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Show HN: Zonote – Sticky notes with Markdown and Tabs, all in one .txt file (github.com)
74 points by zonetti 2055 days ago
6 comments

Congrats on putting something out there! It's a very hard step to take.

Makes me think of a side project I've been poking at off and on for a little while. I had the same idea you did of having a single text file to store a bunch of notes. (which was inspired by a comment from someone who said they've been managing notes for years using a single txt file through Windows Notepad or something along that line) Though mine is more inspired by trying to do that while also giving the capability to do Zettelkasten-style note management versus sticky notes.

The only reason I haven't completed mine is because I got "stuck" trying to code a parser that could in-place patch the AST and visual representation of the text instead of re-parsing an entire note on every character change. (at least for me, this has been extremely hard to figure out how to do correctly. Feels like an infinite number of corner cases to figure out somehow. Especially since I'm self-limiting to a pure plain text representation of everything, because I want the file to be grep-able and not lock someone into a specific UI) I find modern-day delays in UI interactions unacceptable, so I want to make something where even if you were to put an entire novel into a note with a bunch of different special elements in it that would need to be parsed, (and considering I want to offer the capability to turn a piece of text into a "comment" which is a clickable link to another note so if you ARE writing a novel you can still leave notes for yourself on things to improve) there would be zero delays when actively typing.

Have you considered packaging this as a Chrome extension rather than an electron app? AFAICT this is about 80KB of uncompressed html+css+js, released as a colossal 192MB electron app. Sorry to sound all get-off-my-lawn but that seems a tad excessive for a note taker.
I have thought about an eventual web version but more as a visualization tool for sharing files over the internet.

The idea was to be an offline-first app for privacy reasons, but I'll take a look at the file system support in the browser extension API, it might be a more accessible alternative.

Have a look at https://100r.co for an example of how they do offline-first html only web apps. DotGrid is a very interesting example.
Looks very interesting and quite snazzy! But...how do i install it, what are the dependencies, etc.? The little video/animated gif is nice for showing the features...but how do i run the thing? (I'm sure i'm missing something here.)
I'm sorry, I will add some instructions on the readme file.

Right now you can download it from the release page (https://github.com/zonetti/zonote/releases/latest). Then all you have to do is to extract and run the binary.

Thanks!
It appears that there is some github action declared for doing builds, and it's running, but I haven't been able to figure out where the results are.

Here's a clue: https://github.com/zonetti/zonote/actions/runs/354550703

Very, VERY cool - this reminds me of an app I made (primarily for myself) years ago called Mindscope https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-thought-organizer/id... (but Zonote comes with Markdown built in which is way cool)

The main thing missing for me in Zonote would be hierarchical links between entries/tabs...or is there already a way to do that?

I used to use this app all the time! The links between mindmaps/pages was an interesting idea I haven’t really seen replicated anywhere.
I'm afraid there is no way to do that right now, but it does sound like a good feature to be added.
Nicely done. Does this support colored background for different sticky notes ? Could be useful for spotting high priority notes more quickly.
Not yet but it is definitely on my list.
Done.
Looks neat!

Similar to https://www.manifest.app