My ideal notes app, Ohetam (Blaugust2026/8)

In the second post of Blaugust I wrote about Imatal, my notes management system, but I also mentioned that I used Obsidian for some time. Well, the truth is that I didn't leave Obsidian behind because I didn't like it, I liked it a lot actually, the amount of customisation that can be done is truly amazing, given that it's an Electron app and rendered as a web page it can use all the customisation that HTML and CSS provide.

The problem was more the fact that, well... it's an Electron app, which runs an instance of Chromium at all times, which makes it slow on less powerful devices (such as my laptop) and makes the window of OS compatibility quite narrow. For instance, Obsidian (or more likely Electron) dropped support for Windows 7 a while ago, and while my vault still worked fine when I tried it on an older version, I wouldn't have received any new features, such as Bases.

That's not the reason why I switched to Emacs, but it certainly is an important factor... because Emacs is kind-of the opposite, as it is missing a lot of visual customisation.

Now, saying that might cause some angry looks if any Emacs evangelists are reading this, and it's true that Emacs is one of the most customisable editors there is and it runs on basically anything, but I'm not really too interested spending an eternity customising a single text editor so that it does some of the things I'd... ah whatever, you know what, technically Emacs could do all the things I want from an ideal notes app, I'm just not interested in doing so because (1) I don't even like Emacs all that much and (2) configuring it is a pain in my opinion...

Anyway, I thought about making my own program that fits all my needs just fine and runs on all the devices I could ever ask for. I love portable software and I'll write a post about it some time. So these were my goals for such a piece of software:

• an editor, of course
• native support and text rendering for Org and Markdown (without HTML)
• editor read-only mode
• inline images (preferred, but it might be difficult to pull off so it's not really a priority)
• exporting to HTML
• automatic metadata extraction
• support for at least Windows XP (2000 would be preferred) and Linux 2.6.x (not necessarily in a single file of course)
• note creation from templates
• note encryption and decryption

When I say compatibility with Windows 2000 and Linux 2.6, I mean it should compile to run on those systems. The best way for that would probably to write an abstraction layer that handles all the I/O and graphics.

So I tried a few times to start a project to make this, after trying Rust and Java I set up SDL2 with ImGui in C++11 and that seems to have worked out in some way, so I got this...

...which I already showed in one of my microblog posts, and it's certainly a start, but it's far from my end goal.

It'd be much better to be able to use a retained mode UI where nothing is updated until it's necessary, which is what Windows, for example, does by default for its UI because that way the OS doesn't have to update all the graphics every single frame. On modern computers this isn't really necessary for a program like this because the CPU and GPU are fast enough to handle everything and only have 5% utilisation, but on old hardware which is what I'm trying to target, especially a laptop from 2005, it might use 30% of the CPU just for that program.

In any case, for Ohetam, previously called "Ahet", I had multiple ideas for the layout since I came up with the idea last year.

So it's not finished, and in fact I haven't even started on the actual thing, but this right here is the plan. If anyone wants to help, send me an email or something...