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I built myself a little note-taking / wiki app that uses Markdown. The main issue I find with plaintext is that the minute you need anything like rich metadata
by genjipress 5y ago
I built myself a little note-taking / wiki app that uses Markdown. The main issue I find with plaintext is that the minute you need anything like rich metadata on a document, it gets very clumsy, so the MD files are stored in a SQLite database which also holds any needed metadata.
I like the idea of plaintext as a least-common-denominator for many things, but it becomes difficult to use it beyond a small, constrained set of applications.
- jjjbokma 5y agoCan't you store the meta-data as a YAML block like how for example pandoc uses for several of its output formats?
- genjipress 5y agoSure, I can do that. The problem is what to do if I want to mass update the metadata across an entire set of documents. It's just easier to do that with a DB.
- jjjbokma 5y agoThat's very true, thanks for explaining.
- knazarov 5y agoThere is an alternative: you can use a MIME envelope to store notes. This way you’ll have a plaintext container and a way to attach files in a portable way. I’ve built a note taking system based on this idea: https://github.com/knazarov/notes.sh https://github.com/knazarov/notes.sh
- asdff 5y agoYou could just have a link to the rich metadata on the drive within the plain text document, and calling it up is as easy as grabbing the path and piping to your viewer.
- genjipress 5y agoThat's a scenario I do plan to add support for, actually.
- falcolas 5y agoSo, silly thought: HTML. Support for your metadata. Still readable and writeable as plain text. Lots of built-in support in the major text editors.
- blacktriangle 5y agoI tried going that way. Authoring HTML by hand is miserable, it totally breaks up your flow of writing. Then to make matters worse, reading HTML raw text vs reading in an editor is a painful experience as well. I feel like if you wanted to write notes in HTML, you would need to do it from within some WYSIWYG editor environment that felt like plain text most of the time but easily let you drop into metadata, links, tables, etc.
- falcolas 5y agoFair enough. I don’t necessarily agree with you, but I’m not you…
- genjipress 5y agoI don't want to use HTML.
- fridif 5y ago"I have a requirement for my grill. I need to cook steaks, but I don't want to use gas or electric because of valid reasons." "Have you considered using charcoal?" "I don't want to use charcoal, which is potentially one of the last viable options, for unspecified reasons."
- wh3000 5y agoDid the same (with PostgreSQL). Markdown notes in the browser. Text and images, attachments. Only the essential functionality I really need. Used Evernote in the past, but got more and more disappointed.