Remote View

2mo ago

jotty·page - Checklists & Notes made it easy

Hi, This is my first post here, pretty intimidating! haha

I shared this on reddit, and one of my community members told me this is a good place to also share it, so here we go!

A couple of months back I have built a checklist/note taking app for myself and called it rwMarkable, posted it on reddit and a lot of people seemed to resonate to it, so I kept adding new features and enjoying the small but very involved community that has built around it.

For anyone who hasn't heard of the project before, here's a quick bullet list of some features:

Checklists: Create task lists with drag & drop reordering, progress bars, and categories. Supports both simple checklists and advanced task projects with Kanban boards and time tracking.
Text Notes: A clean WYSIWYG editor for your notes, powered by TipTap with full Markdown support and codeblock syntax highlighting.
Sharing: Share checklists or notes with other users or publicly with shareable links.
File-Based: No database needed! Everything is stored in simple Markdown and JSON files in a single data directory.
User Management: An admin panel to create and manage user accounts with session tracking.
Customisable: 14+ built-in themes plus easy custom theme support.
API Access: Programmatic access to your checklists and notes via REST API with authentication for various integrations.
OIDC integration: Use any provider to authenticate, follow this tutorial on how to

There have been a lot of requests to change the name due to it sounding a little too close to reMarkable (the tablet - which, btw, i had no idea existed at the time lol) and after getting some amazing community suggestions we landed on jotty.

You can find all the info (and a demo) here: https://jotty.page/

You can find the repo here: https://github.com/fccview/jotty

Let me know what you think, the app is very much still in development and every week new features get added (that said, I really value the simplicity and lightweight nature of it, so I will not add anything that compromises it).

Few screenshots

p.s. Nice to meet you all <3

74 comments

MIT license, cool! I’ll check this out. Any chance to migrate from discord to a more open platform for community engagement?
- Hey, thank you! Well I know discord very well so I just went for it because it's what I am familiar with, but I am fairly open to have more than one community engagement platform, what did you have in mind? I heard a lot of good things about signal within the self-host community, but then again.. it did go down with the aws outage with everything else yesterday lol
  
  A ticket tracker and a wiki!
  Else all the institutional knowledge about your software that your users are adding too vanishes forever into a black box. And that'd be a dang pity
  
  Ffs Signal went down with AWS??
  
  I hear there's this new thing called PieFed that's pretty cool...
  
  Matrix is generally very nice for chat, and Discourse for forums.
  
  Hey some folks responded here which is great! For me, I think wiki and tracker are perfect like someone else mentioned, because a lot of folks without accounts can still access the knowledge created. The hard part is moderating of course. I’m not sure there is a perfect solution.
  Ultimately, you’re producing something cool for the community and you get to set the terms for that; if discord is easy and sustainable, I prefer that to you doing anything else that isn’t sustainable to see the project through as long and vibrantly as you can. So in that sense just choose what makes sense.
  So in short: do what makes sense for you and if one of the alternatives listed (maybe wiki it seems? That would be cool with me) works then that’s great!
  I guess I’ll also plug forgejo or codeberg at this time haha
  Edit: I’ll also say, more folks here for discussion is cool too, and good to have you posting and hope to see more discussion around it in the future here!
- Just curious why you prefer MIT and not something copyleft like gpl @AliasAKA@lemmy.world ?
  
  Oh I’m fine with copyleft, even preferred. I just see any open source license, even MIT, and am pleased. Perhaps my bar is too low, but at this point anyone posting anything with open source protection to the creation is cool to me.

Please, for the love of god, please be the first app of this kind to support the iCAL VTODO & VJOURNAL standards.
- Hey! I will need to add a calendar at some point, so if you open an issue on the GitHub repo about this I can have a proper look, just done some research and definitely not opposed to the idea, seems pretty standard to me
  
  Thank you for even considering it, let alone add it to the roadmap. Huge thanks.
  I will create the issue, should I open one for each standard or consolidate all into one issue?

Been happily using this for the past month or so! I'm positive to the name change too, Jotty is better 💜 I only have one small request (ill open an issue on it if you want); Basically I think it would be nice if the top left logo could be editable, as in let the user choose what is written there. Keep the logo ofc. Personally wish it could say just "jotty" and not "jotty.page".
Keep up the great work!
- Hi! Very glad you like it! It already is editable :) it's done via the admin panel ♥️ you can even set the pwa icon if you wished to
  
  Wow now i feel silly 😅 Never realised the shield icon led to the admin panel (didnt know there even was an admin panel heh?) This has just leveled up my experience!

Looks cool. Good job!
I know the MIT license tends to be the default... buuuuutttt..... there are other licenses too like AGPLv3 or others.
- You are right, I am fairly new to licenses so I went for the most common, but reading a bit on AGPLv3 it really sounds more in tune with how open source should work.. I'll have a read properly, consult a few friends on the matter and maybe make a switch, thank you for the eye opener!

I like what you've done so far. It's quick and simple to use. The one bugbear I've come across so far is it converting tables to html, rather than storing them as proper markdown.
I read the reasoning in the documentation, and certainly for my usecases, maintaining it as markdown is more important than trying to perfectly preserve the visual formating, especially as I use multiple devices with different sized screens, so I need different fornatting on each! That's one of markdowns main strengths, it doesn't preserve formatting so you don't need to think about it and it'll be displayed in a reasonable manner anywhere.
Is there any reasonable chance that there could be an option, at the server level rather than per page, to store tables as markdown?
- Hey! I hear you and the community member who opened that issue had a chat with me on discord and I was convinced, I have a pull request coming with a setting to keep html or use markdown for tables :)

This looks cool!
Is there or will there be support for importing and exporting Markdown files?
- Hi! You can export already from the admin panel, regarding import i decided not to do it via the UI due to.. well.. a lot of complications involved with it and because the app does just read file/folders within the data folder you mount in the container. So just move your markdown files in the right folder and bob's your uncle, they'll be read and sorted automatically
  
  Thanks for the reply! This honestly looks so good I just might have to finally learn how Docker works.

Looks great, thank you for sharing! Feel free to post to !opensource@programming.dev for wider reach
- Hi! Thank you, I'll create a post there now!

This looks awesome. I'm going to check it out.

I currently use Silverbullet.MD, which is cool, but a bit too much for my needs.
Can you tell me the pros of using jotty instead?
- Never used it, i'll I can say is that they have a .MD domain which is stupidly hard to obtain and the pwa syncs with the server when you go online, these two things alone make me say "stick with it" hahahah what little marketing brain I have huh? 🤣 Jokes aside, I think the UI does make a difference, looking at their site, mobile navigation isn't great and overall everything feels a bit dated, won't be able to give you a full comparison without first running it locally myself tho, so I'll try tomorrow and let you know :)
  
  I don't care for the pwa since I use Markor on android and syncrhing...
  Yes the looks are ugly and it's been a pain with SSO and auth in general...
  Let me know!
  I like how your project looks more.

That looks great. Thanks for posting here, I'm going to check this out.

I'm getting a Cloudflare error trying to access your demo site.
Also, do you support back linking? That's a feature that's very important to me.
- Should be back, of course everything went down while I was asleep, the joys 🤦‍♂️ By back linking you mean offline cache that links to a server when back online? If so, no, not yet at least
  
  Backlinking is when you link to a page, it links back.
  For example, if I have a daily journal, I can say Fixed a problem with my [[Raspberry Pi]] setup... and then a few weeks later I can say Found a new use for [[Raspberry Pi]]..., etc.
  Now when I go to the Raspberry Pi page, it shows me a list of times I've linked to the page and the context.
  I use this all the time with Logseq, but I find Logseq pretty unpolished, infrequently updated, etc., so I'm always on the lookout for something nicer.
- If you need semantic notes with typing and structure, nothing beats https://triliumnotes.org/ IMO/E
  The pace of the project is moreover very high these days
  
  Nice, I'll take a look. How is the mobile experience?

Omw, a replacement for Vikunja and Joplin? Sign me up!

Wow this looks amazing! One of the best looking note taking apps. I think my only problem is that I like that I have offline access to my notes and I think this is only webbased? I didn't read the details in dept but can you sync notes with other note taking apps?
- Yeah this is one of the most requested features so far, I'll need to add offline caching eventually so the PWA can still work offline. At the moment it does work if you only have it connected internally, but in the moment it can't communicate to your server it'll go down, yes.
  
  Nice to hear that it is worked on! I guess since it has working API someone could technically create own desktop app for it :D Encryption is probably not early priority I assume since it is supposed to be lightweight?
  My comparison for this app is Trillium notes. In jotty the UI looks better and kanban support is one of the features that I missed in Trillium notes!

I gave the demo a quick try and I really like it. Simple and to the point, no unnecessary fluff. I might set this up at home.
Thank you for your work!
Edit: One thing, the demo exports notes as PDF with white text on white background. I assume this is a mismatch with the selected theme.
- Hey, The export as pdf has a known bug, it broke after a major refactor I did and I haven't gotten around to fix it yet, sorry, I'll be reworking it to use the native page print instead, and leverage the public note layout instead, should really help.
  Thank you, glad you like it, let me know if you run into any issues :)

Damn, I this is exactly what I searched for, I'll deploy it immediately, thanks a lot!

It's a bit strange that when you create a note, you don't automatically go to the editor.
- Yeah I keep meaning to fix that and I keep forgetting, I'll do my best to remember to add that on the next release >.>

looks great! I need something like this for work tbh and will be checking it out.
question though, do you have any plans on incorporating a backend DB at all in the future? even something as small as SQLite?
I ask because I have used projects that store in flatfile json and as time progresses those files get very large and the UX degrades as the app is used.
- Hi, I toyed with the idea of having an optional light database in place but for now the features are so minimal that I really don't see the need. The biggest json file has about 10 lines and that's the settings, the rest is just being read as and when you open a file, the whole app acts like a folder/file reader.
  Should it ever slow down too much I'll think about it more :)

Thanks for this! I've just got mine setup and will set up the SSO tomorrow. Seems like exactly like what I'm looking for, you rock!
Edit: just wanted to add, setting it up in authentik was insanely easy and worked perfect! Thank you for what is really an awesome piece of software!
- Hey! Glad everything is working smoothly for you ♥️

Does this support nested checklists/tasks/to do?
- No, it does not, but I don't think it should be too hard to implement (at least the checklists side of thing - kanban board subtasks may be a whole can of worms UI wise, but can look into it) raise an issue on github and I'll look into it as soon as I can fit in the roadmap <3

This looks really good and I'm enthused with how responsive you're being, will definitely give it a try.
It is a bit of a shame you didn't call it Jott as jo.tt is available as a domain, but then the tt TLD is pretty expensive so maybe not!
- jo.tt
  if only I had ~1600£/year to throw on a domain... hahaha
  Thank you btw, I won't always be able to be this responsive, but it's some exciting time with the rebranding going on. I usually respond within the day tho, especially if I deem something to be fairly urgent :)
  
  It's more like £150/year, but it's charged every 3 years. Still very expensive compared to .com for sure!

74 comments