Markdown GUIs
‘Organizers’, ‘wikis’, ’note-taking apps’, et c. - these apps are mostly Markdown with an attached GUI. Today, I’m trying each of them out for twenty minutes apiece.
AnyType
- Site: anytype.io
- Size: 383 MB
- AnyType comes encrypted, meaning you can’t easily grab the raw markdown notes and stick them in a Git, or do much else with them.
- It comes with its own synchronizing feature, so you’re discouraged from using your own.
- It recognizes various ’types’ of things very well, with
- bookmarks for youtube links (with an icon), along with the ability to leave notes in the bookmark,
- task lists
- It may be encrypted, but it starts up and just starts synchronizing with…the broader internet. That’s still a little spooky for me.
- Onboarding goes quickly, as the task-list is pre-populated with notes on how to learn the app, and the knowledge-base is populated with knowledge about the app.
- Pressing Alt+F does not open the ‘File’ manager, which I take as a personal insult.
Zettlr
- Site: zettlr.com
- Size: 383 MB
- LaTeX support works by integrating with other LaTeX programs, which warms my heart, but also confuses me. Who uses LaTeX but computer science nerds?
- Very FOSS-friendly,
- with a link to a Mastodon feed for the project.
- The split-view lets you view many notes at once, and reminds me of
vim
. - It seems to use
pandoc
, and the integration looks sensible. - Under the hood, there is no markdown, so once again, no easy way to integrate git.
- But apparently you can make or open Markdown anywhere, so that all works fine.
- I should have tested that function with AnyType as well to make the tests equal. cba
- Once again, Alt+f fails to open
File
at the top bar.
LogSeq
- Site: logseq.com
- Size: 473 MB
- The name
LogSeq
sounds too nerdy. - It opens in light mode, unlike the others.
- Selecting a theme gave me the options:
- Light mode
- This made me think it was a bar of options to click on.
- It kept burning my retinas.
- I really hate this.
- When I found a more general theme option, it merged with my local system theme, and now looks amazing. All is forgiven.
- Selecting a theme gave me the options:
- It’s so minimalist it looks like nothing but a wrapper for Markdown, with no options or abilities. Top score.
- It has an option for when to ’re-index’, which tells users who don’t know what that means that this app is not for them.
- When renaming a whiteboard, a popup asks ‘Are you sure?’ I think I hate it again.
- Whiteboards feel like a CLI-user’s idea of what GUI users want, but then again I make maps in
vim
so what do I know? - The onboarding assaults you with random animations. I don’t like it.
- All settings are in plain text, which is obviously a much-needed feature, but comments are made with
;;
, which is weird. - The standard notes display as simple markdown, and on startup LogSeq asks where it should save information. This isn’t an ‘app’, it’s a
program
. - The automatic graph of pages shows how each links together.
- Everything confuses me.
- Why is everything a bullet point? Where is the normal text?
- I realize I’m typing this from an all-bulleted post, but that’s beside the point.
- The bottom of the page says ‘0 Unliked References’: what does this mean?
- I can make links because I know markdown, but it has no buttons to do this as far as I can see.
- With no
File
bar across the top, I can’t see how to access menus and discover the abilities. I just have to click buttons with random unicode symbols.
- It’s been 40 minutes and I don’t know what I’m doing. Time to stop.