Text editors are not something most people spend a lot of time thinking about or even using. But if you do spend a lot of time working with text – either code or prose – you are bound to start paying close attention to the tools of your trade.
And the same is true of the editor’s closely-related cousin, the note-taking app.
Unsurprisingly, software developers are very passionate about both and very attached to their choices. One of the features offered by the newly Product Hunt award-winning note-taking app Boostnote – the support for both Vim and Emacs keybindings – shows the degree to which it caters specifically to the niche market made up of programmers, as it facilitates the workflow they are used to in their full-fledged editors.
Boostnote, which recently rolled out a new version, doesn’t stop there when it comes to being programmer-friendly: it allows users to make both Markdown and code snippets notes in a fairly clean and easy to use interface. Markdown notes are previewed in a split pane in the same window, while code snippets support over 100 programming languages with syntax highlighting.
Other features include Markdown auto-formatting and drag-and-drop embedding of images.
These notes are saved automatically and synced between devices. Boostnote is a cross-platform application, written for Linux, Mac, Windows, as well as Android and iOS.
And although Boostnote differentiates itself in a market saturated with proprietary and closed source solutions by being open source itself, it’s worth noting that the primary way the sync function happens is via Dropbox.
Nevertheless, the app’s free and open-source credentials are substantial: it is released under the GPL3 license and hosted on GitHub, where it has attracted a large number of contributors and nearly 15,000 stars from users.
One of the advantages of open source software is the transparency and availability of code, which means those using it can find out exactly what an open-source app does under the hood. Another is the longevity that comes with an active community around it – in Boostnote case, it has been forked on GitHub 1,314 times.
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