💥 Now in dark mode! 💥
Marcin Magnus (mmagnus) & Pietro Boccaletto (akaped)
Motto: Notes are like your code.
(geekbook3 since finally Geekbook uses Python 3)
G33KB00K3 - fun to read & fun to write -- 🤓 eXtreme eXtendable note taking system for nerds (including scientists!) (= beautiful html generator of your markdown-based notes) docs: http://geekbook.rtfd.io
THE LATEST
Geekbook Bookify - a plugin to process your notes into e-books
MOTIVATION
I started using MoinMoin for my personal notes in 2008, but something was missing... I started then playing with simple notes in Markdown written in my Emacs. The next step was to write a system to convert these notes into HTML. The system was drafted in Gdańsk at the PTBI conference (2012) when I decided to write a tool to process a folder with notes written in Markdown. I wanted to use my CSS style and then more and more unique features that I found very useful for myself. I think, at the moment, the project converged pretty much to tools like static site generators http://jekyllrb.com, https://www.mkdocs.org, https://getpelican.com with some unique features developed by myself for myself ;-) (e.g., saving notes as a PDF files for easy sync with my Boox device, including reversing the colors of dark images, making it easier to read them on e-ink devices).
The system is a neat way how to combine Emacs/Atom/Sublime/iA Writer editor + Markdown Syntax + Git + Html engine (bootstrap/python) to get the best notes-talking experience ever. Highly customizable with plugins written in Python.
What's the most important, under the hood it's just a set of Markdown files.. you can do with them whatever you want, e.g. you can Pandoc (http://pandoc.org/epub.html) them to epub (that's origin of "book" part of the name), or you can sync them to your iPhone to be edited with iAWriter (this is how I share my notes with my iPhone).
Figure. From an (old) homepage to a note.
Figure. A new Homepage.
| Features | Geekbook | Word Office | Apple Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Edits with Emacs | Oh, boy, yes! | Nope | Nope |
| Outline (collapse to headers) | With Emacs yes. Works great! | Nope | Nope |
| Long notes - easier to browse | Long notes with great speed and table of content | Very slow for long notes. Always problems with formatting long notes with images. | Very good for short notes. |
| Syntax highlighting | Oh, boy, yes! | Hmm.. nope | Hmm.. nope |
| Write your own plugins in Python | Oh, boy, yes! | Nope | Nope |
| Export as a pdf | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Edit with ... | Any text editor (with Markdown support for better UX) | Word | Apple Notes (Closed) |
| Flexible | Super flexible. You can find your own why how to make your notes | Medium | Medium |
| Search | Super easy to search with built-in search or just grep your files | More difficult to search over a set of files. Slow! | OK |
| Version control | Yes, if you use Git etc | Kind of. Hard to use (compared to Git) | Nope |
| Style customizable | Yes, it's HTML. Do what ever you want | To some extend | Nope |
| Edit on your phone | Yes, use Byword | Not really | Yes, works very well! |
| Open & Free | YES | Nope, closed and pricey | Close, no extra charge if you have an Apple device |
| Super easy to use | Rather for geek/nerds/hackers | Easy but who cares ;-) | Easy but who cares ;-) |
@todo Compare to Evernote.
Similar projects: it's kind of like Sphinx for your documentation, or Mkdocs (http://www.mkdocs.org/).
Freatures:
- Index html based
- Sync them with Dropbox/iCloud/github
- Read from console, grep them
- Edit with almost any text editor, I'm using Emacs!
- Keep images separately, edit them in any external tool or edit them in batch
- Customize html templates
- You can sync notes in your system with notes kept at virtual machines (mounted via sshfs) or drives
- Super light!
- Pandoc markdown files to anything you want!
- Use 3rd party editors, if you wish, on your computer or on your phone.
I recommend to use Emacs (or VIM or other super-powerful editor) to:
- run git on your notes in your editor,
- grep them in the editor,
- make bookmarks to parts of your notes,
- copy-paste from your notes to your programs you're writing,
- use Google Translate (https://github.com/atykhonov/google-translate)
- ispell,
- outline mode,
- focuse mode.
Sync with Github to have your notes (full-text searchable) with you all the time (in a private repository):
Kinda similar projects:
Geekbook includes also many plugins that build on top of Markdow to give even more fun.
See for more http://geekbook.readthedocs.io/en/latest/edit.html#geekbook-only and https://geekbook.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickref.html
Export one page as a Git repository:
python page.py /Users/magnus/Desktop/geekbook-export geekbook-export.md --add-toc --push
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Magit
Spotlight your notes:
On your phone: (in this case using Dropbox & Byword on my iPhone).
Or Draft (http://lifehacker.com/draft-is-a-clean-note-taking-app-with-markdown-support-844836670) for Android (not tested by me).
Search on your Iphone to get to the note.
Update: Now I'm using iA Writer for iPhone (https://itunes.apple.com/pl/app/ia-writer/id775737590?l=pl&mt=12). It has sync with iCloud (works with sync also images (!)) and Dropbox. Geekbook has a nice plugin to be able to work with iA Writer seamlessly.
If you insert an image on your phone, the syntax for it will be iA Writer-like. However if Geekbook detects this syntax it converts it to markdown syntax for images (which works as well in iA Writer).
Moreover, you can use in Geekbook also syntax /<file.md> to join chapters into books.
There is also a nice app for Mac (https://ia.net/writer/).
See http://geekbook.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html
http://geekbook.readthedocs.io/en/latest/thoughts.html
PyCharm - Python IDE and Markdown editor https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/
Linux:
- http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/11/notes-up-markdown-editor-for-linux
- https://remarkableapp.github.io/
macOS:
- Bear http://www.bear-writer.com/
- iA Writer https://ia.net/writer/
- Typora https://typora.io
iOS:
\ii get a file from ~/Desktop
\ix get a file from ~/Downloads
\dx get a file from ~/Dropbox
\ip get a file from selected in Apple Photos
\ic get clipboard
#dark to make a figure dark (inverse colors)
'[notes]', '\pagebreak'