Back to the Basic: Command Line Notebook

Dnote will bring its focus back once again to its founding root of building a minimalist command line note-taking software.

Since the inception of the project three years ago, many avenues have been pursued in an attempt to improve the project. However, at the end of the day, it seems that most users want Dnote for a simple command line tool to quickly capture and retrieve information. Therefore I would like to bring the focus of the project to the basest idea that it started with-a command line notebook.

The first ever release for Dnote, made almost three years ago, consists of around 300 lines code for a command line interface to quickly write down one-liners in a YAML file. Since then, the project has evolved in many ways, trying to find a way to become more useful to the users.

There comes a time to prune the features that are not important to the users, as we collectively learn more about how we use the project and what value we derive from it. For instance, the end-to-end encryption feature was dropped back in September. This time, after some deliberation and conversation with the users, the automated spaced repetition features are going to be deprecated.

What It Means To You

Dnote will continue to function as a personal knowledge base for programmers. It will focus on becoming the best command line notebook that supports multi-device synchronization and the web interface.

Everything will be the same but the only difference will be that the spaced repetition feature is deprecated. While touted as being useful, such a feature did not gain adoption among the actual customers. The feature is deprecated in the v0.5.0 release, and will be removed in the next major version. In the Dnote Cloud, the feature will be removed in four weeks by 6th March 2020.

The web interface and browser extension will continue to be developed. You can expect more improvements to be shipped for the command line project.

Conclusion

At the time of the first release, Dnote simply did not know it wanted to become, or what the community would have wanted. Through trial and error, we are steering the project to the direction that is becoming more and more certain. Thanks for everyone that is supporting Dnote, and those that took valuable time to give feedback.