9 ms·

I really miss tomboy (not the new ng version). I used it for years and it was amazing. Rich text without having to use markdown. Razor fast responsiveness when

I really miss tomboy (not the new ng version). I used it for years and it was amazing. Rich text without having to use markdown. Razor fast responsiveness when searching. Instant hyperlinks just by typing the name of another note. Excellent keyboard shortcuts too. I really miss it but it was no longer maintained and falling into disrepair on newer OSes due to lacking support for DPI scaling and dark modes. I use onenote now as it comes with O365 anyway but like most things microsoft it's bloated and slow. It offers a lot more features (tomboy couldn't even do inline pictures!) But fast responsiveness means more to me. I'd consider standard notes but there's so many of these apps around and most are not WYSIWYG editors but instead markdown with a separate preview window. I hate that. And they tend to be slow electron stuff which makes them no better than onenote. Not sure if this one is an exception but if so I might try it.

da39a3ee 6y ago
> And they tend to be slow electron stuff I've read this a couple of times on HN. Can someone fill me in here? Is the claim that electron apps are slow justified? If so why, technically, are they slow? The main one I use is Slack and it is perfectly fine on my machine.
- thecodrr 6y ago
  It's mostly hearsay. Electron is highly optimized (it's chromium after all). Making an electron app doesn't make it automatically slow and clunky. That's absurd. Sure it is a browser and it takes a little more Ram than you are used to (but most machines nowadays have 8 to 16 gigs of RAM so not a huge issue). What does make an electron app slow is the app itself. Obviously. You have VSCode that is blazing fast even for humongous files and you also have some other not so fast apps. Another huge issue raised is size. To be honest, 100 MB isn't abnormal for a desktop app. Look at any Qt app, it can be around 100 MB too. Same for dotnet. Of course native is better but most developers don't have the resources for that. Edit: I see people down voting without giving any reason. I know this is an unpopular opinion but come on. The days when you could use VSCode as an example of slow, clunky Electron app are gone. What's slow and huge is Jetbrains IntelliJ or Visual Studio; both native. VSCode proved that you can make a fast electron app; it just needs work like any other thing.
  - dsissitka 6y ago
    > I see people down voting without any reason. What makes you think they didn't have a reason? I didn't downvote you but you've made a few divisive assertions. For example, your "blazing fast" is my "performs acceptably".
    - thecodrr 6y ago
      A typo. I meant "without giving any reason". Also, I'd be interested to know what you count as blazing fast.
      - infinityplus1 6y ago
        Try opening a big complex html file and scroll immediately in VS Code and in Sublime text. Sublime Text blows VS Code out of water. This lag made me switch back to Sublime Text from VS Code.
        da39a3ee 6y ago
        Are you referring to the way VS Code is slow to display the syntax highlighting on file open sometimes? (Is that when it's getting highlighting via LSP?)
        infinityplus1 6y ago
        Yes. While syntax highlighting is getting rendered, scrolling lags a lot which is really annoying when you want to get to a specifc part of the file quickly. Once I noticed this, it was very hard not to see the same lag everywhere. LSP-I don't know how this works.
        jakear 6y ago
        Curious if you tried with extensions disabled? I just attempted opening both a 100k and 1m line html file in both VS Code and ST, in the 100k case they both were quick to open but Code was a bit smoother in scrolling, in the 1m case ST took a long time to open (showed a loading progress bar for a few seconds before anything), and while Code was choppy to scroll ST was almost unusable. That being said, with extensions enabled it can be a totally different story - some extensions will try to load the text content on every editor opening or even edit, which gets unusable very quickly. (Yes they run in a separate process, but that’s not a cure-all) Tested on 2018 MBP. (On VS code team, had nothing to do with the editor perf)
- thekyle 6y ago
  I do consider the Slack desktop app to be a resource hog. Even on my brand-new M1 MacBook Air it sometimes takes a few seconds for channels to load. On my older Windows computer it's borderline unusable with how bad the text inputs lag. Sometimes I will have typed out an entire message and hit send before any of the text appears in the input box. In fact, this morning a colleague of mine was showing me on Zoom that their Slack desktop app never finishes loading instead just displaying a white screen, so they need to use the website instead. Although I guess that's more of a comment on software quality than bloat. I don't mean to say that all Electron apps are slow and clunky. VS Code for example is very impressive for an Electron app.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  how can you say that this is perfectly fine : https://streamable.com/lzhvjf https://streamable.com/lzhvjf takes ages to open, takes ages to resize, etc etc. my hands shake whenever I have to interact with that mess (thankfully ripcord exists) my computer is an intel 6900k (16-core) with 64 gb of ram and a gtx 1080 so processing power is not an issue.
  - da39a3ee 6y ago
    I guess you're right! I'd never noticed the laggy resizing (I use a laptop so nearly always have apps taking up the full screen). But I see that also (recent MBP w/ 32Gb RAM). I just did a comparison with slack running in chrome and, maybe I'm saying something silly here, but the difference seems to be that I'm simply unable to resize the chrome window at the same speed when the tab inside is displaying slack. So I was unable to "leave the content behind" as you did in your video of the electron app (and as I was also able to do with the electron app).
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  The problem with Electron apps is that they're using an embedded browser. As more and more apps are moving to Electron you're running a whole lot of browsers altogether on one system. I don't want to waste hundreds of MBs of memory just on one small app :) There's good Electron apps, yes. Like VS code, which is fast and optimised and uses very little resources. But most Electron apps are wasteful. Even the other ones from MS like Teams are horrible.
sneak 6y ago
Onenote is not end to end encrypted. Total nonstarter.
- mattowen_uk 6y ago
  OneNote does allow you to password protect (which encrypts) sections within a notebook, however.
  - sneak 6y ago
    It's not open source, so there is no clear indication without RE that "password protection" encrypts anything at all.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Agreed but I don't really care about the privacy of my notes tbh. They're mostly web clippings and technical information I spent time to dig up, not my innermost thoughts. However something self-hosted would be nicer. With other O365 services it's more of a problem indeed. I use cryptomator on top of OneDrive to mitigate.
qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
Seems Zim Wiki is still being actively maintained, I liked it better than Tomboy when I tried them both years ago
- flarg 6y ago
  Zim is the best, good speed, files stored as plain text, fast indexing. I use it for personal and work, auto backup with Dropbox or G Drive.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Thanks, that's one I will try!
winter_blue 6y ago
> I really miss tomboy (not the new ng version). I used it for years and it was amazing. ... I really miss it but it was no longer maintained and falling into disrepair on newer OSes due to lacking support for DPI scaling and dark modes. You could contribute to it, and try to bring the project back to life!!! (I mean, any/most of us here on HN could!) Tomboy is free and open-source software, licensed under the LGPL license[1]. It's also written in C# (which is pretty wonderful language to work with on a GUI application, especially compared to C or C++ or even maybe Vala). It would be wonderful to breathe a new life to it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomboy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomboy_(software)
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  I can't really, I haven't developed for years anymore. I don't have the chops to do it. Also, the Gnome team seems to have deprecated it in favour of a rebuild called tomboy-ng that's written in something new (Delphi I think?). And lacks the benefits of the old one like fast responsiveness and auto hyperlinking. I don't like it at all :)
kushan2020 6y ago
Hey if you want to give my app https://bangle.io https://bangle.io a try, it checks off your requirement of being a WYSIWYG note taking web editor. I would say the friction to try it out is pretty low as there is nothing to lock you in. It simply reads and writes data in a markdown format directly to your hard drive -- think VSCode but for notes.
- ivan_ah 6y ago
  Wow this is excellent. It's very nice it can access local filesystem like a regular app, but nothing to install (other than to open a webpage). Good stuff!

da39a3ee 6y ago

> And they tend to be slow electron stuff I've read this a couple of times on HN. Can someone fill me in here? Is the claim that electron apps are slow justified? If so why, technically, are they slow? The main one I use is Slack and it is perfectly fine on my machine.

thecodrr 6y ago
It's mostly hearsay. Electron is highly optimized (it's chromium after all). Making an electron app doesn't make it automatically slow and clunky. That's absurd. Sure it is a browser and it takes a little more Ram than you are used to (but most machines nowadays have 8 to 16 gigs of RAM so not a huge issue). What does make an electron app slow is the app itself. Obviously. You have VSCode that is blazing fast even for humongous files and you also have some other not so fast apps. Another huge issue raised is size. To be honest, 100 MB isn't abnormal for a desktop app. Look at any Qt app, it can be around 100 MB too. Same for dotnet. Of course native is better but most developers don't have the resources for that. Edit: I see people down voting without giving any reason. I know this is an unpopular opinion but come on. The days when you could use VSCode as an example of slow, clunky Electron app are gone. What's slow and huge is Jetbrains IntelliJ or Visual Studio; both native. VSCode proved that you can make a fast electron app; it just needs work like any other thing.
- dsissitka 6y ago
  > I see people down voting without any reason. What makes you think they didn't have a reason? I didn't downvote you but you've made a few divisive assertions. For example, your "blazing fast" is my "performs acceptably".
  - thecodrr 6y ago
    A typo. I meant "without giving any reason". Also, I'd be interested to know what you count as blazing fast.
    - infinityplus1 6y ago
      Try opening a big complex html file and scroll immediately in VS Code and in Sublime text. Sublime Text blows VS Code out of water. This lag made me switch back to Sublime Text from VS Code.
      - da39a3ee 6y ago
        Are you referring to the way VS Code is slow to display the syntax highlighting on file open sometimes? (Is that when it's getting highlighting via LSP?)
        infinityplus1 6y ago
        Yes. While syntax highlighting is getting rendered, scrolling lags a lot which is really annoying when you want to get to a specifc part of the file quickly. Once I noticed this, it was very hard not to see the same lag everywhere. LSP-I don't know how this works.
      - jakear 6y ago
        Curious if you tried with extensions disabled? I just attempted opening both a 100k and 1m line html file in both VS Code and ST, in the 100k case they both were quick to open but Code was a bit smoother in scrolling, in the 1m case ST took a long time to open (showed a loading progress bar for a few seconds before anything), and while Code was choppy to scroll ST was almost unusable. That being said, with extensions enabled it can be a totally different story - some extensions will try to load the text content on every editor opening or even edit, which gets unusable very quickly. (Yes they run in a separate process, but that’s not a cure-all) Tested on 2018 MBP. (On VS code team, had nothing to do with the editor perf)
thekyle 6y ago
I do consider the Slack desktop app to be a resource hog. Even on my brand-new M1 MacBook Air it sometimes takes a few seconds for channels to load. On my older Windows computer it's borderline unusable with how bad the text inputs lag. Sometimes I will have typed out an entire message and hit send before any of the text appears in the input box. In fact, this morning a colleague of mine was showing me on Zoom that their Slack desktop app never finishes loading instead just displaying a white screen, so they need to use the website instead. Although I guess that's more of a comment on software quality than bloat. I don't mean to say that all Electron apps are slow and clunky. VS Code for example is very impressive for an Electron app.
jcelerier 6y ago
how can you say that this is perfectly fine : https://streamable.com/lzhvjf https://streamable.com/lzhvjf takes ages to open, takes ages to resize, etc etc. my hands shake whenever I have to interact with that mess (thankfully ripcord exists) my computer is an intel 6900k (16-core) with 64 gb of ram and a gtx 1080 so processing power is not an issue.
- da39a3ee 6y ago
  I guess you're right! I'd never noticed the laggy resizing (I use a laptop so nearly always have apps taking up the full screen). But I see that also (recent MBP w/ 32Gb RAM). I just did a comparison with slack running in chrome and, maybe I'm saying something silly here, but the difference seems to be that I'm simply unable to resize the chrome window at the same speed when the tab inside is displaying slack. So I was unable to "leave the content behind" as you did in your video of the electron app (and as I was also able to do with the electron app).
GekkePrutser 6y ago
The problem with Electron apps is that they're using an embedded browser. As more and more apps are moving to Electron you're running a whole lot of browsers altogether on one system. I don't want to waste hundreds of MBs of memory just on one small app :) There's good Electron apps, yes. Like VS code, which is fast and optimised and uses very little resources. But most Electron apps are wasteful. Even the other ones from MS like Teams are horrible.

sneak 6y ago

Onenote is not end to end encrypted. Total nonstarter.

mattowen_uk 6y ago
OneNote does allow you to password protect (which encrypts) sections within a notebook, however.
- sneak 6y ago
  It's not open source, so there is no clear indication without RE that "password protection" encrypts anything at all.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Agreed but I don't really care about the privacy of my notes tbh. They're mostly web clippings and technical information I spent time to dig up, not my innermost thoughts. However something self-hosted would be nicer. With other O365 services it's more of a problem indeed. I use cryptomator on top of OneDrive to mitigate.

qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago

Seems Zim Wiki is still being actively maintained, I liked it better than Tomboy when I tried them both years ago

flarg 6y ago
Zim is the best, good speed, files stored as plain text, fast indexing. I use it for personal and work, auto backup with Dropbox or G Drive.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Thanks, that's one I will try!

winter_blue 6y ago

> I really miss tomboy (not the new ng version). I used it for years and it was amazing. ... I really miss it but it was no longer maintained and falling into disrepair on newer OSes due to lacking support for DPI scaling and dark modes. You could contribute to it, and try to bring the project back to life!!! (I mean, any/most of us here on HN could!) Tomboy is free and open-source software, licensed under the LGPL license[1]. It's also written in C# (which is pretty wonderful language to work with on a GUI application, especially compared to C or C++ or even maybe Vala). It would be wonderful to breathe a new life to it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomboy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomboy_(software)

GekkePrutser 6y ago
I can't really, I haven't developed for years anymore. I don't have the chops to do it. Also, the Gnome team seems to have deprecated it in favour of a rebuild called tomboy-ng that's written in something new (Delphi I think?). And lacks the benefits of the old one like fast responsiveness and auto hyperlinking. I don't like it at all :)

kushan2020 6y ago

Hey if you want to give my app https://bangle.io https://bangle.io a try, it checks off your requirement of being a WYSIWYG note taking web editor. I would say the friction to try it out is pretty low as there is nothing to lock you in. It simply reads and writes data in a markdown format directly to your hard drive -- think VSCode but for notes.

ivan_ah 6y ago
Wow this is excellent. It's very nice it can access local filesystem like a regular app, but nothing to install (other than to open a webpage). Good stuff!