 So I've been talking about note-taking applications quite a bit lately on the channel and I know that can get some, you know, tedious for those of you who don't care about note-taking applications, but I find myself on a bit of a journey recently to find a note-taking application that I can actually use to replace Google Keep. I've been using Google Keep now for over a decade and I have thousands and thousands of notes there. Now, probably half of them or so can just go away because they're grocery lists or whatever, but the rest of them I would like to keep. Unfortunately, getting those out is a pain in the rear end and I don't want to have to go through that process until I actually find the application that I know I'm going to use long term. So I've been kind of going on a journey of sorts to try as many note-taking applications as possible and because as I do that, I kind of want to share it with you guys. I've been making more videos about note-taking apps. So I hope I'm not boring you. So today, what we're going to take a look at is an application called QoN notes. Now, QoN notes is a QT application for taking notes and it is very, very powerful. It has a lot of features outside of one big one, which is probably the reason why I won't be able to use it, but we'll talk about that later. So let's take a look at QoN notes. But before we do, if you leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it. It really helped the channel. So let's go ahead and take a look at QoN notes. That's what this thing is here. Now, as you can see, it looks like a QT application. It's not exactly like a KDE application because you can kind of tell there's no settings menu at the top. The settings panel is actually buried in the note menu, which is a little weird. So it's not a KDE application like you'd expect it to be, but it's very much a QT application. And what that means is that it's very editable and has a lot of settings has a lot of things that you can tweak about the interface and the key bindings and all the stuff that you can do to make it basically yours as much as you want to. And if you have followed my channel for any amount of time, you'll know that I like to edit the way things look. I think that it's always far superior to have the options to change the UI than to have no options at all. So that's where I usually fall down on that spectrum. And QoN notes allows you to do basically whatever you want when it comes to the UI. If we go on a small tour of the UI, basically you have it settled into two different panels. Here you have your editing panel and this is the preview panel. So this is what I would consider one panel. And then along the side, you have tags, all of your notes and your table of contents here. You also have all of the tags associated with the current note that you're editing down here at the bottom and your ability to actually add a tag down here at the bottom. So all that stuff is here along the side and then you have your editing panel in the middle. And then along the top, you have your quick settings buttons that allow you to do things like bold italic strike through things like that. Encrypt your notes. You can do that right from the top. You can also change to workspaces, which I'll talk about more about workspaces later. You can do that from the panel above as well. So that's the general UI. But in tradition with most QT applications, you can change this to look however you want. So you can go up here and click unlock panels. And that means that you can then drag those panels wherever you want. Now I'm not going to touch the panels here because I'm in Wayland and unfortunately dragging panels out of a QT application rarely works well for you when you do it inside of a Wayland compositor for some reason. I think they fixed that more recently, but it hasn't made its way to hyperland as far as you know. So I'm just going to leave things the way that they are because I don't want to break the UI. I did that with Caden live recently where I tried to move a panel from one side to the other and it just popped out and wouldn't go back in. So we're not going to risk that, but you can move the panels wherever you want. You can also stack them if you want to, so you can basically create the UI in whatever form or fashion that you want it, which is nice and it's also superior to a lot of other applications which have a kind of hard coded non editable UI. So that's the UI. So let's then talk about actually taking notes. This is very much a markdown focused note taking application. So while you can write not in Markdown, it's really meant for you to write in Markdown. So you can do things like create headings. You can create links with Markdown. You can create lists. You can create code blocks. And you can do basically anything that you would normally do with traditional Markdown right here inside of key loan notes. And unlike other note taking applications which just play at Markdown compatibility. So far I've found that key loan notes does it the best. They actually follow through with full blown Markdown support including links, images, HTML, things like that. All that stuff can be put right in your notes. And that's awesome because again, you don't find that very often in open source note taking applications where you can actually use full blown Markdown. Some of them go halfway. Some of them either use a different form of Markdown or they try to come up with their own form of Markdown so they're not compatible with other Markdown editors. It's a mess out there. And the fact that this uses just plain old traditional Markdown and it goes the entire way in supporting Markdown. I find that excellent because I'm going to write every note that I wanted to do in Markdown. Obviously, I don't do that in Google keep because it doesn't support it as far as I know. I've actually never tried. Be honest with you writing Markdown on a phone always seems to be a little weird. But if I were to switch to key loan notes, I'd definitely be using Markdown and this fully supports it. I do like that by default, the preview panels open. But if I were to use this long term, I'd probably close it because I don't need to see a preview of the Markdown at least all the time. So I'd probably close that. But other than that, I'm glad that it's there and I'm glad that exists. So just like other note taking applications, you can also add tags. So you can this is a tag and that would add a tag to this particular note. And then if you want to sort by tags, you can do that up here in this particular panel here. Now, I like the way other note taking applications do tags just a little bit better in that, like, for example, in Zemwiki, you can do a tag by doing at and then tag name, right? You can do that in other note taking applications like Beaver notes, which we just looked at maybe a week ago or so. You can do a tag by doing tag like so. And I prefer I like that idea better than having tags externally from the note. It's not necessarily that the way that it does it is bad, but the reason why I prefer to have the tags inside of the note is because it kind of creates a wiki like structure. So if I wanted to put a tag inside of the note, I would do something like this. And then I could just, you know, click on this and it would take me to everything that has that tag here. I have to kind of go outside of the note and then I would, you know, go here and it would show me all the notes. If I wanted to, you know, it would show me the notes of those tags. And you know, while that works and is functional and is not horrible, I would still like to have tags inside of the note similar to what other note taking applications offer. So next let's actually go ahead and look at the settings. So we go get to the settings by going to note and then settings down here at the bottom. And the reason why I'm going to go here next is because I think that it's important to show you some of the features that this has. I'm going to actually move this down a little bit so my bar is not covering it, but there are a ton of settings here and there's a ton of functionality. So you can, if you have next cloud, set up next cloud so that all of your notes are synced to next cloud and because this stuff is just saved in markdown formats, you can access this from any markdown editor. That's amazing. And it's one of the premier features that I want in a notes application. I want to be able to sync this from my computer to my phone. And the fact that it's built in is cool. Unfortunately, I don't use next cloud. So I'm going to have to start using next cloud if I want to use this particular feature, you can also use key on notes for your to-do list. I use to-do list for this. So I haven't really delved much into this yet. So whether or not, or how well it works, I should say is beyond what I can explain right now, but I will say that the fact that it's here and if I were to want to kind of combine both to-dos and notes, I like that option in traditional fashion. This QT application can also be extensively customized in terms of interface. So you can change the language obviously you can enable dark mode. You can show this system tray icon. You can choose what theme that it's using. Although I will say that it doesn't actually use the covantum theme. So my covantum theme looks like this. And as you can tell, that's not the same thing. So whether or not it's because it's using an old version of QT or what that problem is there, I don't know. It's also possible that's because actually now that I think about it, I know exactly what the problem is. This is a flat pack. I need to say no more. Okay, so that's the reason why it's not following the covantum theme is because it's a flat pack. Okay, anyways, you can also change a lot of the things about the layout here. You can select from several different preconfigured layouts if you wanted to. Basically, what this will do is it'll modify all the positions of the panels. So you can come up with use other pre-configured panels. What I don't see is a way to save your own in this particular interface. You can, however, change that by using workspaces, which again, I'll talk about here in a few minutes. There's also a lot of stuff here you can change in terms of how the editor functions. So you can enable syntax highlighting, fully highlight block quotes, things like that. You can basically change how the editor functions and treats text. So things like adding line numbers, like disable cursor blinking, things like that. I do wish that it would allow you to change the actual cursor itself. So if we go to my test note here, and as you can see, as I go down, the cursor actually changes from a I-beam, which is what this is, kind of, to a, you know, a block. And the fact that I have both is kind of weird for me, and I don't like that. I prefer it to be either a block all the time or an I-beam all the time. I don't want it to go back and forth between both. I haven't seen a setting to change that. It doesn't mean that it doesn't exist because there's a ton of settings here. So it's possible that that is something that I can change somewhere and I just haven't found it. You can also edit how the tabs are done. So if you're going to use this for code editing, for some reason, you can have it set so that you can change the indent from four to six or eight or whatever you want it to be, which is nice. I don't think that this would be the best thing for code editing. It doesn't have any language server support or any of that stuff as far as I know. So just probably not the best replacement for Visual Studio Code or Cade or whatever. I will say that there is scripting support. So this is similar to what you'd expect for like plugins or whatever. And while you can add scripts, you can't actually browse for scripts as far as I can tell. Maybe there's somewhere online where you can browse for scripts. But this interface here is basically useless for anyone who doesn't know the name of the script already. So apparently there's a whole repository of scripts out there just waiting to extend your ability to use QoN notes. And without knowing the exact name, it makes searching from the application impossible. So I'm assuming that there's maybe a list of them somewhere else and I just didn't go searching for them. But this interface here was mainly useless for me. There is a browser extension that you can use so that you can clip things from the web into a note in that resides in QoN notes. So similar to like Evernote or Notes Nook, both of those have web extensions that you can use to clip things from the internet. QoN notes also has that, which is really freaking cool because it's not something that you expect to have in a application like this. So the fact that it's here is Primo. QoN notes also has Git support. So if you save all of your notes to a private Git repository or public, if you really want to, but most people probably use a private one, you can set it up so that it has integration within QoN notes to do that. So that again is very cool. I don't think that I'd ever store my notes on GitHub or GitLab or whatever. I just wouldn't really want them there. I'm already stuck on a proprietary piece of software. I don't need to have any more connection when it comes to notes to that kind of thing. Even though I know GitLab is open source, it's kind of, but I would rather have more local sync things, style control or next cloud or whatever. So I probably won't be using this. You can also, of course, change all of the key bindings for everything that's in the app. And I'm talking about literally everything. There are dozens and dozens of different shortcuts here that you can change. All of them can be remapped to whatever you want them to be done. And that's awesome. So I really do like when applications allow you this type of control. And they have the ability to search for shortcuts. So you can, you don't have to scroll through trying to find things. You can actually use this search box up here to search through settings, which so the fact that that exists is also nice. Because again, it has a ton of settings. So being able to just search for the thing that you're looking for is nice. Now, the one thing that I'm really happy that you can do is actually turn on them modes. So enable Venmode is disabled by default. And that's okay because it's not for everybody. But the fact that it's here again is something that I always look for in this type of application because I want Venmode. So like Zemwiki has Venmode. I think like Kate has Venmode although that's not really a text or a note editor. You know, the various full featured note taking applications sometimes offer Venmode, sometimes don't. The fact that this is here again, very good. So that's a very brief walk through the settings. It's not everything that's here. So I didn't talk about much about scripting because I wasn't able to really experience that all that much. They have this web applications thing here where you can use the Keown notes web app to be able to insert photos right into your notes directly from your mobile phone or internet. Again, I didn't try this so I don't know much about it. I also didn't walk you through the settings panels or the panel, the settings for panels. A lot of this stuff has to do with how panels are actually the look and feel of panels in Keown notes. So this is just kind of self explanatory. So you can just kind of go through them as you please. So there's that the one thing that I will notice that is that a lot of the settings that you want to do will require a restart of the application. So changing like the theme will oftentimes require a full restart of it and making some settings like changing the font size will not. So it's very hit or miss on what requires a restart. But sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. That's just one thing that I noticed. So let's go ahead and talk about workspaces, which I've mentioned a couple times now because this is the kind of pain point for me. And it's weird because everybody knows that I love workspaces, right? I talk about workspaces a freaking a lot. Like I love workspaces at the moment. I'm not using actually very many workspaces because I just did a reboot because I was trying to get the damn hyperland portal to work again. But that's beside the point. So but I use a ton of workspaces. I have 12 workspaces enabled on hyperland right now. I at one point earlier today, I was using all 12 of them. It's nuts. I love workspaces. So when I saw that Keywone Notes has workspaces, I was like, Oh, this is going to be awesome. This is going to be my note taking application because it has workspaces. It has tabs as you can see. You can see here that it has tabs. And the fact that it added workspaces like, yes, workspaces, it's awesome. I'm going to adopt this thing. I'm going to pull everything out of Google keep. This is going to be my new thing just because it has workspaces. That's all it took. Really, I'm a very simple man. Give me workspaces, give me tabs, and I will be happy for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, the workspaces functionality is not what you think it is. And it's really quite disappointing. So basically what the workspaces are is the ability to change it so that each workspace has a different UI. And if you think about that, that's just not the way that you'd expect workspaces to work. So let me explain. So right now I'm on the full workspace. So if I go to video ideas, you can see that the panels actually changed. The same note is up. The same tabs are open, but the panels along the side are different. And that's what workspaces allow you to do. You can in each workspace, you can have different panels. And while I can see where that would be useful, I suppose, I don't think it's as useful as how I'd expect workspaces to work. So what I thought was going to be the implementation of workspaces was the ability to have basically a work workspace. Let's just say all my notes for work, all that stuff exists here. And then if I wanted to go to all my work, to all my notes for my the books that I'm reading, I'd go to that workspace and those things would be separated. That's the way that I expect workspaces to work. That's not what those are. Now, I will say that with the introduction of the ability to have different note folders, so you can set up different note folders like so, so that you can have basically a different set of notes in separate folders, you can do that. And if we go ahead and add a folder here, and we just rename it to reading notes or whatever, and you can change basically how that folder is displayed, how it functions in relation to other folders and all that stuff. So you can do that, and then you click OK, and then nothing. So you can switch back and forth between that different note folder. So you can go to read notes here, and what it should do is switch you to that folder. So if we select note folder, oh wait a minute, here we go here, and then okay, here we go. So let's create a new note here in this folder. Okay, so this is my reading notes folder. Let's just say I am reading a book. So then if I go to, if I save this, so I have this note here, we'll just change the name. So I am reading right now, so now I have the title. So if I wanted to switch to default, I'd go here. Unfortunately, it doesn't work exactly like you'd want it to work, because it actually shows both folders. Like whoa there, Matt from the future here, to correct one of Idiot Matt's mistakes yet again. So what you guys are seeing is me doing an epic fail, and let me explain. So here we are back in QoN notes, and what I just showed you was that I went to settings and created this directory right here. But what I didn't do, and what you have to do in order for this functionality to actually work, and this is so effing obvious that only an idiot would miss it. So of course I missed it. What you have to do is actually create a new directory. Okay, just creating a new folder here doesn't actually do shit. You actually have to change the path for the new directory for it to exist, which is again, duh. So you have to click here, go into your folder structure, create yourself a directory somewhere for whatever, name it, hit choose, and then what that'll do is it'll put the proper path here. So that when you go back to QoN notes, and you want to switch between your folders, so default, which is where all of my notes were previously, and then I can switch to the new folder, which is here, so I can then create a new note. So just like so, and then whatever, test. Just that's not how you spell test, but you get the idea, right? So now if I go back to default, that note's not here anymore. It's in the other folder. I can just switch back and forth. That's a workspace. That's how it's supposed to work. But again, I didn't do it properly the first time. So what else is new? So anytime in the future, in the rest of the video, if I don't actually remember to edit it out and I say this feature here is broken, it's not actually broken match just a dumb ass. So returning to past Matt, who is still a dumb ass. So moving on. So you can import and export notes from different applications. So if you have ever notes or Joplin, you can import your notes from those applications to this. You can also import text files. I'm not sure how well it supports markdown from other text files. I haven't tried that, but I'm assuming that probably does a pretty good job. You can export your notes to a PDF or an HTML or a markdown file. So that's also nice. If you want to get your notes out of this application, it's fairly easy to do so. There's also a distraction free mode. So if you want to do a lot of writing in this, you can go into a distraction free mode, which is nice. It's not the best distraction free mode that I've ever seen, but it exists and it's not like horrible or anything. There's also a something called a typewriter mode. I just saw this somewhere. So this is typewriter mode. I'm not exactly sure what it does. I think what it is, usually when there's a typewriter mode, what happens is that the cursor stays in the center of the screen. So yeah, see, as you can see, the cursor kind of stays there in the center of the screen. So it's never going to go below this point right here. And while obviously this isn't a reasonable example of any text typing whatsoever, you can kind of see the benefits of OVS having your cursor right smack dab in the middle. I don't really care for the fact that it's buried inside the windows or the window menu. I didn't find it until just now. So the fact that, you know, it's kind of there. It feels like it should be in a different menu, but whatever, it's not a big deal. One thing I really do like is that QO notes allows you different ways of changing the font size on the fly. So there's a button up here for you to do it. So you can just increase the text size that way. You can do it from the settings panel if you want to. You can do it from the window menu here. While I don't think that it needs to be in all those places, the fact that it is, is I think is actually pretty good because it allows you to, to no matter where you're at in the application, choose your font size. And you can do it per note, like just this session or you can do it permanently. Every time you open the app, it comes up the same size. So that's really nice as well. So overall QO notes is a really good application. I really do like it. And I'm going to leave it installed because I'm going to keep playing around with it because it has a lot of, it's very close to what I want in a note taking application. It has synchronization so I can synchronize it between different places, even though I'd have to use next cloud to do so or get. And of those two, I'd use next cloud. So if I set up next cloud, which is not a big deal, I could have synchronization, which is one of the things that I really want to have happen. I, it has tags so I can use tags, even it doesn't quite do tags the way that I want it to do. And it has fantastic markdown support. So all those things are like, check, check, check, it works really, really well. It does have some pain points or some things that I'm kind of disappointed about. Namely the workspace functionality, which is not really workspace functionality. That's a, that's a canvas functionality. You can choose a different canvas. It's not, that's not workspaces, the way that I expect workspaces to be, but that would be not a big deal at all if the different folders functionality actually worked. Now I don't know, again, if I'm doing something wrong there or if it just doesn't work the way that I expect it to, whatever, that functionality could have been the thing that drew me to Q and notes. Absolutely, like, absolutely, I'm using this thing and it's awesome. As it is, I'm a little disappointed in it because that doesn't work the way that I want it to. And again, I'm going to do some reading up on it. Maybe I'm just not doing it right, which is as usual when it comes to anything that I do, there's a good chance that I'm not doing it right. So that's Q and notes. I really do like it. And like I said, I'm going to keep playing around with it because this is the note application that has come the closest to doing everything that the way that I want it to be done. And that markdown functionality that they just does really, really well. It's really close to selling me on actually using this thing. So that's Q and notes. I know for those of you who have been using this for a very long time, because there's quite a few people out there, you're probably like, man, you didn't cover half the features. No, I didn't because this is a QTE application that's modeled after a KDE application. It has tons of freaking features. I didn't cover hardly any of the scripting things. I didn't cover the web app integration. I didn't cover any of that stuff. There's actually a server integration here where you can set it up as a server so that you can dole out your notes over a server client integration if you want to. That exists. I didn't cover it because I didn't use it. So there are a ton of features here that I didn't cover. The video would have been way longer if I had. So I would highly recommend if you're interested in an application that just has a ton of features, a ton of customizations to download Q and notes and take a look yourself, because I don't think you'll be disappointed. It's a really good application. So that's it for this video. If you have thoughts on Q and notes, you can leave a comment in the comment section below. You can follow me on Masseton or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at Patreon.com slash Linuxcast. I'm also available on Kofi and on the YouTube membership stuff right down below. You can also head on over to the shop, which is available at shop.thelinxcast.org. There you'll find t-shirts and desk mats and hoodies and hats and all sorts of stuff. All the proceeds for that goes directly to help make more Linux content for you guys. So that's available at shop.thelinxcast.org. Again, thanks to everybody who has gone over there and bought something and for those of you who will in the future. So I really do appreciate that. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube because you're all absolutely amazing without you. The challenge has not been anywhere where it is right now. I think it's a very, very, very much free support that you really do appreciate it so very much. Thanks to everybody for watching. I hope you have a wonderful day, wonderful week, wonderful weekend, whatever it is.