, that resizing to the correct size is difficult. It also doesn't have a laser pointer, which is why I can't use it for teaching. Creating a new document with the correct template is also painful.

Honestly, in another life, I would write a decent note-taking app.

[1] https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp/

[2] https://github.com/OpenBoard-org/OpenBoard/

Yeah, also wanted to suggest Stylus labs' app. Don't use a tablet much at present, but two years ago this was the best software I found.

Besides selecting/manipulating with rectangle/lasso/intersection selections, handwritten text that is roughly level with the page rules can be deleted/moved by using the stylus as a "cursor." It understands punctuation and descenders and works surprisingly well. Text that is pushed too far to the right even "reflows" to the next line. The site [1] has a good explanation of how this works.

Rnote looks nice too though. I wonder if it'll be able to match the UX of Write.

[1] https://www.styluslabs.com/

~~Unfortunately doesn't implement expand/contract vertical space (insert or remove vertical space).~~ Ages ago when I used a Toshiba tablet laptop to do math this was a real killer feature in xournal (https://xournal.sourceforge.net/ | https://xournalpp.github.io/)

Demonstration: https://youtu.be/uxFRWpY5o8k?t=299

Yes it does. Click the wrench at the bottom of the window ("Tools"), and the first option is "Insert Vertical Space".

Ah, thanks. That was about the only place I didn't look apparently

An earlier post from about 5 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39671212

I found out about this software way too late, but converting from Xournal to Rnote was not hard luckily. Since then this is among the first apps I install on my 2in1 and I urge anyone using Xournal to give this one a try. I wonder which one of them has the better performance (battery life), this might be an interesting marketing point

This looks cool. I'd love an iOS variant too.

I used to do a LOT of handwritten notetaking on top of existing PDFs so if you're shopping around for apps I'd call out

https://pdfexpert.com/ which to date has the best handwriting recognition I've seen. Plus I they're Ukrainian so bonus points for helping support that economy

https://www.drawboard.com/ which is what I used for Windows

On iOS, Nebo (https://www.nebo.app/) also has really good handwriting recognition and you can write on PDFs.

that looks awesome, thanks!

I recently tested Rnote(Rust) and Saber(Flutter)[1] with a wacom tablet; RNote is minimalist, gets the job done while Saber does some post-processing to make the note prettier, has lot of features and even makes sounds of pen writing on the paper which creates some latency.

Unfortunately Saber crashes when I move to another window and could not even report it to Gnome; Too bad as I do like flutter & dart lang but I don't think the runtime is stable enough for linux.

[1] https://github.com/saber-notes/saber

This piece of software is so good and fast even I'm using it for presenting my work at dayjob

Having onenote erase a days worth of work because it couldn't sync my tablet (and there was no way of exporting it as pdf or anything else) this looks really interesting. Hope there is an android version eventually.

Found this app https://github.com/saber-notes/saber in an earlier thread about this, and at first glance it looks amazing. Multi plattform, you can sync and its easy to save as pdf.

Who’s going to use this on MacOS to take notes? The only input devices are expensive Wacom-style devices. iPad Pro with Apple Pencil is the way to go here, am I wrong?

Drawing tablets are not expensive. I recently purchased a Deco Mini 7 for under $40

I will. This is the app I wanted for a long time.

I am using an iPad connected to my MBP with the sidecar feature. It is somewhat buggy currently(1). I am updating my iPad to see if that is the issue. Do note that I have an iPad 9th gen and an Apple pencil 1st gen.

(1) The tap (left click simulation) does not seem to work which stops me from changing from writing to erasing. So I have to use my mouse instead of the pencil

edit: The issue seems to be from sidecar that does not allow tap as left click anymore https://support.apple.com/en-us/102597

I really like how a lot of software built to run amongst other GNOME applications, usually looks really GNOME-y. I know it's mostly just an effect of the system GTK components looking the way that they do, but it seems like people keep to the same icons, layouts, fonts, etc. when they make GNOME apps. RNote wouldn't look out of place next to any other system app, which is a rarity on other platforms!

I'd really like better export and sync options on the Kindle Scribe. Its pencil input is great, but it can only export by emailing a PDF.

Couldn't it just dump everything you write into a WebDAV share? It's apparently Android underneath, so it's not like the software can't support it.

This is really cool.

Besides the obvious “have idea, build idea”, how can one start a successful challenging open source project like this?

The first consideration is which tool/toolkit/language, and that almost always induces analysis-paralysis in me.

Back when I was doing typography when a new tool came out I'd always do a type specimen book for whatever typeface I was currently fascinated by --- which is a bit better than "Lorem ipsum", or by extension, "Hello World" --- perhaps all GUI development systems should offer an equivalent to Steve Jobs' "5-minute word-processor demo" for NeXTstep?

Tool/toolkit/language should be the final consideration, right before you start coding. The first question is who your target audience is and what functionality best serves them.

I only do projects for myself, so that's a known thing for me.

Sadly, this is not in Debian (but it is in Arch repositories).

Distrobox exists nowadays, you can pretty much run anything in anything

GPLv3 and Rust! Color me impressed! I wonder how hard it would be to run on android (or port if needed).

Looks cool!

pencil/ink on paper

Excellent. As somebody getting in to and learning Rust with some ideas, this is amazing to see and learn, especially with Linux application development.

Gives me a lot to play with!

Absolutely great work.

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