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.
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
To add on to that: Obsidian is the only program that currently has this (to my knowledge) and it is a huge gamechanger. It just feels so much more usable than anything with a source and preview view. [I’m not demanding or anything, this is the stuff you do in your freetime, but you might want to go down that road.]
A “WYSIWYG like” editor is currently in progress (next big update)
I don’t want to go full richtext mode a la LibreOffice writter, it will be something similar as Marktext instead
You will still see the Markdown tag (e.g: the “#” in your heading) but with the possibility to style them in a way that make them pretty much dissapear when your note editing that part, and some nice color and font size for the important part, that would pretty much mimic the preview style ;-)
Sounds cool, where do I best keep up with the project? Is there some RSS feed?
RSS feed looks good but to be honest I’m completly clueless about it, never used one
I’m posting detailled update on KDE Discuss (see the “last update” link in this post) when I’ve made enough progress in my opinion I think you can search them using the “klevernotes” tag
And I make Lemmy and Reddit post linking to those each time
Edit: and if you want to ask question, my dm on those platform are always open, or there’s a Matrix channel (not super active, but I check it every day), the link is in the Readme of the project
Have you looked at how Obsidian handles it? I think their solution is pretty much perfect. You have the markdown, you write wysiwym, but you only ever see the source when your cursor is in that specific line/part. Also for equations.
