I've been working on a very similar app - also based on Sönke's book. Currently everything happens in the terminal but I wanted to start on a GUI app soon. I understand that you don't intend to open source your work, but thanks for the writeup. I like the idea of going over rows and columns, I'll probably shamelessly copy that (my current version uses a tree for display, much like Reddit or Hacker news comments, but that becomes difficult to parse after some time.
Please do copy! I have experimented with tree based interfaces as well, and have also found that they become unmanageable.
The row/column approach works well, but eventually breaks down when working with dozens of notes at the same time. I am trying to figure out a way to efficiently group notes[1], but have hit a bit of a wall. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with :)
[1] E.g. my attempt to have multiple workspaces, while neat in theory, wasn’t great to work with in practice: https://twitter.com/ichverstehe/status/1347896632424198144 - having everything at the same level works better. My next attempt might be some sort of grouped tiles with autoscaling.
When I started building this a year and a half ago, this was my plan. Since then, (1) there has been an explosion of note apps and (2) I realized that I do not really feel enthusiastic about building out commodity features needed for that. Instead, I am slowly building for myself, experimenting with different ideas and workflows[1], and sharing them on my blog, with the hope that someone else picks them up.
Alternatively, if I wait long enough, the "note app" part will become a commodity itself, and I can implement the interface/workflows on top of it. Quarto[2] looks promising in that regard. Their visual editor[3], which is used in R Studio, is really good.
interesting – hadn't heard of quarto before. I dabbled some with building a wiki on top of jupyter lab (1) but have never really gotten beyond the yak-shaving step in the note taking domain. What few notes I do have I throw together in vim and grep for if needed.
Looks like agoose77 has continued implementing some interesting extensions towards a hybrid literate programming / Zettelkasten environment for jupyter though (2), may be worth checking out given your interest in quarto.