KleverNotes Version 1.0 official release

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KleverNotes demo note
KleverNotes demo note1289×838 95.7 KB

KleverNotes, KDE’s Markdown note-taking and management application using Kirigami, is ready for its first release!

KleverNotes lets you create and preview Markdown notes while giving you the freedom to customize the preview from settings or using a CSS theme.

You can organize your notes however you want with a combination of categories and groups, which will be directly reflected on your system in the hierarchy of your KleverNotes storage folders.

Simply choose your storage location and you’re ready to write!

You can print your notes, add small sketches and even create specific tasks for each of them, all from the application!

Notes are saved as Markdown files in your KleverNotes storage for easy access.
They support the entire CommonMark specification with extensive syntax.
KleverNotes also introduces a small collection of opt-in “plugins” to extend basic markdown functionality, such as:
code highlighting, note linking, quick emoji, PUML.

Special thanks

I would like to thank Carl Schwan who helped me through the incubator process, has set up the repository and the various KDE related things, fixed my code, and answered my many questions. The project would not be where it is without him.

History

I started KleverNotes as a small personnal project to learn QML and C++ and motivate myself to take notes in class. After posting a few screenshots of my progress on Reddit, people seemed pretty interested, which inspired me to continue and redouble my efforts. Once it was added to KDE, my motivation grew even more, my final goal is now to be able to offer a simple alternative to QOwnNotes using Kirigami.
(I actively use KleverNotes in each of my classes now btw :grimacing:)

Final note

This release doesn’t add anything special compared to my last update, just UI tweaks from Carl, which makes the app better looking.
I just wanted to get things moving in order to officially push more updates in the future.
A big one is in the works and should arrive soon once my exams are finished.

As always, I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions, discuss potential features, or hear your point of view :wink:

Link to the repo: Office / KleverNotes · GitLab
Mirrorlist: Mirrorlist /stable/klevernotes/1.0.0/klevernotes-1.0.0.tar.xz

14 Likes
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That’s actually a great idea for the app, I’d like to see some Obsidian competitors :smile:. Though, for fundamental features I’d like to see:

  • Sync with other devices (through WebDAV or other methods)
  • Version for Android (I know that KDE apps are rarely ported to Android but I feel that the whole point of note-taking is to be able to open notes from anywhere)
  • WISIWYG editing

I know that this is your first project and I may be asking for too much, but I feel that this is what I want to see in usable note-taking app.

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  • Sync : I’ve been asked about this many times. I’m not against it, I know it’s important, but I need to figure out the APIs and maybe rework the folder structure (which is planned). I was asked about NextCloud Note and Joplin, but WebDav also seems like something to add to the list. In the meantime, I personnaly use Syncthing on my storage, you can also do it with git or NextCloud.

  • Android: not against it either, I have to learn how to do it and test it. I already try to make the UI mobile friendly but without any real test.

  • WYSIWYG: well, that’s perfect, it’s the next update. I won’t go full richtext a la LibreOffice writter, it’s Markdown, I want to keep that feeling, I’m leaning towards something similar to the way MarkText does it.

It’s not to much to ask, I do agree that it’s important, it’s a lot, so it won’t happen instantly, but you can be sure that those are on my todo list. It will all depend on the time I have avalaible.

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Hi. Readme in git repo says:

Klevernotes is currently in KDE incubator, and will not be shipped on Flathub until its first stable release.

version 1.0 looks like stable :slight_smile: so, maybe it is time to publish to Flathub?
Thanks.

Also, could you please add “full text search”? Looks like right now “search” is searching only against notes names, which is not very useful.

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Hi,

I know for Flathub, it is planned. But I get headaches just thinking about the last time I worked on something flatpak related… :laughing:
I’m saving this problem for after my exams (they will be over soon)

Regarding full text searching, the idea seems nice but I have no good idea how to implement it… Having to open each note to see if there is a match for the searched text doesn’t seem to be a good idea, and I also don’t want to use a database.
But searching for text inside the note is on my to-do list.

Edit: @qazerr tagging you just in case because my comment doesn’t look like a reply on Discuss

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couple of ideas:

  1. use index instead of database or opening every file every time search is initiated. i guess you can say that index is a database as well, but it can be stored in some temporary place and it is disposable. also you can make it optional (like if user enabled option then you create index).
    also, maybe Baloo from KDE can be used somehow.
  2. stupid but simple: you can use something like ripgrep or just grep, parse output and then show it in your UI.
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  • Not a huge fan of index either, but I’m not super aware of how it is done, I could change my mind by checking how other apps do it.

  • I won’t use baloo, nothing against it, but many user (including me) disable it.

  • grep is an option yes…

I would have to think more about it to give a final answer. All I can say is that right now it is not a top priority

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How does this compare to Zim?

I have recently started using Zim and love it, but am not heavily invested in it yet. So far, the only drawback is a relatively low level of community support which may be less of a problem for an app like yours in the KDE ecosystem.

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Never used Zim, so I will answer based on what I see on their home page

Zim can be used to:

  • Keep an archive of notes → KleverNotes too, everything is stored locally in your KleverNotes storage (it’s just a folder named ‘klevernotes’) which can be placed where you want, so archiving it should be pretty easy

  • Keep a daily or weekly journal → journaling is not supported. However I planned on adding “recurrent” notes, which will basically let’s you create note automatically each day/weeks/month whatever. This should come when I will rework the storage structure (no specific date yet)

  • Take notes during meetings or lectures → completely designed for this, I use KleverNotes in each of my classes

  • Organize task lists → ordered or unordered list using the regular Markdown syntax for those, and you also have a TODO system for each of your note (I will soon work on task sync with your calendar)

  • Draft blog entries and emails → I guess ? You can export your note as an HTML doc, so why not

  • Do brainstorming → no idea, depend on how you do it I guess.

This markup is saved as wiki text so you can easily edit it with other editors

KleverNotes notes are saved as Markdown, in fact you writte your Markdown on the left and preview it on the right (WYSIWYG similar to Marktext is in progress). What you writte is exactly what will be saved locally in your file. I like markdown because it’s pretty easy and used widely

Because of the autosave feature, you can switch between pages and follow links while editing without worries.

Same for KleverNotes, everything is autosaved

KleverNotes also has “plugins” which are opt-in features that will let you link note to each other, highlight bloc of code, things like that.

Finally, if you use KDE, I think KleverNotes which use Kirigami will look a bit more at home than Zim which seem to use GTK, it matter to me, but that’s a more personnal thing :smile:

@Joseph_J_Pollock tagging you just in case, sometimes Discuss doesn’t show my comment as a “reply”

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Thanks for the prompt and detailed response!

Apparently, printing has gone out of style, but some of us still use hard copies. A real print command would be good to have.

I had to write a strange little bash script to convert all my Zim wiki pages to HTML, then to PDF, and then to one PDF. It works, but its not pretty. I have a few wikis that have multiple nested pages and having to do that dance one page at a time every time I want a printout would be really annoying.

I also had to prefix all my page names with numbers so they would “sort” in the desired order for printing. IDK if there’s a way around that.

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You can also export you note as Pdf (not on flatpak, still trying to find a workaround)

But you would still have to put them together manually if you want a single master note

Edit: and for a real print command I guess I could have a look and see what I can do :thinking:

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pdfunite from the poppler package does that nicely.

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i love clean design. this is the most beautiful note app i ever see.

but is it available yet on opensuse repo ?

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I’m far from the best when it comes to UI/UX, so thank you very much I appreciate it :smile:

Breeze is playing a huge role in this I think :wink:

About opensuse, here’s what I’ve found: openSUSE Software

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oh my mistake. yeah this great app is available here in tumbleweed repo but not in leap. what a pity. unfortunately im using leap 15.6 now.

but thank you for the news.

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Too bad it relies on WebEngineQuick, no qt6webengine for now on Haiku, so will have to give this a go once we’re on par there, looks like something nice to have a look at.

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Yes, I’m not a huge fan of it myself, but I want to be able to render all markdown correctly and right now it’s the only viable options that I found to do it.
And as a pretty nice plus, it’s easily customizable in terms of styles :slight_smile:

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Will stick to Marknote for now then. :wink:

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Not the same goal as KleverNotes, but that’s also good project, understandable :wink:

1 Like