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Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app

125 points by shahinrostami 6y ago

shahinrostami 6y ago
Big fan of Notable, thought I'd share it!
gaara87 6y ago
I've been using notable for a few months now. Its really good for a basic note taking up but clearly theres a lot more in the pipeline that excites me :)
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  If you don't know about the alphas of v1.9 already you should probably give them a try: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases Many of the interesting features you might be referring to are available there.
nullify88 6y ago
Been using it myself for a few years now. Mostly at work for code snippits, scripts, or commands as it has decent syntax highlighting. Synced to dropbox. Love its minimalist UI and feature set.
moneywoes 6y ago
No Android app?
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  Not yet! As notes are just Markdown files on disk some people have been editing their notes on Android with Markor: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.gsantner.markor&hl=en_GB https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.gsantner.m...
- redsolver 6y ago
  I really like Notable, so I made an open-source Android app which is compatible with notes saved in Notable. https://github.com/redsolver/noteless https://github.com/redsolver/noteless
dang 6y ago
If curious see also 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765482
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  @dang I'm Notable's author. I had planned to post on HN about the next update of the app in a few weeks, which I've been working on for about 6 months now, the current post has been made with a bit of an unfortunate timing by a user. Hopefully this will be to ok you and the other people moderating the site. The app changed quite significantly in almost all areas, it's essentially like another app that looks similar to the older one at this point, the post won't be "more of the same thing" if people will actually comment on the app, I'll try to push for a healthier discussion.
pagade 6y ago
For me, ability to quickly expand/collapse headings/sub-headings is essential when I am working with markdown. After some effort got it working in Sublime Text. Notable looks good, but not sure if it can be made to do this.
- SanchoPanda 6y ago
  I struggle with this in sublime, I would love to hear how you figured it out.
  - pagade 6y ago
    I installed the SyntaxFold package and customized the key binding. There needs to be 2 empty lines between sub/headings for folding to work. It's not the prefect solution but good enough.
    - SanchoPanda 6y ago
      This just made my day, thank you so much.
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  Folding is implemented in the editor in the latest alphas of v1.9 already: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases I haven't gotten to implementing the analogous thing but for rendered notes yet.
  - pagade 6y ago
    I tried the latest alpha. It works as expected. Thanks!
evo_9 6y ago
Looks like a clone of Bear, which is an awesome mark-down based note app: https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/ 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.
- salmon30salmon 6y ago
  It most likely isn't a clone. While Bear predates Notable, the timeline does not seem like Notable was a deliberate clone at all.
  - evo_9 6y ago
    I don't mean to imply it was intentional but rather a good sign, Bear is awesome. Nice to have a similar app for other platforms.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
activitypea 6y ago
The comparison matrix made me close the tab immediately.
- captn3m0 6y ago
  I liked it.
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  What's the problem with it? It can be changed if you have any suggestions.
nautilus12 6y ago
I use simplenote but I still feel like the added features to this are enough to convince me to switch
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  You should give the last alpha of v1.9 a spin, it blows v1.8.4 out of the water in many ways: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Yet another electron-based notetaking app.. There's already so many of those. And it's not even open source (anymore, since version 1.5.1). Why go to closed-source for something like this? 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).
- bachmeier 6y ago
  > Why go to closed-source for something like this? 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.
  - fabiospampinato 6y ago
    > I fully understand the desire to make money. 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.
- FooBarWidget 6y ago
  For some historical perspective, consider this. When Tomboy was new, people complained about its ‘bloat’. Why? Because it’s ‘unnecessarily’ written in .NET, and Mono was a ‘huge and bloated’ dependency.
arpit 6y ago
There was an interesting point during Notable's development when the project went from an open source one to closed source [1]. While I get open source developers should be paid for the work, I am not sure how I feel about OSS projects getting some attention and then closing source [1] https://github.com/notable/notable/issues/432 https://github.com/notable/notable/issues/432
- theobr 6y ago
  All of this said, I've recently found Foam hard to beat. Awesome markdown "thought web" experience built right into VSCode. Refreshing approach after years of mediocre Electron apps https://github.com/foambubble/foam https://github.com/foambubble/foam
  - dcsan 6y ago
    2nd for FOAM. Its really awesome. this VSCode as a platform is taking off. There are other markdown renderers like dotgraph that can easily be embedded in your visuals using other extensions. And then all the power of VScode editing on top. It's a shame for obsidian tho... 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.
  - djeiasbsbo 6y ago
    I use this too but have already extended it a lot. What I don't really understand is what the Foam extension itself does (I think nothing yet?!). 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.
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  Author here, I realize how from the user perspective if the app stayed open-source and I still kept working on it full-time that would have been better, but that scenario is unrealistic, I just couldn't justify to myself working on it full-time without getting any revenue out of it and releasing everything as open-source, and I've been working on it for about 18 months now. 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=source https://github.com/fabiospampinato?tab=repositories&type=sou...
bicx 6y ago
I tried using Notable for a while. I ended up sticking with Mark Text. I enjoy the more Bear-like WYSIWYG editor I can switch to for normal note taking.
linuxdaemon 6y ago
Personally I have been a fan of Joplin https://joplinapp.org https://joplinapp.org for note taking. It is also markdown-based with all kinds of features and is MIT licensed.
- vezycash 6y ago
  I love joplin. 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
- bedros 6y ago
  I'm looking for a not taking app, currently using omni notes Can you share notes with joplin? Can you backup to my own webdav?
  - bachmeier 6y ago
    > Can you backup to my own webdav? I used to use Joplin with Fastmail's webdav.
  - linuxdaemon 6y ago
    WebDAV, Nextcloud, Dropbox and one drive are all supported sync endpoints. 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.
- SweetestRug 6y ago
  I am a huge fan of Joplin. Love that it has both a GUI as well as terminal interface and syncs via Dropbox. I can use vim emulation in the GUI and real vim when running from the terminal.Oh - and it has a mobile app too. All libre software.
- novok 6y ago
  Joplin has a broken mobile interface on iOS. I had hopes, but they were dashed.
powersnail 6y ago
My biggest problem with these note-taking apps is that there is no way to have a manual order in the file list. 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.
- baxtr 6y ago
  I had my own note taking app a while back. And that’s exactly what I realized. There will never be a mass market note taking app because of that. However, it’s also nice in way because there will be many many niche players.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  One solution when going with lexicographical ordering is to use a bigger step, so that you can reorder things without having to renumber all the files. 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.
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  Notable's author here. > 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.
maigon 6y ago
Zettlr is so much better than this, how can you possibly omit it from your marketing comparison matrix? oh nevermind
theobr 6y ago
Now that Notable is closed-source, it feels like a feature-incomplete version of Inkdrop: https://www.inkdrop.app/ https://www.inkdrop.app/ Also suspicious that Ink is the only markdown editor not listed in your comparisons, despite being the one most similar to your project
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  Author here, I can add Inkdrop to the comparison table. 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.
kochthesecond 6y ago
I use standard-notes for its focus on zero knowledge design and simple markdown plus potential economic viability.
- random3 6y ago
  I was wondering what's the difference between the two.
choward 6y ago
I really like the comparison chart. I wish every project had that. The first thing I think when I see a project like this and there are a ton of options is "why?". This helps with answering that. 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.
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  Author here. I agree with your comment wholeheartedly. 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.
imagetic 6y ago
I've been on Quiver for quite a few years now — https://happenapps.com https://happenapps.com – and I am pretty satisfied. I can't say if it's been updated at all for most of that time. I just don't pay attention to it. 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/ http://notational.net/
- lalo2302 6y ago
  I used to be a huge fan of quiver, until one day I was writing a very useful piece of text, later, the day finished and I turned off my computer. When I turned it back on and opened Quiver, the note was gone. And it had 0 trace of it. 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.
  - mthoms 6y ago
    I was also a fan until I discovered that there is no search and replace feature. 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. https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/issues/417 https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/issues/417
mahaganapati 6y ago
I recently set up Syncthing on my laptops and my phone. I have always edited my notes in plain text in Vim and dumbly I would email these to myself (and reply to the email) on my phone so I could access my notes when afk. But now that I have Syncthing and Markor (a markdown/text editor) on my phone, I feel like I am in note-taking bliss.
anotherevan 6y ago
QOwnNotes is the best thing to come along in this space in a long time, IMO. https://www.qownnotes.org/ https://www.qownnotes.org/
fabiospampinato 6y ago
Author here, it's nice to see Notable linked to on HN by somebody else! I was planning on posting about it myself after v1.9 gets released though, as pretty much everything changed since the last version available in that repo. 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 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 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 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.
the_pwner224 6y ago
I spent a lot of time recently looking for a good note taking app. Notable (electron), QOwnNotes (Qt), and Joplin (electron) are very similar, with a markdown format with the ability to switch to the rendered view or have them split side-by-side. Joplin has an experimental combined rendered markdown editor view but it's still a bit rough around the edges. 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.
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  Author here. One practical reason to switch to Notable from Joplin is that notes in Notable are just plain files on disk, and that's extremely powerful. In Joplin instead you can only open notes one by one in the default app, the difference is that Joplin essentially copies the note out of its database, opens that in the external editor, and then synchronizes its changes back with the database. In Notable the files on disk _are_ the database. 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 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.
paultopia 6y ago
It's really striking that there are so many markdown-based note-taking apps out there. It seems like there's a new one on show HN every week. 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?
- thex10 6y ago
  I find it striking as well! At least in this case: > 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.
21eleven 6y ago
There seems to be a markdown note-taking app trend... I just want to throw out there that I have been using jupyter lab as a daily journaling markdown editor for nearly a year now and am very much happy with my setup.
redsolver 6y ago
Maybe someone here is interested in Noteless, an open-source Android note-taking app which aims to be compatible with Notable. https://github.com/redsolver/noteless https://github.com/redsolver/noteless
aabbcc1241 6y ago
Except the import from evernote feature, other features are already supported by modern editor/IDE
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  Well, kind of. The TL;DR is that I don't think people using Notion would be very happy if they had to switch to a general-purpose text editor like vscode. 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.
qwerty456127 6y ago
Zettlr, RemNote, Roam, Obsidian - these are some of the titles a modern note-taking app should be compared to.
nojvek 6y ago
Would love to simply see this as a website. Why doesn't chrome make it easier to create desktop apps with a web shell? 63MB download again :(. That's like 0.1% app, 99.9% chromium + nodejs. That's why I don't install the desktop slack app. It's not an efficient user of my computer's resources. VSCode is the only electron app I have. Soz for the rant. Great app though. Well done.
tekknik 6y ago
I just tried Notable the other day, realized how slow and jittery the app and animations were and quickly moved on. I really wish electron would die already, it’s ruining good apps imo.
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  Did you try v1.8.4 or one of the alphas of v1.9? (https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases) 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.
  - tekknik 6y ago
    It would've been v1.8.4. 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!
    - fabiospampinato 6y ago
      > 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. 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.

125 points by shahinrostami 6y ago

Big fan of Notable, thought I'd share it!

I've been using notable for a few months now. Its really good for a basic note taking up but clearly theres a lot more in the pipeline that excites me :)

fabiospampinato 6y ago
If you don't know about the alphas of v1.9 already you should probably give them a try: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases Many of the interesting features you might be referring to are available there.

nullify88 6y ago

Been using it myself for a few years now. Mostly at work for code snippits, scripts, or commands as it has decent syntax highlighting. Synced to dropbox. Love its minimalist UI and feature set.

moneywoes 6y ago

No Android app?

fabiospampinato 6y ago
Not yet! As notes are just Markdown files on disk some people have been editing their notes on Android with Markor: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.gsantner.markor&hl=en_GB https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.gsantner.m...
redsolver 6y ago
I really like Notable, so I made an open-source Android app which is compatible with notes saved in Notable. https://github.com/redsolver/noteless https://github.com/redsolver/noteless

dang 6y ago

If curious see also 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765482

fabiospampinato 6y ago
@dang I'm Notable's author. I had planned to post on HN about the next update of the app in a few weeks, which I've been working on for about 6 months now, the current post has been made with a bit of an unfortunate timing by a user. Hopefully this will be to ok you and the other people moderating the site. The app changed quite significantly in almost all areas, it's essentially like another app that looks similar to the older one at this point, the post won't be "more of the same thing" if people will actually comment on the app, I'll try to push for a healthier discussion.

pagade 6y ago

For me, ability to quickly expand/collapse headings/sub-headings is essential when I am working with markdown. After some effort got it working in Sublime Text. Notable looks good, but not sure if it can be made to do this.

SanchoPanda 6y ago
I struggle with this in sublime, I would love to hear how you figured it out.
- pagade 6y ago
  I installed the SyntaxFold package and customized the key binding. There needs to be 2 empty lines between sub/headings for folding to work. It's not the prefect solution but good enough.
  - SanchoPanda 6y ago
    This just made my day, thank you so much.
fabiospampinato 6y ago
Folding is implemented in the editor in the latest alphas of v1.9 already: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases I haven't gotten to implementing the analogous thing but for rendered notes yet.
- pagade 6y ago
  I tried the latest alpha. It works as expected. Thanks!

evo_9 6y ago

Looks like a clone of Bear, which is an awesome mark-down based note app: https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/ 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.

salmon30salmon 6y ago
It most likely isn't a clone. While Bear predates Notable, the timeline does not seem like Notable was a deliberate clone at all.
- evo_9 6y ago
  I don't mean to imply it was intentional but rather a good sign, Bear is awesome. Nice to have a similar app for other platforms.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

activitypea 6y ago

The comparison matrix made me close the tab immediately.

captn3m0 6y ago
I liked it.
fabiospampinato 6y ago
What's the problem with it? It can be changed if you have any suggestions.

nautilus12 6y ago

I use simplenote but I still feel like the added features to this are enough to convince me to switch

fabiospampinato 6y ago
You should give the last alpha of v1.9 a spin, it blows v1.8.4 out of the water in many ways: https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Yet another electron-based notetaking app.. There's already so many of those. And it's not even open source (anymore, since version 1.5.1). Why go to closed-source for something like this? 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).

bachmeier 6y ago
> Why go to closed-source for something like this? 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.
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  > I fully understand the desire to make money. 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.
FooBarWidget 6y ago
For some historical perspective, consider this. When Tomboy was new, people complained about its ‘bloat’. Why? Because it’s ‘unnecessarily’ written in .NET, and Mono was a ‘huge and bloated’ dependency.

arpit 6y ago

There was an interesting point during Notable's development when the project went from an open source one to closed source [1]. While I get open source developers should be paid for the work, I am not sure how I feel about OSS projects getting some attention and then closing source [1] https://github.com/notable/notable/issues/432 https://github.com/notable/notable/issues/432

theobr 6y ago
All of this said, I've recently found Foam hard to beat. Awesome markdown "thought web" experience built right into VSCode. Refreshing approach after years of mediocre Electron apps https://github.com/foambubble/foam https://github.com/foambubble/foam
- dcsan 6y ago
  2nd for FOAM. Its really awesome. this VSCode as a platform is taking off. There are other markdown renderers like dotgraph that can easily be embedded in your visuals using other extensions. And then all the power of VScode editing on top. It's a shame for obsidian tho... 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.
- djeiasbsbo 6y ago
  I use this too but have already extended it a lot. What I don't really understand is what the Foam extension itself does (I think nothing yet?!). 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.
fabiospampinato 6y ago
Author here, I realize how from the user perspective if the app stayed open-source and I still kept working on it full-time that would have been better, but that scenario is unrealistic, I just couldn't justify to myself working on it full-time without getting any revenue out of it and releasing everything as open-source, and I've been working on it for about 18 months now. 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=source https://github.com/fabiospampinato?tab=repositories&type=sou...

bicx 6y ago

I tried using Notable for a while. I ended up sticking with Mark Text. I enjoy the more Bear-like WYSIWYG editor I can switch to for normal note taking.

linuxdaemon 6y ago

Personally I have been a fan of Joplin https://joplinapp.org https://joplinapp.org for note taking. It is also markdown-based with all kinds of features and is MIT licensed.

vezycash 6y ago
I love joplin. 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
bedros 6y ago
I'm looking for a not taking app, currently using omni notes Can you share notes with joplin? Can you backup to my own webdav?
- bachmeier 6y ago
  > Can you backup to my own webdav? I used to use Joplin with Fastmail's webdav.
- linuxdaemon 6y ago
  WebDAV, Nextcloud, Dropbox and one drive are all supported sync endpoints. 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.
SweetestRug 6y ago
I am a huge fan of Joplin. Love that it has both a GUI as well as terminal interface and syncs via Dropbox. I can use vim emulation in the GUI and real vim when running from the terminal.Oh - and it has a mobile app too. All libre software.
novok 6y ago
Joplin has a broken mobile interface on iOS. I had hopes, but they were dashed.

powersnail 6y ago

My biggest problem with these note-taking apps is that there is no way to have a manual order in the file list. 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.

baxtr 6y ago
I had my own note taking app a while back. And that’s exactly what I realized. There will never be a mass market note taking app because of that. However, it’s also nice in way because there will be many many niche players.
chrismorgan 6y ago
One solution when going with lexicographical ordering is to use a bigger step, so that you can reorder things without having to renumber all the files. 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.
fabiospampinato 6y ago
Notable's author here. > 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.

maigon 6y ago

Zettlr is so much better than this, how can you possibly omit it from your marketing comparison matrix? oh nevermind

theobr 6y ago

Now that Notable is closed-source, it feels like a feature-incomplete version of Inkdrop: https://www.inkdrop.app/ https://www.inkdrop.app/ Also suspicious that Ink is the only markdown editor not listed in your comparisons, despite being the one most similar to your project

fabiospampinato 6y ago
Author here, I can add Inkdrop to the comparison table. 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.

kochthesecond 6y ago

I use standard-notes for its focus on zero knowledge design and simple markdown plus potential economic viability.

random3 6y ago
I was wondering what's the difference between the two.

choward 6y ago

I really like the comparison chart. I wish every project had that. The first thing I think when I see a project like this and there are a ton of options is "why?". This helps with answering that. 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.

fabiospampinato 6y ago
Author here. I agree with your comment wholeheartedly. 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.

imagetic 6y ago

I've been on Quiver for quite a few years now — https://happenapps.com https://happenapps.com – and I am pretty satisfied. I can't say if it's been updated at all for most of that time. I just don't pay attention to it. 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/ http://notational.net/

lalo2302 6y ago
I used to be a huge fan of quiver, until one day I was writing a very useful piece of text, later, the day finished and I turned off my computer. When I turned it back on and opened Quiver, the note was gone. And it had 0 trace of it. 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.
- mthoms 6y ago
  I was also a fan until I discovered that there is no search and replace feature. 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. https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/issues/417 https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/issues/417

mahaganapati 6y ago

I recently set up Syncthing on my laptops and my phone. I have always edited my notes in plain text in Vim and dumbly I would email these to myself (and reply to the email) on my phone so I could access my notes when afk. But now that I have Syncthing and Markor (a markdown/text editor) on my phone, I feel like I am in note-taking bliss.

anotherevan 6y ago

QOwnNotes is the best thing to come along in this space in a long time, IMO. https://www.qownnotes.org/ https://www.qownnotes.org/

fabiospampinato 6y ago

Author here, it's nice to see Notable linked to on HN by somebody else! I was planning on posting about it myself after v1.9 gets released though, as pretty much everything changed since the last version available in that repo. 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 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 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 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.

the_pwner224 6y ago

I spent a lot of time recently looking for a good note taking app. Notable (electron), QOwnNotes (Qt), and Joplin (electron) are very similar, with a markdown format with the ability to switch to the rendered view or have them split side-by-side. Joplin has an experimental combined rendered markdown editor view but it's still a bit rough around the edges. 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.

fabiospampinato 6y ago
Author here. One practical reason to switch to Notable from Joplin is that notes in Notable are just plain files on disk, and that's extremely powerful. In Joplin instead you can only open notes one by one in the default app, the difference is that Joplin essentially copies the note out of its database, opens that in the external editor, and then synchronizes its changes back with the database. In Notable the files on disk _are_ the database. 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 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.

paultopia 6y ago

It's really striking that there are so many markdown-based note-taking apps out there. It seems like there's a new one on show HN every week. 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?

thex10 6y ago
I find it striking as well! At least in this case: > 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.

21eleven 6y ago

There seems to be a markdown note-taking app trend... I just want to throw out there that I have been using jupyter lab as a daily journaling markdown editor for nearly a year now and am very much happy with my setup.

redsolver 6y ago

Maybe someone here is interested in Noteless, an open-source Android note-taking app which aims to be compatible with Notable. https://github.com/redsolver/noteless https://github.com/redsolver/noteless

aabbcc1241 6y ago

Except the import from evernote feature, other features are already supported by modern editor/IDE

fabiospampinato 6y ago
Well, kind of. The TL;DR is that I don't think people using Notion would be very happy if they had to switch to a general-purpose text editor like vscode. 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.

qwerty456127 6y ago

Zettlr, RemNote, Roam, Obsidian - these are some of the titles a modern note-taking app should be compared to.

nojvek 6y ago

Would love to simply see this as a website. Why doesn't chrome make it easier to create desktop apps with a web shell? 63MB download again :(. That's like 0.1% app, 99.9% chromium + nodejs. That's why I don't install the desktop slack app. It's not an efficient user of my computer's resources. VSCode is the only electron app I have. Soz for the rant. Great app though. Well done.

tekknik 6y ago

I just tried Notable the other day, realized how slow and jittery the app and animations were and quickly moved on. I really wish electron would die already, it’s ruining good apps imo.

fabiospampinato 6y ago
Did you try v1.8.4 or one of the alphas of v1.9? (https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases https://github.com/notable/notable-experimental/releases) 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.
- tekknik 6y ago
  It would've been v1.8.4. 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!
  - fabiospampinato 6y ago
    > 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. 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.