So recently I worked on the much requested Visual Studio Code port of my project Sublime Notebook and released it.
And guess what happened —
I honestly didn’t expect it to go that far. But alas, maybe I underestimated the potential of the concept here. I have always believed in the power of plain text and even though we have stuff like voice recordings, illustrations, videos, etc; (plain) text is here to stay.
Some of you might be wondering, what is VSCodeNotebook?
Simply said, VSCode Notebook is an attempt to use Visual Studio Code as a reliable note taking application.
The next question that comes up automatically is why would anyone use VSCode, which is a code editor, as their note-taking application. And that brings me the opportunity to present the following section from project’s README —
I have been note-taking for as long as I started using computers. I use notes mostly for technical stuff, but these days I am using notes to record all kinds of information like journals, ideas, snippets etc. In my career, I have tried a number of note-taking tools like OneNote, Evernote, CintaNotes, SimpleNote, Cherrytree, Google Keep, etc. But I have never been satisfied with them mainly because —
(1) I don’t have any control over how or where my notes are stored. — What if the company closes or the developer stops building the product?
(2) Most of these services are paid or work on only certain Operating Systems. And even if they are truly free and cross-platform, they lack critical features like fast full notebook search or hierarchical organisation.
Because of these reasons, I had to lose my notes a number of times and was forced to start from scratch. This was frustrating, and finally, I decided to do something about it.
The result is this project, a wrapper/idea that converts my text editor, VSCode, to a feature-rich note-taking tool. Sure it might not be as polished as all those premium note-taking tools, but it works and that too in the way I want it to. And if for some reason I get tired of using VSCode, I can always create a port for another text editor. It will be easy because the dependency on the text editor is very minimal here, not to mention the notes are nothing but plain text files.
You see it now. For someone who takes a lots of notes, this was something that I had to build. And so was I able to put all my efforts into it. The result had to be great.
Here are the stats —
If you are curious how this thing works, feel free to visit its documentation. I am not going to write the same thing over here again.
I don’t see any major upgrades that are needed in the project right now. It’s quite simple and effective the way it is. But I am very open to suggestions at this point, one primary reason for that being that I am regularly using this project and hence would love to keep on improving it.
I should probably also write an article related to note-taking, I have had that in mind for a long time. It will also serve as an inspiration-cum-sales pitch for how you can/should use VSCode Notebook. Let me know if you have any ideas that I can include in that post. I am reachable via Twitter.
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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors