New Markdown notebook application for System 6

[teemaw]

Hello everyone,

Firstly, a disclaimer: LLMs were used in the production of this software, mostly for boilerplate/plumbing but also to ideate/generate decision tables for some engineering decisions. If you don't like this, I totally understand, sorry for wasting your time.

Anyway, I came across Action Retro's latest video on YouTube yesterday and was inspired to finally package up the live Markdown "wikibase" (think Obsidian) notebook application I've been sitting on and slowly polishing up.

Here's an example screenshot:


A quick rundown of some features:

• Live Markdown rendering
• Folding section headings
• Sections outline
• Wikilinks between notes
• Saves files as plain TEXT
• Handles large (8MB) files (if you have the memory)

I found toolbox's TE too limiting for the features/behavior, and performance I wanted so under the hood it's using a custom text processing engine with QuickDraw. I only have an SE/30 (which it performs well on) so I've been relying on Mini vMac at 1x speed to simulate Markette's performance on 68000s. Hopefully its performance is ok on real hardware. It runs fine with 512K of memory on System 6 if your notes are less than ~100K (there's ~200K constant-sized space + max heap usage of ~2x the currently open note size). You can check its memory usage from the About dialog. If you are working with files that are larger (100K should be ~20,000 words), it may behoove you to run this on a 68030 anyway, as searching and jumping around will get slower the larger the note is.

You can grab it for free and see more info here: https://markette.cc

I'm also toying with the idea of producing some boxed physical 800K disks, will share more about this later if there is enough interest.

Thanks for reading