vnote

VNote

中文

Designed specially for Markdown, VNote is a Vim-inspired note-taking application, which knows programmers and Markdown better.

Downloads

Users from China can download the latest release of VNote from Baidu Netdisk.

Windows

• Github releases
• Latest builds on master:

Linux

NOT ready yet! Please help yourself to compile and build it from sources.

Any help for packaging and distribution on Linux is appreciated!

MacOS

• Github releases
• Latest builds on master:

Description

VNote is a Qt-based, free and open source note-taking application, focusing on Markdown. VNote is designed to provide comfortable edit experience.

VNote is NOT just a simple editor for Markdown. By providing notes management, VNote makes taking notes in Markdown simpler and more pleasant.

Utilizing Qt, VNote could run on Linux, Windows, and macOS (due to the quite different interaction logics on macOS, VNote is not fully tested on macOS and we need more feedbacks to help improving VNote).

Supports

• Github issues;
• Email: tamlokveer at gmail.com;
• QQ group: 487756074;
  

Highlights

• Supports inserting images directly from clipboard;
• Supports syntax highlights of fenced code blocks in both edit and read mode;
• Supports outline in both edit and read mode;
• Supports custom styles in both edit and read mode;
• Supports Vim mode and a set of powerful shortcuts;
• Supports infinite levels of folders;
• Supports multiple tabs and splitting windows;
• Supports Mermaid, Flowchart.js, and MathJax;
• Supports HiDPI.

Why VNote

Markdown Editor & Notes Management

VNote tries to be a powerful Markdown editor with notes management, or a note-taking application with pleasant Markdown support. If you are a fan of Markdown and enjoy writing Markdown notes for study, work, and life, VNote is the right tool for you.

Pleasant Markdown Experience

Insight About Markdown

Markdown, as a simple mark language, unlike rich text, was born with a gap between edit and read. There are about three ways to handle this gap:

1. As one extreme, some editors just tread Markdown as plain text. Users may lose themselves in the messy black characters. It is hard to keep track of the information of the note.
2. Most Markdown editors use two panels to edit and preview Markdown notes simultaneously. It makes things easier since users could see a pleasant typesetting and layout while editing the text. However, two panels may occupy the whole screen and users keep moving eyes left and righti which will be a big distraction.
3. As another extreme, some editors convert the Markdown elements in place immediately after the typing, which makes editing Markdown just like editing rich text document in Word.

Since most editors choose the second way to handle the gap, people always think of preview when it comes to Markdown. It may be a misunderstanding about Markdown. Designed as a simple mark language, Markdown is intended to help to keep track of the information of the text when editing and provide a beautiful typesetting when reading after being converted to HTML.

Tradeoff: VNote's Way

VNote tries to minimize the gap and provide the best-effort WYSIWYG for Markdown via tuned syntax highlights and some other features. By helping to keep track of the content, there is no need to preview or alter the text immediately after being typed.

Features

Notebook-Based Notes Management

VNote uses notebooks to hold your notes. Like OneNote, a notebook can be hosted on any location on your system. A notebook is designed to represent one account. For example, you could have one notebook hosted on local file system and another notebook hosted on an OwnCloud server. This is really useful when notes require different levels of security.

A notebook corresponds to a self-contained folder (called the Root Folder of the notebook) in the file system. You could copy the folder to another location (or on another computer) and import it into VNote.

A notebook could have infinite levels of folders. VNote supports copying or moving folders or notes within or between notebooks.

Simple Notes Management

All your notes are managed by some plaintext configuration files and stored as plaintext files. You could access your notes without VNote. You could use external file synchronization services to synchronize your notes and import them on another machine.

VNote supports both Markdown (suffix md) and rich text notes.

Syntax Highlight

VNote supports accurate syntax highlight for Markdown. Tuning the style of the highlight, VNote enables you to keep track of your document easily.

VNote also supports syntax highlight for fenced code blocks in edit mode in Markdown, which is superior than almost all current Markdown editors.

Live Image Preview

VNote supports previewing the image link in edit mode. With this, you could just stay in edit mode as much as possible.

You could select the image to copy it.

Pleasant Image Experience

Just paste your image into the Markdown note, VNote will manage all other stuffs. VNote stores images in a specified folder in the same folder with the note. VNote will pop up a window to preview the image when you insert an image. Furthermore, VNote will delete the useless image files automatically after you remove the image links.

Interactive Outline Viewer In Read & Edit Mode

VNote provides a user-friendly outline viewer for both edit and view mode. The outline viewer is a responsive item tree instead of a segment of HTML.

Powerful Shortcuts

VNote supports many pleasant and powerful shortcuts which facilitate your editing, including Vim Mode, Captain Mode, and Navigation Mode which enable you to work without the mouse.

Please refer to the shortcuts help in the help menu for more details.

Window Split

VNote supports infinite horizontal window splits, facilitating notes management and writing.

Highly Configurable

In VNote, almost everything is configurable, such as background color, font, and Markdown style. VNote uses a plaintext file to record all your configuration, so you could just copy that file to initialize a new VNote on another computer.

Others

VNote also supports many other features, like:

• Highlight current cursor line;
• Highlight selected text;
• Powerful search within the note;
• Auto indent and auto list;

Build & Development

1. Clone & Init

   git clone https://github.com/tamlok/vnote.git vnote.git
   cd vnote.git
   git submodule update --init
   

2. Download Qt & Have Fun
   Download Qt 5.7.0 and open VNote.pro as a project.

3. Or if you prefer command line on Linux, you could follow these steps:

   cd vnote.git
   mkdir build
   cd build
   # May need to use the qmake in your downloaded Qt.
   qmake ../VNote.pro
   make
   sudo make install
   

MacOS

If you prefer command line on macOS, you could follow these steps.

1. Install Xcode and Homebrew;

2. Install Qt5.7 via Homebrew:

   brew install [email protected]
   

3. In the project directory, create build_macos.sh like this:

   QTDIR="/usr/local/opt/[email protected]"
   PATH="$QTDIR/bin:$PATH"
   LDFLAGS=-L$QTDIR/lib
   CPPFLAGS=-I$QTDIR/include
   
   mkdir -p build
   cd build
   qmake -v
   qmake CONFIG-=debug CONFIG+=release ../VNote.pro
   make -j2
   

4. Make build_macos.sh executable and run it:

   chmod +x build_macos.sh
   ./build_macos.sh
   

5. Now you got the bundle path/to/project/build/src/VNote.app. Enjoy yourself!

Dependencies

• Qt 5.7 (L-GPL v3)
• PEG Markdown Highlight (MIT License)
• Hoedown 3.0.7 (ISC License)
• Marked (MIT License)
• Highlight.js (BSD License)
• Ionicons 2.0.1 (MIT License)
• markdown-it 8.3.1 (MIT License)
• markdown-it-headinganchor 1.3.0 (MIT License)
• markdown-it-task-lists 1.4.0 (ISC License)
• mermaid 7.0.0 (MIT License)
• MathJax (Apache-2.0)
• showdown (Unknown)
• flowchart.js (MIT License)

License

VNote is licensed under the MIT license.