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

 

[killvore]

This looks super cool! I was just thinking about what kind of software to put on a 6.0.8-based "workstation" computer (eg a IIcx or IIci running Wingz, WordPerfect, SuperPaint, etc.), going to add it in next time I have it set up!

 

[slomacuser]

Nice to see new apps coming. Why is there no print option in your app same as with Action Retro's.
I would be happy if it si possibility to localize this apps.

* edit: Your app is definitely more polished and has more resources.

 

[teemaw]

This looks super cool! I was just thinking about what kind of software to put on a 6.0.8-based "workstation" computer (eg a IIcx or IIci running Wingz, WordPerfect, SuperPaint, etc.), going to add it in next time I have it set up!

Thank you! Happy to hear you're going to try it out. Would love to hear what you think after you have a go.

Nice to see new apps coming. Why is there no print option in your app same as with Action Retro's.
I would be happy if it si possibility to localize this apps.

* edit: Your app is definitely more polished and has more resources.

That's a good question, I didn't really think about printing while building this. I don't typically print notes but I could definitely see it being useful. That said, I don't actually have a printer to test with, maybe that will change soon...

 

[killvore]

This is Rad As Hell on a portrait display! Haven't had the chance to do actual work with it yet, but seems great so far

Quadra 650 (in a Q700 case) running System 7.1

 

[beachycove]

How does it handle Markdown footnote syntax?

 

[teemaw]

This is Rad As Hell on a portrait display! Haven't had the chance to do actual work with it yet, but seems great so far

Quadra 650 (in a Q700 case) running System 7.1

Looks great! Very cool to see it on a portrait display. Hope it works well for you with actual work

How does it handle Markdown footnote syntax?

Good question! Right now it does not handle footnote syntax at all. It's high on my list of priorities though. Did you have anything in mind for how you would want it to be handled?

 

[beachycove]

Could it be shown as a collapsable (-ible?) window, like a sticky? This is the behaviour of footnotes in FullWrite.

 

[killvore]

All right! I've had a good half hour to do some "work" with Markette this afternoon (writing up a campaign setting for my D&D group ) and here's some notes!

First up - this rules! The featureset is really well balanced and I can easily "zone in" and focus on getting the stuff down. I especially love the [[ link ]] feature, and that I can declare a term as a link before actually setting up a new note, then come back to it later. Awesome!

I really like that I can mess around in the Finder with folders etc. to reorganize a base, since sometimes that's just a more practical way to move things around. I also really like that this is ultimately just plaintext files, so my info doesn't get "trapped" in some cryptic format like Filemaker 2 or something

It would be useful to manually reorder the Notes in a folder so they don't show up alphabetically - currently I'm prefixing them with numbers but its a bit hacky (see attached pic for example hack)

Also for next version - a Style menu! I think the default fonts are well chosen, but it would be rad to bring in Espy Sans. Plus a toggle option for white text on black background! (invert)

This is already a super useful app for me, looking forward to this fall when I can get settled in and geek out with it!

(also thank you for making international payments easy by supporting Apple Pay)

Edit: If there is plans for a Print feature, maybe it then also makes sense to have a "view the whole Base with all Notes in-lined" option if you want to read the whole thing, since this is kind of what a Print feature would need to do anyway? You'd presubably need to walk through and load all the files in all the Base subfolders though

 

[iantm]

This is Rad As Hell on a portrait display! Haven't had the chance to do actual work with it yet, but seems great so far

Quadra 650 (in a Q700 case) running System 7.1

Oh snap. Looking forward to trying it! Still on my backburner to do something similar.

 

[iantm]

This is amazing. So far the only thing I really wanted was the ability to hide and show the sidebar, and maybe more keyboard shortcuts. So you don't rely on TE Toolbox at all?

I still want to try my hand at something like this, even though you've pretty much built it already …only because I've always wanted to learn how to code an app like this.

 

[teemaw]

Could it be shown as a collapsable (-ible?) window, like a sticky? This is the behaviour of footnotes in FullWrite.

I just played around with footnotes on FullWrite a bit to see what you mean, being able to open the "sticky" window from any reference is a pretty nice experience. I found it strange not being able to edit the footnote directly from the page though.

I will continue to work on this. There are a lot of little things to get right when the footnotes are in Markdown and can be placed anywhere in the note, instead of just at the end.

All right! I've had a good half hour to do some "work" with Markette this afternoon (writing up a campaign setting for my D&D group ) and here's some notes!

First up - this rules! The featureset is really well balanced and I can easily "zone in" and focus on getting the stuff down. I especially love the [[ link ]] feature, and that I can declare a term as a link before actually setting up a new note, then come back to it later. Awesome!

I really like that I can mess around in the Finder with folders etc. to reorganize a base, since sometimes that's just a more practical way to move things around. I also really like that this is ultimately just plaintext files, so my info doesn't get "trapped" in some cryptic format like Filemaker 2 or something

It would be useful to manually reorder the Notes in a folder so they don't show up alphabetically - currently I'm prefixing them with numbers but its a bit hacky (see attached pic for example hack)

Also for next version - a Style menu! I think the default fonts are well chosen, but it would be rad to bring in Espy Sans. Plus a toggle option for white text on black background! (invert)

This is already a super useful app for me, looking forward to this fall when I can get settled in and geek out with it!

(also thank you for making international payments easy by supporting Apple Pay)

Edit: If there is plans for a Print feature, maybe it then also makes sense to have a "view the whole Base with all Notes in-lined" option if you want to read the whole thing, since this is kind of what a Print feature would need to do anyway? You'd presubably need to walk through and load all the files in all the Base subfolders though

Great to hear that it's working well!

You can definitely reorganize through Finder, but I would be careful about renaming or moving notes that are linked to since those won't be updated if you do it outside of the app.

Manual ordering is an interesting idea. If implemented, I don't think the ordering could be portable between other apps like Obsidian for example, but could still be worth doing. I would love to support different fonts, and an inverted option sounds interesting too.

Regarding printing, I am implementing this as a per-note print option. If you need an inline view of multiple notes, I think that's a sign you might want to consolidate those notes. That way you could still jump around using the note contents pane, and selectively collapse sections you don't want to see at any given time.

Anyway, glad to hear it's working well, have fun with the D&D campaign!

This is amazing. So far the only thing I really wanted was the ability to hide and show the sidebar, and maybe more keyboard shortcuts. So you don't rely on TE Toolbox at all?

I still want to try my hand at something like this, even though you've pretty much built it already …only because I've always wanted to learn how to code an app like this.

Thanks! I agree being able to hide the sidebar would be nice. Regarding shortcuts, which ones did you feel like you were missing? And yeah, the editor portion doesn't use TE at all, it maintains its own buffer and calls QD's DrawText where needed, and draws other inline elements as well. I would definitely encourage you to build your own! I've found it to be a very rewarding process.

 

[iantm]

Regarding shortcuts, which ones did you feel like you were missing? And yeah, the editor portion doesn't use TE at all, it maintains its own buffer and calls QD's DrawText where needed, and draws other inline elements as well.

Mostly formatting shortcuts, because of muscle memory from Ulysses. Bold, Italic, Strikethrough (cmd-opt-del). I'm writing more long form and rely more on in-document editing. I love that you've even implemented links! That has been instrumental in threading together multiple documents and chapters.

I would definitely encourage you to build your own! I've found it to be a very rewarding process.

I appreciate the encouragement. It's out of my comfort zone to code like this, but something I've always wanted to learn, and I'd definitely use what I build for my own work. It's great to see that it can be done, and can run great, you've got a solid app.

btw I chipped in a few bucks but I still haven't seen the registration email?

 

[killvore]

btw I chipped in a few bucks but I still haven't seen the registration email?

Same I don't know how long it should take

 

[killvore]

... and it came through just now, nice! All good

 

[teemaw]

Mostly formatting shortcuts, because of muscle memory from Ulysses. Bold, Italic, Strikethrough (cmd-opt-del). I'm writing more long form and rely more on in-document editing. I love that you've even implemented links! That has been instrumental in threading together multiple documents and chapters.


I appreciate the encouragement. It's out of my comfort zone to code like this, but something I've always wanted to learn, and I'd definitely use what I build for my own work. It's great to see that it can be done, and can run great, you've got a solid app.

btw I chipped in a few bucks but I still haven't seen the registration email?

Ah cmd-B and cmd-I do work for Bold and Italic, you can also get to these from the Edit menu. Strikethrough doesn't have a shortcut yet though. I will continue to keep shortcuts in mind when working on new menu items/actions. Glad to hear links are working well for you.

... and it came through just now, nice! All good

And yes, I just noticed these were stuck and this is now fixed. Sorry about that!