Hi,
Thanks for those nice words, I really appricate it :)
I'm making this app partially to learn, I face a lot of challenges, but that's the thing that push me to continue the project !
Your app looks beautiful, and well polished (the image drag and drop is a fantastic) amazing work really ! Be sure that I will take a look at your blog post, I'm sure that I can learn a thing or two with it.
I can imagine that selling an app like this can be difficult with all the options out there. I wish you the best of luck for this ! :)
I try to make it user friendly on small screen but I can't actually try it out on a phone.
I should remove that part, thanks you for making me think about that.
Edit: it has been removed, thanks
That's weird yes...
Well, I hope you'll feel at home with the way KleverNotes does it !
It might be the MarkText on this one, Markdown is just plain text with a specific extension, formating should not change base on the app...
Quick note here, since you might be confused about something. KleverNotes let's you organize and Edit your note within the app, you can't just open a random Markdown file with it, it's not a "just" an editor. You can always navigate your storage from your prefered file manager and find your note file in there, but I'm not sure that it's the best way to use the app.
I'm more and more considering a standalone markdown editor, we'll see...
With that said, what don't you like about Marktext ? I might learn from it :-)
It's fearly new, distro have not packaged it yet.
And I'm in the process of releasing it to Flathub, it should soon be available.
Right now you can either build from source or try the Flatpak Nightly, which is V1.1 since I did not add anything new to the main branch since the release. Everything is explained in the README, once it's on Flathub, I'll add a link to it there too ;-)
That's the goal ! Work in progress, but I try to improve this feeling with every release ;-)
I'll be honest, I would not have the time to add it... Glad github is working for you !
I ended my last post by saying that the next version is coming soon, well here we are 3 months later (better late than never) and I am happy to announce that KleverNotes v1.1 is finally out.
What's new?
New parser
The previous parser was a C++ reimplementation of marked.js that I made to easily integrate my plugins and extensions. While it was great for that aspect, I will be the first to admit that it was far from perfect and required a lot of maintenance.
For this reason, I decided to switch to a proper Markdown parser, in the form of md4qt: > md4qt is a header-only C++ library for Markdown parsing. > > md4qt supports CommonMark 0.31.2 Spec and some GitHub extensions, such as tables, footnotes, to-do lists, strikethrough, LaTeX math injections, GitHub autolinks.
It's fast, reliable, customizable and easy to use. A perfect combination!
Better toolbar and editor
With this new parser, it is possible to know exactly where the Markdown tags are in the text. Thanks to this, and the new access to the underlying text document, the toolbar is more precise in removing specific tags but also in applying them. In addition, the toolbar now tells you which tags are already applied on the text under the cursor or the selected text.
!bold, italic and strikethrough are checked
The editor has also gained some small bonuses. Tabbing/untabbing blocks and auto-adding list items are now more reliable, but you now also have the ability to add an HTML line break (<br>) before a new line with Shift + Enter or a horizontal rule using Alt + Enter.
Optimization 🚀
- Parsing is now done on a separate thread, so parsing very large notes should still be smooth!
- Rendering is now disabled if preview is disabled, saving resources!
- Using the toolbar will now add or delete text in a single undo block, no more double/triple
Ctrl+Zto go back to your previous state. 😆
WYSIWYG-like editor
Now the big news, you read it correctly!
Again, thanks in large part to the new parser, the editor now has the ability to be "WYSIWYG", bold text will be bold, highlighted text will be highlighted, etc...
By default, Markdown tags will be 50% smaller than the rest of the text, this can of course be changed in the settings, a value of 1% makes them practically invisible. These tags will revert to their normal size depending on the position of the cursor/selected text, this way you can see which tag is responsible for a style.
Give credit where credit is due, this way of doing things was inspired by Marktext, it brings the best of both worlds.
However, this does not mean that the preview will be removed anytime soon, it is still in my opinion the best way to view Markdown, and if you don't like it, as you already know, you can disable it. 😉
Special Thanks
I would like to thank Igor Mironchik, the creator of md4qt.
I contacted him to ask if he could help me integrate his parser into KleverNotes, and he not only helped me do it, but also listened to my requests throughout the process and added features to make my life easier.
Credit where credit is due, the main part of the syntax highlighter belongs to him as well, although he gave me full copyright on it, all I did was customize it to fit my vision, it would have been much harder for me without his help!
Finally, thanks to his years of experience, he taught me a lot about C++ and software development in general, and continues to do so today. I really grew up working with him and I can't thank him enough for that. I clearly made a good choice in asking him for this collaboration and I sincerely hope that it will continue. 🙂
md4qt and markdown-tools
As I said:
> md4qt is fast, reliable, customizable and easy to use.
And it is now part of the KDE Incubator program! So if anyone wants to try it or needs a good Markdown parser to work with Qt, feel free!
Igor also uses it for some pretty cool personal projects, check out Markdown-tools it's worth a try! 😄
Final note
I'm back at school and my schedule is busier than last year, this will obviously impact development. However, this doesn't mean I'm abandoning the project, things will just move a bit slower.
The next release should overhaul the way the sidebar works, and I'll start working on it soon. 😉
I'm currently publishing this version on flathub, you should (hopefully) be able to get it soon!
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As always, feel free to tell me what you think of the app, I'm always happy to hear criticism, good or bad, as long as it's productive.
Link to the repo: https://invent.kde.org/office/klevernotes
Mirrorlist: https://download.kde.org/stable/klevernotes/1.1.0/klevernotes-1.1.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist
Yes, I agree on that. I supposed it's more difficult to do than it seems
It's not electron, it's a WebEngineView, see the VideoViewerUi_alt.qml file for example.
But you're right about dolphin. It does support preview and they're enough for me. However, I saw people for whom this was not enough, and IIRC that's the reason behind the creation of this project.
There's https://invent.kde.org/danagost/Kiview
Don't know how well it works but you could give it a try
Based on you use of Obsidian this might change
If you don't use some crazy Obsidian plugin the biggest change is the folder structure, which wil change to be less strict in the future
It's normal! I want people to try it out and give me some feedback ;)
Yes that's pretty much the plan ;-)
And math support is wanted, I just need to check what would be best to do it
Not from KDE
I tried it before creating Klevernotes, and it was just to much for me. I would like to make an alternative that look and feel simpler, while keeping the power.
But if QOwnNote is good for you, that's cool
"WYSIWYG like" editor is the next step
Not full richtext mode, but something similar to Marktext
You might not need one more, but I'm having fun making it and the work is here, so why not sharing it
Next step is "WYSIWYG like editor" And the addition of different Plugins
Thanks you !
I want it to look nice and easy to use while keeping some power under the hood ;-)
Just to be sure
Create an issue with the list sample so I can try it out by myself, it will be easier to debug ;-)
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 😬)
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.
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As always, I'll be more than happy to answer your questions, discuss potential features, or hear your point of view 😉
Link to the repo: https://invent.kde.org/office/klevernotes
Mirrorlist: https://download.kde.org/stable/klevernotes/1.0.0/klevernotes-1.0.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist
Klevernotes is now available as a flatpak (Nightly version) through KDE cdn.
To install it, simply run:
flatpak install --user --or-update https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/klevernotes-nightly/org.kde.klevernotes.flatpakref
This is based on the following tutorial.
For more info and news see: KDE Discuss post
Hi, There has been quite a lot of merge since last time lots of minor tweaks/bugs fixes but also some big changes. Let’s take a look a this! What’s new ? Tweaks/Bugs fixes I’m not going to list and explain each one since there are more or less 20 of them. Tweak wikilink regex The wikilink rege...
Hi ! Between the holidays and my exams I haven’t been able to work on the project as much as I would like but the objectives I set for myself last time have been fulfilled. So I’m back with news! 😎 What’s new? Quality of life: Spring cleaning (mainly C++) Clean QML files Dropping QT5 CMake and Q...
Hey ! It’s been roughly a month and I’m back with more KleverNotes news ! I ended the last post by saying : As I said, the new C++ parser makes life much easier for new features. I’m now working on a “note linking” feature, similar to Obsidian (the map won’t be included with this). Well, this ...
Hi, I’m Louis, the creator of Klevernotes. For those who don’t know Klevernotes : KleverNotes is a note taking and management application for your mobile and desktop devices. It uses markdown and allow you to preview your content. It’s been roughly 9 month since I made my first post about it a...
