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
Can I sync it with Nextcloud notes?
Probably can open your notes directory in the nextcloud sync dir and it’d work.
I don’t have a Next Cloud instance but I don’t see why this would not work :-)
Just need to walk the folder hierachy to your note
Does it support inline editing?
Sure. I would like to know if this app allows to edit inside the rendered view. E.g. you click on a table cell and you get a caret to manipulate tect inside that cell. Something akin to a richtext editor.
No, there’s currently nothing similar to richtext editing.
You edit your text inside the editor and it is renderer in the preview. You can toggle on/off one or the other.
I tried to make things easier with the editor toolbar. You can easily create table from it through a dialog similar to the one from richtext editor such as LibreOffice writter
Does it support KaTeX math, git integration, and spell checking? I’m using vscode for note taking but it’s slow and power hungry
Math integration is something I want, hesitant between Katex and ASCIIMATH, but there’s no such thing currently
Technicaly no git integration, as in, there’s no way to “git add/commit/Push” directly from the app, but you can style do it. Your notes are saved inside a folder, you can see the path directly from the settings, so you can technicaly use git on it. I personnaly use syncthing
No spell checking, never thought about it, could be a cool feature, thanks for the idea
Well, I’m biased because KaTeX is load bearing to my use case. But I would argue that it:
- Is more powerful
- Is an introduction to LaTeX (which is an industry standard)
- It’s ubiquitous
You could consider using mathjax instead of KaTeX which should render both latex math and asciimath, (and should be better in general). If you had unlimited resources (which I guess you don’t) it would be cool if you made the math language into a setting.
For git, other than the add and commit buttons, it would be useful to have a “git gutter” which shows changes from the last commit. Which is the only git integration feature that you can’t get away with external tools.
For spell checking, even just pulling in some dictionary, like the ones in vscode’s cspell extension and having a basic dictionary check is much better than nothing.
You make a good case for it! But one thing that I also have to consider is the ease of implementing this into my C++ parser…
Right now I don’t see how that would fit into the app to be honest, I’m not fully against the idea, but it would have to be nicelly integrated and I don’t see how it would be (mostly in terms of UI/UX)
There’s also KDE sonnet, I will have to look further into this, but that will most certainly be a future addition to the project!
@edinbruh
Aspell should work for spellcheck.
@louis_sch
Is this why Kate dropped Markdown previews?
In the future, if you plan to add sync, consider reimplementing Joplin sync algorithm
That would give you tens of thousands of passionate users, dedicated FOSS server as well as webdav/s3/dropbox/onedrive client sync ability, webclipper and a lot of support to navigate future issues/roadmap
If you ever decide to do that, there’s even a plan to repackage the algorithm as a standalone library
My first plan is to add NextCloud Note sync
But if the two are compatible let’s go for it ! Thanks for sharing this
Yeah, I’m using Joplin over Nextcloud and it would absolutely be compatible, the Markdown syntax is the same after all.
I’m not to much worried about the syntax, KleverNotes follows Common Mark, so as long as the other app follows it too (which it should) this part is okay
I’m more worried about directory structure and things like that, but I’ll have to read more about both API before I can really say anything concrete on this subject
By the way, if you have something in Joplin that you really can’t live without, let me know, I’m always looking for pottential features :)
