The markdown-based note-taking app for conducting your knowledge.

I couldn't find a note-taking app that ticked all the boxes I'm interested in: notes are written and rendered in GitHub-flavored Markdown, no WYSIWYG, no proprietary formats, I can run a search & replace across all notes, notes support attachments, the app isn't bloated, the app has a pretty interface, tags are indefinitely nestable and can import Evernote notes (because that's what I was using before).

So I built my own.

/path/to/your/data_directory
├─┬ attachments
│ ├── foo.ext
│ ├── bar.ext
│ └── …
└─┬ notes
  ├── foo.md
  ├── bar.md
  └── …

• No proprietary formats: El Baton is just a pretty front-end for a folder structured as shown above. Notes are plain Markdown files, their metadata is stored as Markdown front matter. Attachments are also plain files, if you attach a picture.jpg to a note everything about it will be preserved, and it will remain accessible like any other file.

• Proper editor: El Baton doesn't use any WYSIWYG editor, you just write some Markdown and it gets rendered as GitHub-flavored Markdown. The built-in editor is Monaco Editor, the same one VS Code uses, this means you get things like multi-cursor by default. If you need more advanced editing features with a single shortcut you can open the current note in your default Markdown editor.

• Indefinitely nestable tags: Pretty much all the other note-taking apps differentiate between notebooks, tags and templates. IMHO this unnecessarily complicates things. In El Baton you can have root tags (foo), indefinitely nestable tags (foo/bar, foo/.../qux) and it still supports notebooks and templates, they are just special tags with a different icon (Notebooks/foo, Templates/foo/bar).

On first launch with a new empty data directory, El Baton opens the built-in Cheatsheets panel so new users can quickly learn the workflow and core features.

Part of this comparison is personal opinion: you may disagree on the UI front, things I consider bloat may be considered features by somebody else etc. but hopefully this comparison did a good job at illustrating the main differences.

There are multiple ways to contribute to this project, read about them here.

• enex-dump: Dump the content of Evernote's .enex files, preserving attachments, some metadata and optionally converting notes to Markdown.
• Noty: Autosaving sticky note with support for multiple notes without needing multiple windows.
• Markdown Todo: Manage todo lists inside markdown files with ease. Have the same todo-related shortcuts that El Baton provides, but in Visual Studio Code.
• Todo+: Manage todo lists with ease. Powerful, easy to use and customizable.

Base: AGPLv3 © Fabio Spampinato

Fork code: AGPLv3 © Samuel Howard