I apparently needed to take another pass at a note-taking application, this time using the best technology that 1988 has to offer.
Once upon a time, I used the original version of Boost Note to manage my notes. It didn't do too much, and despite the overhead of an Electron app, it generally worked, which kept me happy.
When the Boost Note team decided to form a service business and overhaul their application, I wished them well, but decided that I didn't fit the target audience for that. I wanted something lighter-weight, with no worries about somebody else's security. But I also want to work with my existing notes, which Boost Note stored as Markdown-embedded-in-CSON, where CSON comes from CoffeeScript's object notation model comparable to JSON, and where CoffeeScript tries to bring the JavaScript ecosystem more in line with more modern dynamic languages, primarily Python. Note that, in previous versions of this document, I previously and incorrectly blamed CoffeeScript on Microsoft, assuming that they either had no sense of irony or forgot about the Microsoft Coffee debacle; instead, Microsoft pushed and continues to push TypeScript, which wants JavaScript to look more like C#; my apologies to anyone who got misled by that oversight.
Anyway, as a result, I wrote Miniboost, using an up-and-coming React.js-like framework for desktop, Proton Native. I didn't really do my research, though, and so didn't realize that the team behind Proton Native included one student, building on top of an incomplete library that nobody had updated.
As such, Miniboost has served me well for a while, but Node.js still takes a shocking amount of resources, and the fact that I'll probably never have the ability to set a window title in my application bothers me. That has left me looking for an alternative solution, something that takes even less memory and processing power to run, but also has a mature understanding of how a desktop application should look.
And that led me to Tcl/Tk, launched in 1988 and 1991, respectively. Do I like the programming environment? Not really. Does it have everything that I need to process my existing notes ready to go? No, I need(ed) to write custom code to manage CSON files. However, I shouldn't ever have a performance problem, using technology designed to run on computers from more than thirty years ago.
Oh, and why did I use Tcl and not some more modern language that has a Tk library? Heh. It turns out that everybody has decided that you "write a Tk library" by bundling up a Tcl/Tk interpreter, and sending it Tcl code. Therefore, all you Tkinter (and similar) people still use Tcl...
I settled on calling this third note-taking application Notoboto. It started as rearranging the letters in the word boost, and then I dropped the s when I found that the word botos refers to certain South American river dolphins. With three out of four syllables ending in a long-o sound, it then seemed natural to shift the silent-e to another o.
And I intended the application icon to look like a stylized version of the boto photograph in the Wikipedia article, swimming in front of the letter B.
You'll need Tcl/Tk on your system to run this, until I can figure out the current approach to bundling applications. And at least on Ubuntu, you'll need to install libtk-img unless you change the icon to something "native" to Tk.
You'll also need tcl-markdown, tclx, and tcllib.
After that, run the script, and I'll try to keep it working as much like Miniboost as I can, with notes auto-saving when you stop typing and making themselves available on a least-recently-used basis.
Over time, I might add features, because Tk's text widget can apparently support searching, formatting, and many other features that Proton Native couldn't and even on Electron would've required work. I would also like to migrate the notes away from CSON, at some point, so that I don't need to rely on my shaky custom code.
Other than the application all icons come from Material Symbols, made available under the terms of the Apache License, version 2.0.