Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to get ahead of the curve and warn everyone: Yes, Electron web application. Yes, noticeable input delay. Yes, memory consumption is how you might expect it to be.

They distribute on Linux with an AppImage, though, which at least isn't a Snap or Flatpak, so there's that, I guess.

If you want a non-proprietary Electron application, take a look at Logseq, or Athens (YC some year that I'm too lazy to look up).

If you want a non-proprietary non-Electron application, Emacs has a Roam mode, and a couple other Zettelkasten modes.

If you want all that, but you don't care about proprietary operating systems and you want it following the Apple HIG, the popularizer of the Zettelkasten method did it via Textmate.

If you don't mind those things, it's a shiny new application. You might enjoy it. The pricing model is a SaaS, and they lock down the API and limit the amount of entries you can have if you're using the free tier. Standard stuff. It's a very shiny application, and has a dark mode, apparently.

If you don't care about proprietary OS and want something that follows the Apple HIG, as well as working across Apple platforms, NotePlan is also worth a look. it might look like a task manager at first, but it actually has very solid note taking / backlinking / Zettelkasten abilities. it also has a really approachable/hackable JavaScript plugin api (that works on iOS!) which is not obvious on first look.

Love noteplan... + simply uses icloud drive / cloudkit / local (should work with dropbox)

Good idea to preempt those points, keeps the conversation focused imho.

One thing I noticed that I hadn't seen in any other Electron note-taking apps yet is that it's using Google Analytics to track usage but I didn't see any consent banner (?)

How to poke around: cd Supernotes.app/Contents/Resources/; npx asar extract app.asar ./; cd web; cat index.html

We actually use Plausible[1] for analytics (actually switched from GA to Plausible because we much preferred their privacy story), Google Tag Manager is in there for use with Google Ads I think but honestly I'm not sure we even need that there. Thanks for pointing it out – need to double-check with my co-founder but I'm pretty certain that can be removed.

[1] https://plausible.io/

Very cool, Plausible looks like a solid alternative to GA - Thanks for pointing it out!

Just curious, do you really notice an input delay? Is there a way of measuring this? Because I tried to compare Supernotes to BBEdit and couldn’t tell the difference

I do, personally, but that might just be because I'm used to xedit, and have a monitor with a reasonably high refresh rate, a keyboard I purchased largely to lower input latency (which I find annoying), and a typing speed that's decent (120wpm).

You can measure input latency relatively easily, but it's not as useful without a frame of reference. Here are a couple internet posts on doing exactly that:

https://danluu.com/term-latency/

http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency...

If you're not wanting to go out of your way to measure it, though, there's a pretty straightforward way you can get a feel for it: Pay attention to when the glyph appears on the screen, versus when the click of the keypress happens. For example, in xedit, I press 't', and the appearance of the glyph occurs almost simultaneously with the click. The click and the appearance happen much more noticeably asynchronously with Electron applications, including this one.

Personally, I use a monitor with a 60hz refresh rate but can still tell the difference between VSCode (an Electron app) and Sublime Text for example. It's very subtle, and I overall I believe VSCode to be usable, but after enough time using a native text editor, Electron-based editors feel sluggish in comparison and it takes me a little while until I'm used to them again.

I actually used to be an avid Sublime Text coder, but at some point I switched to VSCode for other aspects of DX besides performance and my happiness with that changeover (compared to when I'd tried Atom in the past) is what convinced me that we could definitely build an Electron app that, although the perf would never be best-in-class, could definitely be good enough for 99.9% of users and use-cases.

We definitely haven't optimized quite as much as the VSCode team, but not being fully optimized means I can still improve perf for our users (myself included), which I'm always happy to do!

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