Motome is a note taking and information aggregation application inspired by many other note taking programs.
Some of its features are:
- Note search and creation from a single input
- Markdown rendering
- History tracking and the ability to see diffs
- Note tagging
- Auto-saves notes in the background
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Local storage and link to any file type
- Drag and drop files to create links
The motivation behind Motome:
- Notes are yours and stored where you want them
- Notes are stored in easily accessible text files, not in a database or inaccessible format
- Notes can have histories
- Notes can be more than just text by including additional data files like images, pdfs, spreadsheets, and rich text documents (the inspiration for this comes from bigger note taking apps like Evernote and OneNote)
Motome is developed with Python and Qt and is cross platform.
Released under the BSD licence. Please see the LICENSE file.
- A Python installation (currently known to work with ver. 2.7)
- The PySide Qt framework
- Markdown for Python
- The PyYAML Python module
Currently Motome is in a pre-release state and there are no OS specific binaries, no automated installation and limited frozen binaries. The easiest way to get Motome is to make sure you have the dependencies installed and run:
pip install Motome
If the python/Scripts folder is in you path then you should be able to start the application by typing
Motome
at a command prompt.
When running Motome for the first time you will be shown the settings dialog where you need to pick a directory to store your notes in.
The application will then create a .Motome folder in your home directory to store configuration settings and you can
always change your settings by using the small gear icon next to the search input.
Using the search input, type in the title of your new note and press Enter. This will create a new text document with
the title set as both the file name and the initial content. If you include #hashtags in the title text they will
be converted to tag values and attached to your note.
#blogidea The 99 Habits of Highly Effective Procrastinators
You can easily switch to the search input using Ctrl-F or Ctrl-N. Pressing Esc will clear the search text.
Search results are automatically updated as you type. Motome will show you any notes that contain your search words,
ordered by relevancy. You can use #hashtag words in the search to limit results to the relevant tags. To exclude any
words or hashtags from your search use a -minus sign in front of the term to be excluded.
You can easily switch to the search input using Ctrl-F or Ctrl-N. Pressing Esc will clear the search text and
show all your notes in the note list.
For notes you use often Motome provides the ability to pin them to the top of the notes list for easy access.
Double-clicking on any note in the notes list will pin or unpin it. Alternately your can use the keyboard shortcut
Ctrl-Shift-P to pin/unpin the current note.
Motome is very keyboard focused, to the point that accessing the Preview and Diff views requires using Ctrl-W and
Ctrl-D respectively. To get back to the Editor press Ctrl-E. The preview pane contains an HTML rendering of the
text entered in the Editor pane. The text is passed through a markdown
parser before being shown in the Preview, so any markdown formatting will be converted to HTML.
Here are some additional useful keyboard shortcuts:
Ctrl-T- Switch to the Tags editorCtrl-[- Move up one note in the notes listCtrl-]- Move down one note in the notes listCtrl-Shift-U- Add the current date and time at the cursor location
Explanation of all the keyboard shortcuts is available in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in the Settings dialog.
Motome autosaves your notes in the background and by default will save and record the current text to the note history
when you press Ctrl-S. This feature can be turned off in the Settings dialog, but you can still tell Motome to save and record using Ctrl-R.
The full text of each historical note is stored in a .zip archive with the filename set as the date and time the record
was taken. These zip files are stored in the /archve folder inside you note directory.
A note's history can easily be browsed using the slider and buttons at the bottom of the window. The content of the
historical record will be shown in the Editor and Preview panes and the difference between the historical note and the
current text will be shown in the Diff pane. Toggling between the panes can be done using the Ctrl-E, Ctrl-W, and
Ctrl-D keyboard shortcuts. Moving forward and backward in the history can be done with the Ctrl-< and Ctrl->
shortcuts.
Motome makes it easy to include more than just text information in your notes. By dragging and dropping or cutting and
pasting a file in the Editor or pressing Ctrl-Shift-K you can insert a link to a local data file at the current cursor
location. This file can be of any type and can be opened by clicking on the hyperlink in the Editor or Preview panes.
The file will be opened in whatever application your operating system has assigned to that file type.
Motome stores a copy of any files you attach to a note in the /media folder inside your note directory.
Right-clicking on the Preview pane will bring up the option to export the current HTML data. The .html file is stored
in a folder with the note's title in the /html folder inside the note directory and any stylesheets or media files are
copied over so styles and links work. This folder can then be moved or deleted since it is not needed by
Motome for the Preview display.
The text files Motome writes are slightly unique but should still be readable by most text editors. You should be able to edit them just like any other text file but they have a few important features that Motome uses:
- Motome saves the note files using UTF-8 encoding
- There is a special section at the end that contains YAML formatted data that holds the note's metadata. This section
should be surrounded by
---for proper parsing.
---
pinned: 0
tags: site draft
title: Readme
---
Contributions and feedback are greatly appreciated and welcome. Please see the CONTRIBUTING file to see how you can help.