sowhat VS zim-desktop-wiki

Hello HN,

The demo here shows the companion editor [0] for the sowhat language [1].

The purpose of the editor is two things:

- Makes building and organizing a collection of writing easier. It does this by extracting different elements such as tags and folders from a collection of writing then presenting those elements via in-context autocomplete.

- Makes the collection of writing more useful by including notation elements such as events, beans [2] and formulas to support computing within the writing itself.

A while back I released sowhat, the language supporting Tap [3]. Sowhat and the companion editor are, together, a cornerstone of Tap. Tap is a system for collecting writing and other digital matter.

The editor here can be used in conjunction with sowhat to build your own tools. Or, it can provide a foundation to augment and enhance Tap.

My goal is to open source as much of Tap as possible because:

- It's fun to build with other people

- It should be as easy as possible for someone to customize their Tap experience. There's no way to accommodate all the UXs one might want within Tap. These tools are intended to enable a developer to create their own experiences.

- For those that use Tap but the then leave, a person's exported notes can maintain their original organization and meaning.

- Opens a path for others to provide feedback and enhancements to the open source tools and Tap itself.

0. https://github.com/tatatap-com/sowhat-editor, demo: https://tatatap-com.github.io/sowhat-editor/

1. https://github.com/tatatap-com/sowhat

2. https://github.com/tatatap-com/sowhat#beans

3. https://www.tatatap.com

I hear you. What guarantees about how it works do you have in mind?

You may be interested in just the parsing component of /tap, which is open source https://github.com/tatatap-com/sowhat

I'll slightly modify your argument; because Pure HTML does suck:

Why don't people make static sites with a simple "Markdown-or-Similar to HTML" converter, CSS, and vanilla JS...etc?

(This is what I do, btw -- http://zim-wiki.org + a template)

You should add Zim [1] to the "Personal Knowledge Management" section :)

[1] https://zim-wiki.org

https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

And I just tweaked the CSS and added a bit of logic to included the possibility of one image per slide; as well as editing slides not with raw HTML but with https://zim-wiki.org (because that's what I'm really used to, I'm sure any Markdown thing would work just as well).

Absolutely; recently I realize I wish I'd never learned vim. I use too many other programs that are at least CUA-ish ( http://zim-wiki.org is the most important app I use ) and now I kind of want out. I haven't yet tried Modeless Vim, but that looks like my next experiment.

https://github.com/SebastianMuskalla/ModelessVim

It is so hard not to feel REALLY SMUG reading stuff like this, as someone who has run my own website as the working primary source for my college instruction for the past 15 years or so using https://zim-wiki.org. (before Markdown was much of a thing!)

It's borderline bizarre to have watched this method of doing things kind of die out, and then also come back in the form of "static site generators" -- which, frankly, are still way clunkier than this.

Write in Zim, export to html, rsync to site. Easy.

FWIW, I've been using http://zim-wiki.org for YEARS. (Sites a little messy and I need to clean it up, but it's extremely functional,) I host my college classes websites from it, to the point that I forced myself to learn the Canvas API, to just clone the page from this site to the front page of Canvas and change the links so they come back here.

jrm4.com