Notable: a simple but effective Markdown editor

In the world of Linux there are a large number of applications for all kinds of purposesFrom image editors, media players, to applications to create circuits, 3D modeling and more.

However of the applications that are essential in a system are text editors, of which several of them have been discussed here on the blog.

Among which even each one of them has its own special purpose, from the simplest (not so simple) that are used in the terminal such as nano or vim or in a graphical interface such as gedit, kate, bluefish among others.

This time we will talk about a simple but useful text editor, which I am sure that more than one will make you want to try.

Notable is a small Markdown editor Licensed (MIT) which is pretty good if you are familiar with proprietary tools like Apple Notes or Evernote.

It has an interface very similar to Notes Apple. Notable offers the user the possibility to create notebooks to put their notes, all in WYSIWYG and without blocking it in a proprietary format.

Notable It is cross-platform and supports the addition of attachments, images, code block formatting, the ability to search your notes, bookmark or pin some notes, add tags, and more.

This software works locally, but you can sync your notes through a version similar to Dropbox or even with Git.

In addition, We can highlight that Notable does not use any WYSIWYG editor. Your notes are pure Markdown files, as their metadata is saved as Markdown.

Of the main features that can be highlighted in this text editor are:

• No proprietary formats: Notable is just a nice front end for a structured folder as shown above.
• Notes are raw Markdown files, their metadata is stored as Markdown material.
• Attachments are also flat files, if you attach a picture.jpgnota everything will be preserved and accessible just like any other file.
• Notable doesn't use any WYSIWYG editor, it just writes a Markdown and it renders as a Markdown.
• The built-in editor is CodeMirror, this means you get things like multi-cursor by default.
• If more advanced editing features are needed with a single shortcut, the current note can be opened in its default Markdown editor.
• Tags added indefinitely, almost all other note-taking apps differ between notebooks, tags, and templates.

In Notable, they can have root tags (foo), tags that can be added indefinitely (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).

How to install Notable on Linux?

For those interested in being able to install and test this fabulous Markdown editor on their systems, They can do it in one of the following ways that we share below.

Generally for any Linux distribution, we can install this application by downloading its code from git.

The only requirement that we must fulfill in our system is that it can install and run applications written in Node.js.

Therefore, if you do not have this support, you can do it in the following way.

On Arch Linux and its derivatives such as Antergos, Manajaro Linux, run the following command to install it:

 sudo pacman -S nodejs npm git

In Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and any derivatives of these, you must run the following command:

sudo apt-get install nodejs npm git

On RHEL, CentOS, you must first enable the EPEL repository.

sudo yum install epel-release

And then install Nodejs using the command:

sudo yum install nodejs npm git

In Fedora they just have to run the following command:

sudo dnf install nodejs npm git

Now to install the editor, we just have to type the following:

git clone https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable.git

cd notable

npm install

npm run svelto:dev

npm run iconfont

npm run tutorial

npm run dev

Installation on Arch Linux

For the specific case of Arch Linux and its derivatives, they can do the editor installation in another way, you just have to have support enabled to install applications from AUR.

The command they have to execute is:

yay -S notable-bin