xournalpp VS GNU Emacs

I highly recommend Rnote to anyone on Linux that misses the "hodgepodge" notetaking of apps like OneNote. It works like a dream on touchscreens and drawing tablets, with a surprising amount of configuration under the hood.

Also worth noting is Xournal, an older but similar project: https://xournalpp.github.io/

I've been using Xournalpp[1] for many years, highlighting books as I read them, adding in text/hand drawn annotations in whitespaces if necessary. Unlike other PDF readers/annotators, it saves a separate file, so the original PDF is untouched. It can also export the annotated PDF as a new PDF with highlights and annotations.

Obsidian[2] also has PDF support, where you can open a markdown document side by side with the PDF to take notes as you read. I think it also lets you highlight the PDF itself.

Emacs I think has a similar feature, via plugins/org-mode(?) to the Obsidian setup.

And of course your typical PDF reader probably has support for highlighting PDFs too, but I find them clunky and they save by exporting a PDF, which can be a bit heavy-handed IMO compared to just saving the annotations/highlights as a separate file as Xournalpp does.

[1]: https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp/

Currently, I am trying to build a small open source NLP project for which I first find text on a page and then translate it; see the current project state here: https://github.com/PellelNitram/xournalpp_htr. The purpose of this project is to make handwritten text in Xournal++ searchable for all users.

[Xournal++](https://xournalpp.github.io/) is in my option the best handwritten note-taking software out there, because it has all the coolest features (like LaTeX snippets and shapes) and it's open source too, so make sure to check it out!

gnu.org - contains everything you need to research his philosophy.

stallman.org - personal website, contains a lot of opinion, but I absolutely respect this man in all what he says.

emacs.org (redirects to https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) - his non-philosophical work, one of two mainstream console text editors.

Forever, there was a file included in stock Emacs, `spook.el`, which could be hooked up to automatically add random strings of "interesting" keywords to each of your email or Usenet messages (in signatures, or in headers like `X-Spook`).

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ma...

Looks like copyright date of 1988:

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/play/...

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/spook....

Try `M-x spook RET` in an Emacs buffer.

If you want to spare a couple of detours, you probably could start with Emacs Org-mode according to Greenspun's eleventh rule: "Any sufficiently complicated PIM or note-taking program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Org mode."

Emacs: winget install GNU.Emacs

The whole cl-lib thing is a total disaster:

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/emacs...

They added cl- as a prefix to each Common Lisp symbol.

FIRST is now called cl-first, CAAAR is now cl-caaar .

I would really prefer if GNU Emacs removes all Common Lisp functionality, instead of creating this really wacky stuff, with discussions about this topic every year.

Never too late to try! Take your time. Emacs will outlive us all. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

GNU Emacs is a versatile, open-source text editor that offers extensibility and customization—a sort of self-documenting real-time display editor. Our thanks for the suggestion go to CartanAnnullator.

Emacs

Their DEFUN and DEFVAR macros for example let us define a function or a variable that will be available as a Lisp function, and can be used as an ordinary C function from the C code. Emacs is written in pure C99 language and works with both GCC and Clang I believe. We can just define a C function via macro, and it is auto exported and made available to Lisp. For example my first patch to Emacs was for this function (we added "count" argument to make it possible to skip enumerating files in a directory for the case when user code is just interesting if a directory is empty or not):