AppFlowy VS flutter-quill

💾 Source code: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy 👕 Size: M 🛠️ Stack: Flutter, Rust

You can use Rust with QML[1].

QML is actually pretty amazing. I've been building my block editor[2] view entirely in QML while the model is in C++. This separation of logic and presentation works great. And yes, there are some crashes sometimes (that I find quite easy to debug thanks to the built-in debugger), but take for example a similar app that's built with Rust and Dart[3], in my testing there were still memory leaks that caused my computer to hang. It's better to know you have a bug than for it to be hidden from you.

I agree with parent commenter, saying these cross-platform frameworks will end up supporting the least common denominator set of features. But I found with external open source libraries, the community is catching up very fast. For example, you want the awesome translucency macOS apps have for your Qt app? Here you go[4]. Many such cases. It's also pretty straightforward to add your own custom OS-dependent code, especially so, if someone already open sourced his approach. I recently wanted to move the traffic light buttons on macOS for my app, but couldn't figure the Objective-C code for that. I ended up looking at either Tauri or Electron source code and found my answer.

[1] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs

[2] https://www.get-plume.com/

[3] https://www.appflowy.io/

[4] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit

AppFlowy - GPL Licensed - their unique selling point is that they're farther along than SiYuan or Affine on their database table functionality. Both Siyuan and Affine have database tables for project management but Appflowy's solution is solid. https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy

Download from https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy/releases/tag/0.3.0

Just enabled it for AppFlowy macOS. https://docs.flutter.dev/perf/impeller#macos

AppFlowy has doesn't have links to pages, but they're working on it, and "This feature will be expanded to support Mention a block in the future." (https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy/issues/2196)

It seems like there's a lot of recent interest and effort in open-source or self-hosted Notion-like/markdown-with-widgets applications and platforms. AppFlowy (https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy) comes to mind; I attended one of their monthly "town hall" meetings a few months back, and looks like they're rapidly increasing in popularity. I think there was another similar project like this on HN front page last week, IIRC.

This makes me happy, because I switched to Obsidian primarily for local-first file storage in a platform-agnostic format. I've learned to love many things about Obsidian and am writing a few plugins myself, but there are still several Notion-esq functionalities I wish I had, and I find myself handing off between Obsidian and other webapps for certain effort, like team project management.

I used to get far more excited to explore new projects like BlockSuite, and I really appreciate their documentation, but I find it hard to justify allocating time to reviewing and trying out new tools when I still have much more improve on with my Obsidian usage; this is especially true of newer projects where I'm unsure of their shelf life.

To assuage my internal conflict I remind myself that I think plaintext is fundamentally the right choice for much knowledge collection, and I'm proud to say that if the internet shut down, I'd retain a significant growing fraction of my personal data.

Two months ago I decided to fork the Quill rich text editor because the architecture is extremely difficult to follow. Since I desperately need for my own project, a strong rich text editor that can be easily extended with more features I took the decision to byte the bullet and refactor Quill from the ground up. There are numerous extremely good features in Quill yet the overall architecture was a total train wreck. In this article I'll be explaining in detail what were the issues and how I attempted to improve them. You can find the source code at Visual Editor Github. I've documented the entire process and I'll be releasing deep dive Flutter architecture episodes at Visual Coding YouTube. Enough shameless plugs, let's get going.

On top of any other points you could make about the project's philosophy or code quality, they just don't communicate very well, as exhibited by this recent issue.

I've noticed that on the slack community nobody seems to be online and almost no answers are given (several months in). It's a pity, Quill is by far the best tool for rich text editing in the flutter ecosystem. However, all help request that I've wrote went unanswered by the maintainer(s?). I've wrote multiple times on their slack an no answers were given. Many other users seem to have the same issue. If I look at the github tickets many tickets get closed without answers or resolution.

There are three that I know: - SuperEditor. - zefyr -- not sure if it's still maintained. - flutter-quill -- similar to zefyr in implementation.

(Disclaimer: I work on Notion)

It looks like desktop software built with Flutter. Their editor is based on https://github.com/singerdmx/flutter-quill which also has a web version, so maybe they’ll be able to target web in the future. For now I don’t think they support multi-user sharing or collaboration yet, and I didn’t see web features listed on their roadmap either.

I like https://github.com/singerdmx/flutter-quill. It makes a cross-platform editor. And it helps me to build my own project: AppFlowy

You're right. There are this thing: https://github.com/singerdmx/flutter-quill (latest commit 5 days ago).

See https://github.com/singerdmx/flutter-quill/issues/15