Show HN: Text Lambda, a versatile notebook for your personal data

[apshrestha]

https://textlambda.com

Hi there, I'm looking for some feedback on a product I'm working on: https://textlambda.com Beta version is available for download if you want to give it a whirl.

Briefly, it is a notebook app for your personal data. You can use it to store passwords, your diary or any kind of text in general.

It's an extension of an opensource cli command I built a long time ago https://github.com/rorokimdim/stash. My primary motivations for Text are still the same:

1. Needs to have user side encryption

All encryption related code and file format is opensource and can be validated independently. I hope to opensource the rest of the code in the future.

2. Needs to be versatile to work with user's existing tools and workflow

You can access all of its features via command-line tools and scripts. You can use your favorite text editor to edit everything -- I hope to make the integration more seamless in the future with editor specific plugins.

--

It has other features like sharing, web publishing and multi-device access, which I think are important but not essential. It is also plain-text only -- which is a trade-off I'm making to keep things simple.

Do you think it is a useful product for you personally? Do you have any ideas or suggestions? You can send me an email at amit@textlambda.com if you prefer that instead of commenting here.

[geniemano]

Great work here! Enjoyed poking around the github repo. I see you do a lot of work with Clojure, would you mind sharing why you chose Haskell for this project?

[apshrestha → geniemano]

Thank you!

"stash", the initial MVP version, is written in Haskell. I chose Haskell mostly because of https://github.com/jtdaugherty/brick, which is a wonderful TUI library. I also tend to prefer functional programming languages when I have the choice.

However, Text 's backend and website are currently implemented in Clojure. The app is in C + Flutter (Dart).

[JoelMcCracken]

this certainly could be useful for me personally, but it would need more functionality. I think the _full_ project could be very useful though. however i would ask, how is this different from e.g. https://standardnotes.com/ and other note systems available ?

[apshrestha → JoelMcCracken]

Thank you. Is there any specific functionality that you are looking for that is not mentioned or perhaps done poorly in Text Lambda?

There are definitely lots of 'notebook' products out there, and they all excel in their own ways by making different trade-offs. Standardnotes, Obsidian etc. support user-side encryption but in my opinion they are not as versatile as they could be. I am also keeping it plain-text only for a few reasons that are important to me:

1. keep the UI straightforward and efficient to use 2. provide seamless integration with popular text editors (emacs, vim, vs-code) 3. support some nice functionality for editing structured text like markdown and org (like org-mode in Emacs)

I can consider some hybrid approach in the future if the 3 things above are not affected.

[JoelMcCracken → apshrestha]

I don't have a direct answer here, but let me just elaborate upon what I _wish_ existed.

I use org mode for notes. extensively. I am not interested in moving to something else (well, I would for the _right_ something else, but that's a big aside; it would need to do what org mode does right, but also fix the things that it lacks. Basically none of the solutions I know of get anywhere within this realm. This is an entirely other topic)

The main issue is that emacs is basically desktop only. Yes, there are other clients for mobile etc for org mode that exist, but no, they don't satisfy. They usually only support the minimum of features, and/or have various limitations which aren't inherent to org mode.

What I _want_ is basically a web based frontend to emacs/org-mode that I can interact with, search easily, etc. something that reimplemented this functionality would be OK, but the downside there is that it isn't

I personally have a long term plan to hack on something that would work for me ideally: use a web based ssh system (some of these exist) and then add some support for buttons etc somehow where I can click/edit/interact with the notes db. This seems like the shortest path to a solution that would work somewhat OK, although it is not perfect (offline support, etc).

These are all giant problems, and are sadly orthogonal to what you're talking about.

Today, how I handle my notes: - git repo, private on gitlab. Would like it if it were encrypted, but this works for now. - clone on private digitalocean machine. I ssh into it, use emacs on there. (mainly when I need to do something with notes on work computer, as I don't keep a clone of anything personal on work tech) - local clones on personal computers, slightly nicer interface.

This... works, but is not great.

a question for your solution: how would I use emacs tools to search across notes if the notes are encrypted? the most straightforward way I can imagine this working would be by keeping a copy of all notes in a local directory; does this represent an acceptable tradeoff? seamless integration with vim and emacs (at least them; i can't speak for vs-code) means also being able to work with a variety of CLI tools, such as find, grep, etc.

[wenbin]

well done!

it’s cross platform. I can see this be used as a geek-friendly Day One [1].

[1] https://dayoneapp.com/

[apshrestha → wenbin]

wow dayoneapp looks impressive. Thanks for mentioning it.