Jottings: The desktop app

That’s what I’m calling it. Jottings.

The story so far…

Lately, I have been obsessed -- utterly obsessed -- with making a custom note-taking app. I’ve tried everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. I went as far as using VS Code, VIM, Nano even; my meagre attempt at the Quiet Writer. And Python Notes. Obsessed! I think I have a problem! :-)

The issue is this: whilst the tools do exist and are plentiful, they all fall short somewhere along the line for me. They have too much or not enough. I have to hack, script, and tweak configs just to get existing tools to resemble something close to what I want. But, nothing is perfect. Hence, the obsession over the tool. I finally came to understand that perhaps others are developing tools for themselves, according to their own particular needs and wants and workflows.

My latest adventure was a Python script which was basically Quiet Writer running on a Python server with some niceties on top. That, too, came from IndexedDB Notes.

I have a home server, a Debian machine on an old laptop and so, Python Notes has been sitting on there. It is easy to open a browser, connect up and start typing. But even that doesn’t seem to satisfy the itch. What if I’m on my laptop and away from home? I’m not opening up my home network to the wider Internet.

See? Nothing is perfect.

Anyway, Jottings.

I’ve always been amazed -- and frankly, stumped -- by how apps get their GUIs. C++, Rust, Python even. Whilst the back-ends are simple enough for me to write, I know diddly-squat about building a UI using any framework. It’s all squares and rectangles, mostly, like trying to construct a Minecraft world. Hence, we see a Python server pushing a HTML page with a SQLite database and I’m happy for a time.

Well, I was happy. Oh, it works and works exceedingly well for me. But, call the itch what you will. Frustration at not being able to break through my total lack of UI-coding skills, or just sheer laziness. Yeah, probably laziness. Fear? That too. I’m starting from scratch. There is always the fear of the unknown. But the itch came.

I’ve detailed the start of the journey in an early post: Logs on UIs, LLMs, frameworks and such. I played around with Tauri, Rust, GTK and C++, and discovered that dependency hell does, in fact, exist. Even the much-hated Electron crossed my mind, tempting me to give it a try. I came this close.

Just as I was about to give up and stay put on my working-just-fine setup, I stumbled upon a little-known (to me) framework called Neutralinojs. Their selling point is: we are as convenient as Electron (browser as UI) but we don’t embed 70MB of Chrome nastiness to deliver that.

Well, that sounds cool. Too good to be true?

No, it’s true. Neutralinojs delivers what is says. Of course, there was the usual environment setup woes (i.e. dependency hell, but I’ll be kinder this time) : libwebkit2gtk 4.0 or 4.1? I don’t have 4.0 in my repos and Neutralinojs does not like 4.1. Fix fix fix, scramble, hammer. BANG! We have an app. A freaking native desktop app. When built, it gives you executables for Windows, Linux and Mac by default, no faffing around. Oh, wow!

I’m a beginner; no, actually, I’m an absolute beginner at this. But I managed to write what I know -- HTML, CSS and JavaScript -- and this thing just does what it does and…POOF! In a puff of smoke, you have a desktop app.

Version something-or-other is on my repos if anyone wants to take a peek. Yes, this post was written in there. Yes, this app was build by me. Yes, some AI helped me resolve dependency hell. No, this post was not written by AI, despite the multiple em-dashes which I’ve purposefully split into two separate dashes to avoid AI police. Why build an actual “writing app” if you ain’t gonna write your own stuff, you dumb cops? And, – take that!

Told you, I have a problem!

Jottings.