Emanote – Haskell-powered structured view of your plain-text notes | Hacker News Reader

Emanote – Haskell-powered structured view of your plain-text notes

emanote.srid.ca

61 pointssmartmic11 comments

One thing I would love to see is a comparison to the other Haskell powered tool - Pandoc.

Pandoc is so versatile and supports turning plain text into so many many formats that it would be interesting to see where Emanote fits in.

Not to detract from OP's tool, but Pandoc is an excellent and underused tool for this use case.

After previously playing with the https://unifiedjs.com ecosystem extensively, I recently redid my personal site (https://simple.industries) with a 80 line shell script that uses Pandoc instead: https://git.sr.ht/~kb/open-notes/tree/main/item/.build.sh.

Thanks for this. I'm going to check this out and try it on my website. My site has become too heavy for Jekyll. I don't need to render it all the time as I write mostly in plain-text (Markdown) these days. I have Obsidian doing that for me and let Github/Cloudflare use Jekyll to publish. I was looking for a solution where I can render just a page or two when I want but continue to write on Obsidian.

These days, I can walk outside, take few sips of tea while Jekyll renders a post locally.

That's a similar setup to me. Obsidian works beautifully for fast, efficient editing, local preview and creation. The plug-in ecosystem also lets that be customised to your individual needs.

Similarly, Pandoc works amazingly well out of the box, but then let's you extend as required with filters in a way that just feels right.

It seems to me that Emanote is more like a (static or dynamic) site generator for generic content, like mdBook. So intended to have nice enough defaults, but not necessarily compete with Hugo for generating any kind of website.

This is just a quick take, though.

Based on the docs it looks like it actually uses pandoc

Here's the github repo: https://github.com/EmaApps/emanote

If this was compatible with the format that Logseq uses, I'd be inclined to use it as a static-site publisher-tool for my Logseq graph. I maintained a nvim plugin for Emanote's predecessor, Neuron, for awhile. It's a very good personal wiki/knowledge management format, but the usability of Haskell's packaging and the somewhat painful switchover from Neuron -> Emanote lost me in the process.

Having to pull in Nix and run that to use something like this is a big no, for me.

You can always run Nix in Docker to build and run any software that uses it. Without Nix, however, I am forced to either install a bunch of bloat into my system such as Haskell compilers or libraries, or run Docker anyway.

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