Show HN: Collate: Cross platform note taking app based on plain text data format

Thanks! It's really good to hear that other people wanted something similar!

Zipping is a great idea, I didn't even consider that. I'll definitely look into it.

I've mainly been considering trying to integrate Git into the application for both version control and the remote features. It would auto add, commit, push and pull from remote and allow people to use a git repo they host or an already available service like github or gitlab. It would try to be as seamless and out of the way as possible.

It would be quite a bit of work and I'm interested on hearing what others have to say before I dive into that rabbit hole.

I'm not sure what backend you're using, but you might find it simpler to integrate Mercurial, as you can basically access it as a Python library [0].

Though, Mercurial doesn't have a particularly great git-export story, so syncing to GitHub or the like is harder. (Fossil has a better story there, with first-class git export, but a different workflow, and harder integration story (a RESTful JSON API)).

Git tends to be harder to integrate with, as there is sort of an expectation you'll maintain a shell process for it. [1]

As to zipping, with Git, you need to zip the whole repo.

Fossil can zip files upon storage, or you can zip the *.fossil file.

Mercurial can bundle with gzip, to simplify things a bit.

My point being, though git can give you some nice places for users to deploy to, it can be a bit of a pain to work with, and a couple other SCM systems might need to be considered. They might make your life a lot easier.

[0] https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/MercurialApi

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/be/v2/Embedding-Git-in-your-Applica...

Hey thanks for the thoughtful answers! The back end is written with Electron, so I have access to plenty of libs on NPM. I was thinking of utilizing libgit2 with some popular thin wrapper out there and giving it a shot and testing it. If it doesn't work out, I'll check out the other SCM systems as well.

Git is appealing to me personally because it's just so ubiquitous and there are plenty of free services out there to use.

git has libgit2, which has bindings in most languages.

Personally, I think cross-platform support is more enticing at this stage. Especially since you could just drop the whole collection directory into a git-tracked folder, and have half of those features.

Also, how do you feel about others (i.e. me) making Collate-compatible software? Like, I'm really tempted to make a web-app for viewing/editing, or even just a vim/VScode plugin for that interface-integration.

Like I said, I'm really enthusiastic about the file format!

Cross platform support works right now but could probably get better. In terms of mobile support, that's a huge project that I would have to invest significant time into, so I'm holding off for now. It's definitely one of those things I want to do in the future for sure.

I would be absolutely flattered and would support any Collate-compatible software. The file format itself is open and MIT licensed and any contributions and discussions would be welcome!

I put a lot of thought into the file format and I'm really glad you're excited about it! Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about the format or if anything is unclear at [email protected].

For my two cents, I'd use something like tar instead of zip, if for no other reason then that you don't have to unzip a file every time you open it.

That would be something I'd pay money for.