
Notable – A Markdown-based note-taking app - shahinrostami
https://github.com/notable/notable
======
arpit
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
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)

~~~
djeiasbsbo
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
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.

------
powersnail
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.

~~~
fabiospampinato
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.

------
linuxdaemon
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.

~~~
novok
Joplin has a broken mobile interface on iOS. I had hopes, but they were
dashed.

~~~
pizza
What’s broken about it? Admittedly I haven’t been using it for more than a
month, but the interface seems to work just fine on my iPhone.

~~~
novok
I remember trying some basic operations a few months ago and it was just not
working properly at all. Like I couldn't scroll when the keyboard was up
levels of borked.

~~~
xref
The iOS-can’t-scroll bug was killing me for about 5 months, they finally fixed
recently. It’s free software and all but...oof.

------
GekkePrutser
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).

~~~
FooBarWidget
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.

~~~
bachmeier
It was a little more than that. It was the only app on the live CD of several
major distros that relied on Mono. That meant, back in the days of CD's that
could hold 800 MB (?) you had to remove a whole lot of other stuff from the
live CD, all for an app that most people didn't use. (As was pointed out at
the time, what's the purpose of a notes app on a live CD, where you don't even
have persistent storage?) It was widely perceived, correctly in my opinion, as
a way to get Mono installed on everyone's machines. After the pushback Miguel
de Icaza got pissed, trashed Linux every chance he had, and switched to Mac.
I'm not going to relitigate all of _that_ , but it wasn't just that Mono was
bloated.

* Here's just one link: [https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html](https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html)

"Machine would suspend and resume without problem, WiFi just worked, audio did
not stop working, I spent three weeks without having to recompile the kernel
to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers, or deal with the
bizarre and random speed degradation that my ThinkPad suffered."

~~~
GekkePrutser
Haha that random speed degredation happened to me even in Windows. Turned out
to be a bug in the T470 firmware that throttled the cores down to a couple of
hundred Mhz when on battery. I could literally watch the windows being drawn.
Not sure if this was what happened for him, probably not as he wrote that
years before the T470 was released, but I'm just saying it's not necessarily
Linux related.

But overall I've had no such issues with Linux during the last years. I use
all 3 desktop platforms a lot, and my favourite was Mac, but due to Apple's
constant "dumbing down" (both the OS and hardware) to appeal to the
iPhone/iPad userbase it meets my needs as a power users less and less.

------
theobr
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
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.

------
the_pwner224
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
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.

------
choward
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
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.

------
evo_9
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
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
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.

------
mahaganapati
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.

------
redsolver
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)

------
imagetic
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
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
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)

------
21eleven
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.

------
pagade
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
I struggle with this in sublime, I would love to hear how you figured it out.

~~~
pagade
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
This just made my day, thank you so much.

------
nullify88
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.

------
nojvek
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.

------
gaara87
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
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.

------
dang
If curious see also

2018
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765482)

~~~
fabiospampinato
@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.

------
paultopia
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
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.

------
nautilus12
I use simplenote but I still feel like the added features to this are enough
to convince me to switch

~~~
fabiospampinato
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)

------
tekknik
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
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
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
> 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.

~~~
tekknik
> 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?

Sorry for the delayed response, yes it is a 100hz external display.

------
anotherevan
QOwnNotes is the best thing to come along in this space in a long time, IMO.

[https://www.qownnotes.org/](https://www.qownnotes.org/)

------
bicx
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.

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

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

~~~
random3
I was wondering what's the difference between the two.

------
qwerty456127
Zettlr, RemNote, Roam, Obsidian - these are some of the titles a modern note-
taking app should be compared to.

------
aabbcc1241
Except the import from evernote feature, other features are already supported
by modern editor/IDE

~~~
fabiospampinato
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.

------
moneywoes
No Android app?

~~~
redsolver
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)

------
activitypea
The comparison matrix made me close the tab immediately.

~~~
fabiospampinato
What's the problem with it? It can be changed if you have any suggestions.

