Notes

This is my implementation of a note-taking app, organized around the following principles:

• Linking creates structure as necessary. Having to choose a category or folder for notes just makes me tired. I want to write and connect stuff as I think of it. Structure will emerge where it needs to! I should also be able to see all linked/unlinked references to a note.

• Notes are for me. Sharing is important but secondary, and exporting should be fine in most cases. Note, though, that this means I want importing to work great so I can slurp in stuff from multiple places!

• Anything I can see, I can edit. There should be as few read-only views in the app as I can manage.

• Keyboard shortcuts for the win. I want to be able to navigate completely with the keyboard. Vim-ish keybindings, if possible!

• If I can't organize things I need to do, I'm not going to use the tool. It should handle TODOs nicely (due/defer, mark/complete/cancel, recurrence rules?) It should also be possible to reorder/filter todos in some sort of aggregate view.

• Aggregate views reveal structure. These look like queries. Maybe I want to see only the first marked TODO in each note? Should be doable.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action	Implemented
Alt-Up	Move edit cursor up	No
Alt-Shift-Up	Move node up	No
Alt-Down	Move edit cursor down	No
Alt-Shift-Down	Move node down	No
Alt-Right	Move edit cursor to first child	No
Alt-Shift-Right	Indent	No
Alt-Left	Move edit cursor to parent	No
Alt-Shift-Left	Dedent	No
Tab	Indent	Yes
Shift-Tab	Dedent	Yes
Enter	Split node at cursor	Yes
Backspace	Join nodes	Yes
Esc	Stop editing	Yes

Interaction Ideas

• It'd be cool to be able to select/export a group of notes. These could either be viewed in a read-only mode or imported into someone else's database. I guess it would also be possible to structure the export with CRDTs for easy merges.
• It'd be cool to persistently save a database somewhere shared, but that potentially violates the "no formal structure" principle so it needs to be done carefully.
• It'd be super slick to do something like idea fight where one could order the children of a node.

Next things to do

• basic tree editing
  • ability to move a node up and down as well as in and out
    • moving up and down to siblings
    • if you're at the first child, moving up goes to the parent.
    • if you're at the last child, moving down goes to the parent's next sibling.
• persistence
• nice design
• navigation by link
• sidebar improvements
  • display and sort by last modified time
  • show first couple rows of content
• package to be deployed by Nix
• links to a note should change if you change the title
• backlinking
• syncing with CouchDB / PouchDB servers
• the module layout reflects some old design ideas (Node.Content, Node being separate from Database.Row)
• too many things are named Node. There's Node, Node.Content.Node, and I think a few others
• there aren't any inline formats. I'd like italic, bold, and inline code at a minimum. Possibly :highlights: or ~strikethrough~ too?
  • I'd like a few more block formats too... > for blockquotes in particular
• default selection to the end of the text box
• show the incoming links along with their titles
• fix encoding issue on notes.bytes.zone serving
• make it possible to edit an empty node
• get rid of onBlur handler (just use esc)
• I'd really like some level of autocomplete for note titles in notes
• auto-link URLs
• hitting backspace at the beginning of a non-empty node should not delete it
• automatically create notes when they're first linked?
• only show incoming links for notes, not nodes
• profile some large notes and try to make them much faster
• brackets are valid syntax for non-link reasons. Don't block that!
• don't discard content as easily when something's invalid ] ]
• change the page title to the current note
• tree editing
  • moving edit focus around
    • hitting alt-up and alt-down should go to the previous/next sibling
  • refinements on existing behavior
    • move to the previous sibling when I backspace through a node
    • hitting tab/shift-tab should preserve the cursor position, if possible
      • Html.Keyed? Blocking keyup defaults as well as keydown?
    • alt-shift-up and alt-shift-down to move nodes
    • preserve cursor position when joining nodes with backspace (put it at the join point)
    • delete selected text when splitting with enter (but if it's collapsed, no change)
    • alt-enter or shift-enter or something should insert a linebreak in the current node
    • cmd-enter should close the node in addition to Escape
• search
  • finding nodes and navigating to their notes
  • backlinks
• come up with a consistent design for keybindings (e.g. alt moves edit, alt+shift moves node)
• offline support (webworker, caching?)
• exporting to
  • (likely) markdown
  • (less likely) rich text of some kind
• allow multiple notes to be edited concurrently
• more metadata (todos, etc)

Notes to Self

elm-rte-toolkit looks cool, and it may make sense to add it later, but don't go for the complexity now! Keep things simple as long as possible!

Layout

Prior Art

• Roam does bidirectional links amazingly well.
• Bear has a really nice user experience.

Icons

TODO: I need to add this to an in-app page somewhere.

• chick by Symbolon from the Noun Project