Store notes as .md files instead of .cson files

[SMontgomery]

Would be nice if the files could be viewed by any program that can view markdown. One suggestion is to put your internal data you need as a comment at the top of the file:

<!--
type: "MARKDOWN_NOTE"
folder: "02d0f982bd56ad197fe5"
title: "My Title"
tags: []
isStarred: false
createdAt: "2017-04-23T03:30:44.232Z"
updatedAt: "2017-04-23T03:32:00.174Z"
-->

My Note Content

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IssueHunt Summary

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• boostio ($60.00)

Submitted pull Requests

• #3445 Changing Notes CSON to Markdown

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[aldomendez]

Or better yet, at the bottom.

[jasondavis]

the benefit of the top is that there are tons of other apps and librasries that use this format so it would be more standardized

[asmsuechan]

Hi, @SMontgomery. I'm reluctant to implement our own style. Because I assume it costs a lot to maintain. In our future, if Boostnote will become bigger, then let's consider again 😄

[loicteixeira]

An alternative would be to move all the metadata to the boostnote.json file (it essentially becomes the "library") and only save the actual content in the markdown files. Snippets might need to be saved in something else than md though.

[kohei-takata]

How about put metadata in the form of YAML Front Matter in front of markdown file?
YAML Front Matter is being used by jekyll , Middleman , and many of other static site generators.
Github can understand YAML Front Matter like this .

[jasondavis]

@loicteixeira I agree with this being the best solution as it is the most common solution across other apps.

Also it means if using the Markdown file outside of Boostnote, then that Metadata is not going to get in the way!

Also JSON is much more popular and easier to use with other libraries as most modern libraries support it already

@kohei-takata you argument that GitHub parses the data when viewed on GitHub, they also parse JSON data in the same manner.

Just my view on the matter

[danalexilewis]

@loicteixeira bang on the money mate.

This is in line with how GitBooks works: a summary.md file defines the contents page - essentially a series of links. This is similar to storing the meta-data of the book/collection of notes.

I suppose the tension is what, if any, meta-data is related to the organisation of notes vs the note itself. ie maybe we still need to have meta-data stored in the head of a note?

Note Gitbook has a second file book.json for enabling plugins/additional functionality associated with that book. eg youtube viewer.

eg. This is the RootSystems (the dev owned company i work with) handbook: https://github.com/enspiral-root-systems/meta

[kirtan403]

Storing it in markdown will make life of other devs even more simpler. Agree to @agentlewis for the gitbook example.

Storing it in front matter will make if more simpler as @kohei-takata told. There are many parser available for it. All the static site generators based on markdown does this, too.

[SMUsamaShah]

I started using Boostnote recently (its awesome). I looked at the code to implement this feature and just chickened out.

It will be nice to have markdown files actually saved as independently readable files and metadata could be stored in front matter as jekyll (kramdown) supports it.

[ebridges]

Thanks a lot for a terrific product!

There are a couple of approaches that already exist in the Markdown community for storing metadata.

• YAML frontmatter, supported by Github and easily supported by the majority of editors.
• MultiMarkdown Metadata, developed by Fletcher Penney as an extension to John Gruber's Markdown standard. I believe this will also work with YAML as well.

Using an external JSON file to hold metadata is an OK workaround, but I'd suggest storing metadata related to the file in the individual file itself as YAML frontmatter (or MMD), and album and editor-specific metadata in the external JSON file. This would keep the formatted notes independent of the editor, and allow you to edit them in any markdown editor if you need to.

[flyisland]

yes, I'm a fan of typora, which is the best markdown editor in the world, hope I could use it to edit the content in boostnote!

[lpld]

I started using Boostnote recently and was quite surprised with the fact that the actual notes are not stored as real markdown files. I can see several scenarios where this could be needed:

• Edit/view note with an external app
• Backup notes to a cloud (I use pCloud, for instance) and view/edit them from the phone using any markdown editor for Android/iOS
• Easily port notes from/to Boostnote

I understand, that Boostnote is not a markdown editor, it is a note-taking app, but it seems to me that the implementation should be as standard as it can be.

And BTW, the app itself is great, the devs did a really good job. Thanks!

[pyriand3r]

I would prefer the idea of using markdown files with yaml front-matter. That would make it really easy to reuse the files. The current storage format as CSON is really suboptimal. It's uncommon and even doesn't have a real specification...

I have a fork of boostnote where i ported the data format to normal json because i'm planning to write a new mobile client in go + qt and couldn't find a CSON-library for go. But markdown files with yaml front-matter would also fit very well in my plans.

I could implement the parser i think, if desired.

Normal notes would be no problem, but the syntax for snippet notes could be tricky. Atm i'm thinking about putting the description in the front matter and all snippet "files" in the markdown content, separated by lines (--- tags). A heading could be used as file name and a code-block tag with language tag for the file content. This way the snippet notes could easily be rendered by any markdown editor, too.

---
type: 'snippet'
title: 'snippet title'
description: 'snippet note description'
tags: [ ]
----

# First file

```javascript

let someJSFunction (arg1, arg2) {
    ...
}
``
---

# Second file

```html
<body>some html here</body>
``

[ecvgit]

Is this issue going to be fixed? I think this will convince a lot of folks who are currently using various markdown based schemes to switch to Boostnote (because of the ease of switching back if needed).