I'm making a note-taking app

greenjeans · 2025-12-29 22:47:22

I just can't seem to help myself, this stuff is addicting, I should probably focus most of my time on improving the projects I already have going... but I see things and I think I can do it more to my liking if not in fact, better sometimes.

There's some note apps in the repo, lots more in the wild, and crazy stuff with paid subscriptions mind you, for a note-taking app, lol. Didn't like any of them.

Brute simple is what I like, things that do great work with very little code. So re-using some of my skeleton code that most of my projects start with I have a working prototype called VuuNotes for now (I know, what inspired titles I have, lol). A simple GUI in gtk3 and C, basically a simple text-editor.

On startup it looks for the notes folder and creates one if need be in ~/Documents/VuuNotes, loads all your notes by title into the treeview and will display the contents in the main pane, all fully editable and selectable. It has a search bar at the top to search titles, with a button to clear the searchbar. At the bottom it has a text entry box to enter a name for a new note when you highlight "New Note" which is always at the top of the treeview. This text-entry displays a placeholder text when you first startup, and when you switch to one of your notes to view it the name of that note is displayed in it. You may edit both contents and titles of your notes, or create new ones, and once finished hit the "Save" button to save it. Tiny little utility, binary is about 34 kb.

Like I said, brute simple, no bells or whistles, but it gets the job done fast and is handy and tiny, i'll be using mine mostly for code snippets and such which right now are badly disorganized in test files all over the place. This will improve my workflow quite a bit. I doubt that anybody but me is interested in it but thought i'd
post it up here anyway, i'll throw the code up if someone wants to try it.

Screenie of working prototype, I shrunk the screenshot quite a bit so it would fit here so it looks a little wonky, actual size is about a third larger.

HardSun · 2025-12-30 01:21:01

Looks neat.
Will it have the ability to format text or just very similar to say leafpad in functionality ?
I like the tree view idea.
My notes are a mix of markdown + pandoc + html using vim as the editor.
I like to just have all my notes in one easy html file that has a table of contents that anchors to the different notes in the same page instead of numerous markdown and html files everywhere.
I tried plain text before but im a sucker for nicely formatted html/css.
Anyhow i digress, good luck with the notes app.

greenjeans · 2025-12-30 13:20:19

Hey HardSun, no problem digressing at all, that is exactly the kind of post that is helpful, I know what apps do but I don't always know what people do, if that makes sense.

Your method is very similar to what I wanted, one simple place to go to for my notes. My manual and app info apps are similar to the way you save files, their databases are just carefully formatted long text files.

Yeah this one is more similar to leafpad, very basic, no formatting other than word wrap and a little extra spacing. No opening a file browser to save, everything gets saved in the same folder. Not even a close button, lol.

greenjeans · Yesterday 17:36:04

Okay, just threw up a tar.xz of the prototype, there's no .desktop yet or packaging, the tar.xz just contains the source code, the compiled binary, and the compile command in case anyone wants to mess with it. It has no depends other than gtk, to compile yourself you just need libgtk3-dev in addition to the usual compiling stuff like GCC.

I can't find any bugs now, and behavior seems very good, but this is a prototype, so there may be some extraneous code and such, and there may be dragons still. Thanks for testing!

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vuu-do … /VuuNotes/

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#1 2025-12-29 22:47:22

I'm making a note-taking app

#2 2025-12-30 01:21:01

Re: I'm making a note-taking app

#3 2025-12-30 13:20:19

Re: I'm making a note-taking app

#4 Yesterday 17:36:04

Re: I'm making a note-taking app

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