I don’t wish to change your direction of travel with knotes but it pays (for me) to search all notes contenders. Have you compared other contenders such as CherryTree? In CherryTree I can include bulleted list and tabbing each bullet runs through different options. The internal structure of CherryTree can be viewed through any XML editor such a XMLCopyEditor so you can XML parse historical files. This does not answer your question and in other discussions outside this forum I have on occassions been flagged for going off topic. Which is one reason I turned up here. We’ll see. I am keen on X11 deployment. And employing multiple tools for notes management in a tool chain. Not just one.
ADDENDUM
Being a curious soul and experimenter at heart I installed Knotes on Ubuntu 22.04 (I have other K apps there although not on Kubuntu - yet). I found that my desktop froze.
I then found this link.