Development History

I started college last year, and I was using OneNote to take notes for my CS classes. It was pretty awkward to put code examples into the notes. I'd have to either paste code in and just change the font to Consolas (which would freeze the program for like 6 seconds) or paste in a screenshot if I wanted to get some color in there.

So I decided to try to make my own note-taking software to use that would make it easy to put code in, and make it look nice.

At first, I decided to make the program in C# with WinForms, because C# is the language that I'm most familiar with and I assumed that winforms was cross-platform (I was very wrong).

This is what came out of it (looks like garbage). The idea was that you would type your notes into the textbox on the left, and it would render that into an HTML page with the code highlighted on the right.

This version of the program would make a whole folder for each notebook, a subfolder for each section, and finally a text file for each page. That was an incredibly stupid idea, because you couldn't have certain characters that aren't allowed in directory names, and you couldn't have two of anything with the same name.

So then I rewrote the whole thing to make the notebooks/sections/pages into C# classes that were serialized to 1 file, which was a lot better.

This actually worked for a few weeks for taking notes in class, even though the two-panel design was a really stupid and ugly idea.

A few weeks later I decided that the program was utter trash, and decided to rewrite it a second time. That was when I realized that winforms was not cross platform at all. So I spent about 3 days searching the internet for a cross-platform GUI library type thing. I also wanted to make it a 'WYSIWYG' editor because having a separate panel for text and another panel for the rendered page is really ugly.

I finally settled on Electron, and after a few days of working on the project I was already amazed at how much better it looks than anything that I could ever make in WinForms.

I think it's hilarious how much the look of the program has improved since I switched from winforms to Electron. I think I'm finally satisfied with how the program looks and functions, and I hope that someone else will find this software useful for whatever they're doing.