Monday, July 1, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Edna, note taking app for developers

Show HN: Edna, note taking app for developers
12 by kjksf | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I took a small break from coding SumatraPDF and wrote a note taking application that is perfect for me: https://ift.tt/9spZu4z Edna is a note taking app for developers and power users. A cross between Obsidian and Notational Velocity. Markdown, plain text, code, works in browser so no installation required, private (notes are stored in your browser or disk) and secure (can encrypt notes with a password). The story so far. I was always attracted to editors with minimalistic UI, like https://mak.ink/ , simplenote, Notational Velocity. I like having most of the screen estate for writing because writing and editing is what note taking apps are for. But: most of them are very thin on features and UI. I saw Heynote and it was one of those minimalistic writing UIs with not many features. I liked their concept of dividing notes into blocks so I forked Heynote and started coding. The goal was to combine writing-oriented, minimalistic main UI while also providing on-demand UI for features and efficient operation. Things like context menu, type-down note switcher, command palette, quick access shortcuts, plenty of keyboard shortcuts. Another goal was privacy and security. The notes never leave your computer and can be encrypted with a password. It also makes the code simpler because I don't need any backend storage, user accounts and auth etc. Sadly, only Chrome and Edge provide the necessary file system api, on other browser you can only store notes in local storage, which means no sharing between computers or accessing the notes with other software. 40 working days and 528 commits later, here's what I've added: * added support for multiple notes * ability to store notes on disk * and if you store notes in a directory managed by DropBox, OneDrive etc., you get sharing of notes between computers * Ctrl + P: UI for switching between notes, creating new notes, deleting notes, inspired by Notational Velocity * Ctrl + Shift + P: command palette like in vs code * context menu to access frequently used functionality * Ctrl + E to open note from history (list of recently opened notes) * ability to assign Alt + 0 ... Alt + 9 quick access shortcuts * ability to encrypt notes with a password * export all notes to a .zip file * automatic, daily backup of notes to a .zip file (optiona, see Settings) * Ctrl + B to navigate between blocks * re-designed Settings UI * added ability to execute Go blocks * support Svelte and Vue in code blocks * ported the UI code from Vue to Svelte 5, just because I could * converted from desktop app to run in the browser (Ctrl is on Windows, on Mac it's ⌘). I've been using it daily while working on it. 94 notes and counting. I still have ideas for improvements but it has all the core features for productive work. The app: https://ift.tt/9spZu4z The code: https://ift.tt/z6oTOjN

Sunday, June 30, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Pickcode – Free online code editor for kids

Show HN: Pickcode – Free online code editor for kids
15 by csmeyer | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! I've posted Pickcode a few times (most recently https://ift.tt/Nd2MnFo ), but we've improved things quite a bit so I thought it was worth posting again. This is a bit of 1.0 release after a long year of working on the company full time! Pickcode is basically Replit-lite, for kids. The editor is simple: text editor + output console + big green button to run your code. We support Python, HTML/CSS/JS, Java, and our block/text hybrid language, Pickcode VL. We're partners on code.org's Hour of Code, and hundreds of thousands of students have tried our free stuff through them. An account for individual kids is totally free, and we offer some free Python and Pickcode VL lessons to get them started. We make money by selling licenses to schools for better customer support and roster/lesson management features. You can use this demo account I made to try out the editor: email: demo@student.pickcode.io pw: Demo1234 (Don't clobber other people's work, and what you put in the demo account is public so be nice)