KnoMa, the way forward ...

KnoMa is one of my ❤️ repositories. I have started the project in 2018 with last public commit, at time of writing, 2023. The original promise is simple. a note taking application. Nowadays there are established application like Notion and Obsidian. Yet, I still resisted using any of those, why? To be honest it is probably mostly out of nostalgia.

The aim of KnoMa is to allow me to take notes when reading articles, browsing websites, watching videos, attending events, or reading books. With this I designed a document oriented data model. I draw inspiration from my note taking process. I would take a pen, piece of paper and just note down fragments of the sources mixed with my thoughts and other notes. As such the KnoMa document contain metadata and content. The metadata section is mostly for search, like title, description, tags. The content consists of text areas, which can be typed and tagged. This should allow me to mark what what my idea, my note, comment, or fragment of a source.

About two years ago I decide to change all of this. Instead I introduce a general concept of a document, just an item stored in KnoMa storage. The new document can be a quick note, just ULR, title, tags, … or it can be full document with content. The content now consists only from a free text, or MarkDown to be precise. There are not types, on tags.

Yet, recently I stated to take notes in a new way. I just use VSCode and Markdown. With Markdown I can use code sections to mark fragments from the original code. I can use horizontal line to separate content. I can use headers to create sections. You probably know where I am heading. Yes, it does not provide all the freedom of a paper, not even the freedom I intended to get with the first version of KnoMa, but it works.

When I want to take a note, I just open a file, use front-matter for metadata and MarkDown for the content. Best of all? I can do this using VSCode with all my favorite editor shortcuts, toggle options, etc..

There is one drawback though, the one that the original KnoMa addressed — images. With the second version, or now with VSCode, I do not have an easy version to add an image into a note. I need to download the image, save it and then link it. Too much work, I just do not do that.

But there is a simple solution a service, even a website, where I would just paste the image and got a link. Seems familiar? You are right, this is how GitHub handles image in issues. So a combination of VSCode editor and this image handling may be perfect solution for me.

There is one more point to make. The storage format. It would be just nice to have all the content available as MarkDown files. A user would be able to easily take all the content and move it elsewhere, update it, or do whatever they want.

With all of this said the question is what now? Unfortunately, I do not know yet. Perhaps it is time to update KnoMa again.