Notable: The markdown-based note-taking app that doesn't suck

notable / notable

The Markdown-based note-taking app that doesn't suck.

Notable  

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I couldn't find a note-taking app that ticked all the boxes I'm interested in: notes are written and rendered in GitHub Flavored Markdown, no WYSIWYG, no proprietary formats, I can run a search & replace across all notes, notes support attachments, the app isn't bloated, the app has a pretty interface, tags are indefinitely nestable and can import Evernote notes (because that's what I was using before).

So I built my own.

Comparison

Part of this comparison is personal opinion: you may disagree on the UI front, things I consider bloat may be considered features by somebody else etc. but hopefully this comparison did a good job at illustrating the main differences.

Features

Markdown-based

Notes are written in GitHub Flavored Markdown, and you can also write KaTeX expressions, Mermaid diagrams and so much more, check out our full Markdown cheatsheet.

Notable also gives you a very powerful Markdown…

View on GitHub

This is a very slick looking product for taking notes in markdown instead of wysiwyg, plaintext, etc. Open source, promising project.

Of course, built with Electron. This will be a turn off for some.

Comments

[Martin Beierling-Mutz]

Thanks for sharing, I was looking for a markdown based note taking app. Always great to see polished open source solutions.

Personally, I still use Workflowy for almost all of my note taking. I love that it's limited to lists, but some things need more formatting. In these cases I rather reach for Markdown than GDrive or MS Office.

[Florimond Manca]

I just gave this a shot yesterday. It is indeed a very-well designed app!

However, I decided to stick to MacDown because:

• It is faster to load and feels much lighter overall (Electron is a turn off for me here).
• It has LaTeX support, which I absolutely need for my lecture notes (although it seems Notable has that on master).
• It doesn't make any assumption as to where and how you store your notes, or even whether you sync them. I'm used to just dropping plain Markdown files in well-named Dropbox folders, and that has worked very well for me. Having a sidebar with tags and menus and categories etc may do it for some, but that's too much for me. And if I want mobile edits, I just do so on the Dropbox app (which has Markdown preview built-in).

[Antonio Radovcic]

Thanks! Good job! I'm also working on an Electron-App with TS currently, and this code seems readable and useful to study.

[Jacob Herrington (he/him)]

There are quite a few of these out there (of varying quality). I'll give this one a look, thanks for sharing!

[Liana Felt (she/her)]

This one seems quite polished so far.

[Giorgos Kontopoulos 👀]

This is a great app thanks for sharing. I am looking to replace .txt notes with markdown notes and this looks very easy to use.

[Jamal Al]

I was actually just about to start working on making one myself but now..

[bdbch]

Looks really good! Thanks for sharing!

[Stephen Chiang]

I really enjoy notion.so it's markdown but with additional features that make it really fast for me to enter a new item. It's the first app that has a mobile version I use easily.

[Mike Wheaton]

Looks good! I've been using Bear, which has similar functionality, for a little over a year now and am very happy with it.