Hi, This is my first post here, pretty intimidating! haha
I shared this on reddit, and one of my community members told me this is a good place to also share it, so here we go!
A couple of months back I have built a checklist/note taking app for myself and called it rwMarkable, posted it on reddit and a lot of people seemed to resonate to it, so I kept adding new features and enjoying the small but very involved community that has built around it.
For anyone who hasn’t heard of the project before, here’s a quick bullet list of some features:
- Checklists: Create task lists with drag & drop reordering, progress bars, and categories. Supports both simple checklists and advanced task projects with Kanban boards and time tracking.
- Text Notes: A clean WYSIWYG editor for your notes, powered by TipTap with full Markdown support and codeblock syntax highlighting.
- Sharing: Share checklists or notes with other users or publicly with shareable links.
- File-Based: No database needed! Everything is stored in simple Markdown and JSON files in a single data directory.
- User Management: An admin panel to create and manage user accounts with session tracking.
- Customisable: 14+ built-in themes plus easy custom theme support.
- API Access: Programmatic access to your checklists and notes via REST API with authentication for various integrations.
- OIDC integration: Use any provider to authenticate, follow this tutorial on how to
There have been a lot of requests to change the name due to it sounding a little too close to reMarkable (the tablet - which, btw, i had no idea existed at the time lol) and after getting some amazing community suggestions we landed on jotty.
You can find all the info (and a demo) here: https://jotty.page/
You can find the repo here: https://github.com/fccview/jotty
Let me know what you think, the app is very much still in development and every week new features get added (that said, I really value the simplicity and lightweight nature of it, so I will not add anything that compromises it).
Few screenshots
p.s. Nice to meet you all <3
I’m getting a Cloudflare error trying to access your demo site.
Also, do you support back linking? That’s a feature that’s very important to me.
Should be back, of course everything went down while I was asleep, the joys 🤦♂️ By back linking you mean offline cache that links to a server when back online? If so, no, not yet at least
looks great! I need something like this for work tbh and will be checking it out.
question though, do you have any plans on incorporating a backend DB at all in the future? even something as small as SQLite?
I ask because I have used projects that store in flatfile json and as time progresses those files get very large and the UX degrades as the app is used.
Hi, I toyed with the idea of having an optional light database in place but for now the features are so minimal that I really don’t see the need. The biggest json file has about 10 lines and that’s the settings, the rest is just being read as and when you open a file, the whole app acts like a folder/file reader.
Should it ever slow down too much I’ll think about it more :)
MIT license, cool! I’ll check this out. Any chance to migrate from discord to a more open platform for community engagement?
Hey, thank you! Well I know discord very well so I just went for it because it’s what I am familiar with, but I am fairly open to have more than one community engagement platform, what did you have in mind? I heard a lot of good things about signal within the self-host community, but then again… it did go down with the aws outage with everything else yesterday lol
A ticket tracker and a wiki!
Else all the institutional knowledge about your software that your users are adding too vanishes forever into a black box. And that’d be a dang pity
Yes! I am absolutely working on a wiki! Release notes are very detailed so it’s easy to track progress scrolling through them on GitHub (I do this for work too, so I am fairly organised with that)
I’ll add a wiki to the official site once I’m done building it, there is a help button within the app itself with some knowledge base on key features ♥️
FYI the github repo can also have a wiki
That is actually such a good point 🤦♂️
Sometimes I tend to reinvent the wheel, I’ll probably enable it and the community can help out document stuff, duh 🤦♂️ thank you
Ffs Signal went down with AWS??
Yeah, I assume they use AWS for end to end encryption, so not the end of the world, but goes to show how fucked up the internet has become, when a service hosts a third of the web something has gone terribly wrong 😅
Matrix is generally very nice for chat, and Discourse for forums.
I hear there’s this new thing called PieFed that’s pretty cool…
Hey some folks responded here which is great! For me, I think wiki and tracker are perfect like someone else mentioned, because a lot of folks without accounts can still access the knowledge created. The hard part is moderating of course. I’m not sure there is a perfect solution.
Ultimately, you’re producing something cool for the community and you get to set the terms for that; if discord is easy and sustainable, I prefer that to you doing anything else that isn’t sustainable to see the project through as long and vibrantly as you can. So in that sense just choose what makes sense.
So in short: do what makes sense for you and if one of the alternatives listed (maybe wiki it seems? That would be cool with me) works then that’s great!
I guess I’ll also plug forgejo or codeberg at this time haha
Edit: I’ll also say, more folks here for discussion is cool too, and good to have you posting and hope to see more discussion around it in the future here!
Hey thank you so very much!
Yeah, you said it best! I take all suggestions on board but ultimately I won’t do anything that is to my detriment, between work and family (with two very very young kids) I have little time to spare haha my precious evenings should go to fun coding and not admin, I do enough of that at work as is lol
Still getting used to the layout here, feel like I am missing a lot of replies, but yeah, wiki seems to be a very manageable solution for now, GitHub wiki is what I’m leaning towards :)
Please, for the love of god, please be the first app of this kind to support the iCAL VTODO & VJOURNAL standards.
Hey! I will need to add a calendar at some point, so if you open an issue on the GitHub repo about this I can have a proper look, just done some research and definitely not opposed to the idea, seems pretty standard to me
Thank you for even considering it, let alone add it to the roadmap. Huge thanks.
I will create the issue, should I open one for each standard or consolidate all into one issue?
Consolidate all into one issue, no promises, but as long as it’s there I’ll definitely at least spike it and investigate the possibility ♥️
I gave the demo a quick try and I really like it. Simple and to the point, no unnecessary fluff. I might set this up at home.
Thank you for your work!Edit: One thing, the demo exports notes as PDF with white text on white background. I assume this is a mismatch with the selected theme.
Hey, The export as pdf has a known bug, it broke after a major refactor I did and I haven’t gotten around to fix it yet, sorry, I’ll be reworking it to use the native page print instead, and leverage the public note layout instead, should really help.
Thank you, glad you like it, let me know if you run into any issues :)
I like what you’ve done so far. It’s quick and simple to use. The one bugbear I’ve come across so far is it converting tables to html, rather than storing them as proper markdown.
I read the reasoning in the documentation, and certainly for my usecases, maintaining it as markdown is more important than trying to perfectly preserve the visual formating, especially as I use multiple devices with different sized screens, so I need different fornatting on each! That’s one of markdowns main strengths, it doesn’t preserve formatting so you don’t need to think about it and it’ll be displayed in a reasonable manner anywhere.
Is there any reasonable chance that there could be an option, at the server level rather than per page, to store tables as markdown?
Hey! I hear you and the community member who opened that issue had a chat with me on discord and I was convinced, I have a pull request coming with a setting to keep html or use markdown for tables :)
I currently use Silverbullet.MD, which is cool, but a bit too much for my needs.
Can you tell me the pros of using jotty instead?
Never used it, i’ll I can say is that they have a .MD domain which is stupidly hard to obtain and the pwa syncs with the server when you go online, these two things alone make me say “stick with it” hahahah what little marketing brain I have huh? 🤣 Jokes aside, I think the UI does make a difference, looking at their site, mobile navigation isn’t great and overall everything feels a bit dated, won’t be able to give you a full comparison without first running it locally myself tho, so I’ll try tomorrow and let you know :)
I don’t care for the pwa since I use Markor on android and syncrhing…
Yes the looks are ugly and it’s been a pain with SSO and auth in general…
Let me know!
I like how your project looks more.
Looks cool. Good job!
I know the MIT license tends to be the default… buuuuutttt… there are other licenses too like AGPLv3 or others.
You are right, I am fairly new to licenses so I went for the most common, but reading a bit on AGPLv3 it really sounds more in tune with how open source should work… I’ll have a read properly, consult a few friends on the matter and maybe make a switch, thank you for the eye opener!
This looks cool!
Is there or will there be support for importing and exporting Markdown files?
Hi! You can export already from the admin panel, regarding import i decided not to do it via the UI due to… well… a lot of complications involved with it and because the app does just read file/folders within the data folder you mount in the container. So just move your markdown files in the right folder and bob’s your uncle, they’ll be read and sorted automatically
That looks great. Thanks for posting here, I’m going to check this out.
This looks awesome. I’m going to check it out.
