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
Omw, a replacement for Vikunja and Joplin? Sign me up!
Damn, I this is exactly what I searched for, I’ll deploy it immediately, thanks a lot!
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!
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!
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
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!
Aw not silly at all, maybe I should make it clearer actually. Always important to remember that what’s obvious to me may not be as obvious to someone else
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!
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 sayFound 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.
have you tried silverbullet? https://silverbullet.md/
Oh yeah, that’s not a feature yet. There’s an open feature request for this and I’ll definitely implement it, may take a bit of time to do.
Would you be able to give me a couple of screenshots on what the context looks like? I just had a simple “mentioned 2 times” with links on where it was mentioned in mind, but full on context sounds way better, I’m curious to see how that works (totally not copying :P)
MIT license, cool! I’ll check this out. Any chance to migrate from discord to a more open platform for community engagement?
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.
Ok thanks. “Even MIT” is something i agree on. And the author decides of course. But this means that big corp can ‘steal’ the code. It also means you can build extensions and other stuff that are not MIT. And then it gets muddy.
Anyways didnt mean to make this about license. Sorry.
I think it’s okay, I made a comment about the license first! It’s good discussion. I certainly like everything being copyleft, but I also get why people who make a contribution (an extension or otherwise) might want to license it differently. Ultimately whoever does the work gets to decide on the license — closed source I’ll never touch, extension or otherwise, but I’m lenient on open source.
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
Yes! I am absolutely working on a wiki! Release notes are very detailed so it’s easy to track progress scrolling through them on GitHub (I do this for work too, so I am fairly organised with that)
I’ll add a wiki to the official site once I’m done building it, there is a help button within the app itself with some knowledge base on key features ♥️
Have you thought about migrating or mirroring the code from github to codeberg?
FYI the github repo can also have a wiki
That is actually such a good point 🤦♂️
Sometimes I tend to reinvent the wheel, I’ll probably enable it and the community can help out document stuff, duh 🤦♂️ thank you
Ffs Signal went down with AWS??
Jup 😢
Yeah, I assume they use AWS for end to end encryption, so not the end of the world, but goes to show how fucked up the internet has become, when a service hosts a third of the web something has gone terribly wrong 😅
Yea, it’s the end of the world with Signal.
Having such a dependcy just exposes yet another way their story doesn’t add up, like dropping SMS support because of engineering costs. Apparently, SMS is so hard to do there are free SMS apps.
I can’t trust them at this point.
And how does E2E require a middleman?
More like it’s their store-and-forward servers. Why that’s on AWS, or more importantly not distributed with auto fail over is a major fail, as in “get fired” failure.
dropping SMS support because of engineering costs
Who told you it was because of “engineering costs”?
I mean, I don’t use it so I can’t really say much on the topic, when looking into it yesterday I found this article https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/ which kinda goes through some of the stack they use, and in all fairness they do mention aws in the mix, so it’s not like they were keeping it hidden or anything, it’d be valuable for a company who values privacy so much to be a little more upfront on what’s used for what but as you’re probably well aware we don’t - and never will - live in a perfect world do we haha
Matrix is generally very nice for chat, and Discourse for forums.
I hear there’s this new thing called PieFed that’s pretty cool…
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!
Hey thank you so very much!
Yeah, you said it best! I take all suggestions on board but ultimately I won’t do anything that is to my detriment, between work and family (with two very very young kids) I have little time to spare haha my precious evenings should go to fun coding and not admin, I do enough of that at work as is lol
Still getting used to the layout here, feel like I am missing a lot of replies, but yeah, wiki seems to be a very manageable solution for now, GitHub wiki is what I’m leaning towards :)
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?
Consolidate all into one issue, no promises, but as long as it’s there I’ll definitely at least spike it and investigate the possibility ♥️
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 :)
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 :)
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 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 :)
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.
Hey, for as much as I genuinely think docker is the way to go for this kind of things you don’t HAVE to, you can just run it as a service, the readme has a manual install process on top of the docker one.
Also if you use proxmox there is a community script going around for ease of setup ♥️
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.
