notes VS AppFlowy

Plume is actually based on my open source note-taking app Notes[1]. You can already get it on Flathub, Snap Store etc. Notes uses just a simple plain text editor while Plume has a completely revamped block editor that I built from scratch. That parts of Notes used in Plume will remain open source (per the MPL license) but the rest of the code will be closed source. At least for the time being.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

Plume is built on top of my open source note-taking app Notes[1]. Since Plume is based on Notes, I'll of course comply with the MPL license and release all existing files that were changed (and must stay MPL licensed).

But I recently discussed my reasoning to go close-source with Plume[2]. I've been working night and day (every day) converting 4 cups of coffee into code for the last 4.5 months to create Plume. I don't want to risk not being rewarded sufficiently for it. But, I'm 99% sure that I'll either open source the core block editor or the entire app in the future.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38584960

2. Each note is just a simple plaintext in the underlying data (although currently stored in a database, but in a future update we'll convert the database to an arbitrary folder).

So you can create beautiful and advanced notes, easy. In a non-proprietary format (when that future update arrives). All while using a resource efficient and fast software that is cross-platform.

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

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

My Noets app[1] editor is built on top of the Markdown syntax of QOwnNotes.

My new app Plume[2] is built on top of Notes but features an advanced block editor and a new design.

[1] https://www.get-notes.com/

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

Indeed, I want this feature badly myself to create wikis and such. There's an open issue[1]. We'll definitely implement that some day.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/issues/431

I mostly disagree. Like you said, Qt is the best native GUI toolkit available today. And that is a hard achievement. There are many tradeoffs (some you pointed out) but the open source community seems to find a way around those limitations. There are thousands of open source libraries you can plug-in into your Qt app to overcome many of its limitations (although some remain, like how can't we still not easily change caret/cursor color of QTextEdit??).

Unlike you, I like the direction where Qt is taking. I think QML and Qt Quick are great. I just implemented a feature in my note-taking app that turns Markdown text into Kanban board using QML and the experience has been great (https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574). I'm planning to continue transition from QWidgets to QML/Qt Quick.

I do worry of the continuous friction with open source development and hate the online installers as well. I can recommend this useful tool https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall that allows you to easily download prebuilt Qt binaries. I hope they can revert their approach on that.

I beg to differ, QML is great. I'm implementing a feature that converts all tasks in Markdown editor to a Kanban view (written in QML) and it's been so easy to do. Work in progress GIF here: https://imgur.com/a/sZNHnp6

And it's even crazier that most of it compiles to C++. It's so fast to develop with it, and runs so fast.

BTW, source code here: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574

Thanks! Even more awesome features and improvements are coming soon (:

We're on Github here btw: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

💾 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.