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Whilst looking at note-taking applications, I have been pleasantly surprised by the sheer number of applications available on Linux and the variety of ways in which you can collect your thoughts or organize your life.
In the past, I’ve always stuck to using the same type of application but, this month, we’ll take a look at something slightly different: MicroPad, an open-source electron application which doesn’t tie you to organizing your notes in a hierarchical structure, but gives you an “infinite canvas” on which to capture your ideas.
Download and Installation
MicroPad is not available in the default Ubuntu repositories, but you can download a deb file from https://getmicropad.com/#download to install the app on any Ubuntu, Debian, or derivative system; you can install the app via the Snap store or you can choose to download the application as an AppImage, which is what I chose to do. You can download an RPM for use on Fedora or openSUSE, or install the app via the AUR if you use an Arch-based system. As MicroPad is cross-platform, downloads are available for Windows or Mac, and you even have the option to run MicroPad in the browser with your notes stored in your browser’s persistent storage.
The application starts quickly and has a clean, modern and slightly quirky interface, which is designed to look like a whiteboard. The background shows you how to start taking notes, and a short, introductory video is displayed which you can choose to hide in the future. The sidebar on the right-hand side of the page displays a help notebook where you can find license information for the application (Mozilla Public License Version 2.0) and its dependencies.
See image right: 1. Notebooks menu – select or create notebooks, import, export and sync options; 2. Cog icon to move, rename, delete or export notebooks, sections or elements.
It’s worth taking a few moments to browse the Help to familiarize yourself with the GitHub-flavored Markdown MicroPad uses and also the keyboard shortcuts available. As well as Markdown, you can include AsciiMath or LaTex in your notes.
The application includes a few options for theming, including a theme called IanPad which is an eye-watering mix of bright greens!
Usage
MicroPad doesn’t use a traditional hierarchical format for taking notes. Instead, notes are stored in a notebook which can have multiple sections and subsections – each containing multiple elements. Elements appear as cards on the note and can be moved around and resized as you see fit. The developer likens this to how you would take notes on a whiteboard. As well as textual notes written using Markdown, you can add images, drawings, embedded PDF documents, files, Jupyter notebooks, or even voice recordings made directly in the application.
Using the Notebooks menu at the top of the screen, let’s add a new notebook, imaginatively titled “My Notes” and see how it works.
Clicking anywhere on the page gives you the option to choose the type of element you wish to add (right), and choosing text opens a small Markdown editor (far right). On saving, text elements are displayed as formatted text rather than the raw Markdown. When adding an image, you can choose the size at which it should be displayed. By default, notes are named with their creation date and time, and stored in a section called “Unorganised Notes”, but these can be easily renamed by clicking on the cog icon beside the note title in the sidebar (below). You can also add tags to notes by preceding a word with the # symbol, or add a due date in the Markdown editor pane. If you add checkboxes to an element, MicroPad displays a progress bar at the top, showing how many of the checkboxes have been completed; useful if you want to use the application to manage your to-do list.
Under the Notebooks menu, you have the option to import files in Evernote format, Markdown format, or from a previous MicroPad export. I tried to import three notes from Vim. MicroPad created a new notebook for the imports but added only one of the notes. Trying to import the three notes individually also didn’t work, but as the notes were originally in a different application (Zim), and were exported to Markdown, this was because the Markdown generated was incompatible with that used by MicroPad. Trying again with three test notes containing only very basic Markdown did work; the three notes were successfully imported into a new Notebook with three notes, but I was unable to move the notes into my “My Notes” notebook – so ended up copying and pasting the Markdown into new elements. You can, however, move notes between sections in the same notebook.
The cog icon beside a note’s name also gives you the options to delete the note or to export it as a PDF. One of MicroPad’s features which appeals to me is the ability to embed PDFs in a notebook. Some of my notes are PDFs of articles I’ve scanned in and kept for reference. My current note-taking application will allow me to attach these PDFs to a note, but does not display them inline. Exporting one of my “test” notes to PDF worked flawlessly, and subsequently embedding the PDF not only showed the content in my note, but the text of the PDF was also searchable directly in MicroPad. Impressive!
Adding a drawing allows you to use a stylus or mouse to add handwritten notes, drawings, or annotations, which are displayed like any other element. As I lack any artistic ability and was “drawing” using a touchpad on a laptop, the extent of my ability was a crudely drawn arrow and asterisk! For those of you with a more artistic bent, or with a digitizer tablet, being able to annotate your notes in this way could be an important feature which is not available in many other applications.
MicroPad includes the option to encrypt your notebooks, and you can also synchronize notebooks between different devices, although this requires registering with MicroPad and using third-party servers. Full details are available at https://getmicropad.com/sync/ including full terms and conditions and privacy notices.
Viewing and searching notes
As previously mentioned, MicroPad displays elements as cards on a board. These can easily be moved around and even overlapped, as with my arrow, drawing attention to a specific part of an element. Keyboard shortcuts are available to zoom in or out of the note so you can see the bigger picture if you have a lot of elements on one note.
You can search by tag; clicking on a tag will show all notes that have the same tag. You can also carry out a text search, but only for the names of notes; this search doesn’t include text in any elements .
Exporting
Through the notebooks menu, you have the option to export all your notebooks to a MicroPad zip archive or to a folder of Markdown files. By clicking the cog icon beside a notebook, you can limit your export to one notebook; the cog icon beside a note’s name only gives you the option to export the note as a PDF file. Whilst exporting my notebooks worked well, the images and drawings were embedded in the Markdown files in Base64 format rather than being exported as separate files, meaning that, even for my very small test notes, the files were very large and crashed Gedit when trying to open them. The embedded PDF wasn’t exported at all; the Markdown file for it was 0 bytes long!
Data Storage
The notes you create are saved in a database in ${HOME}/.config/micropad with any pictures, drawings or embedded PDFs easily accessible. MicroPad uses an open-source file format which you can download from https://github.com/MicroPad/Notebook-Library, or you can access your data through PDF or Markdown exports as detailed above.
In Summary
I was really excited about trying MicroPad and, yes, I do realize how sad that sounds! Now that I’ve used the application, I can’t really see how I would use it to manage my notes on an ongoing basis as most of the notes I take are hierarchical in nature. Trying to organize these types of notes in MicroPad would, to me, feel messy. It would also take me quite a while to alter my existing notes so that they could easily be imported in MicroPad. However, that doesn’t mean that MicroPad is not a useful and original application. If you take notes which combine pictures, text and handwritten annotations, then MicroPad offers features which I’ve not seen in any other note-taking application. For example, planning a garden redesign, combining textual measurements, photos of plants, hand-drawn sketches of the layout, would be an ideal use for MicroPad. It may also feel more comfortable for existing users of Microsoft’s OneNote application than other note-taking applications available on Linux.
My search for the perfect note-taking application will continue… but I won’t be deleting the MicroPad AppImage just yet. It’s an interesting application which, generally, works well and is pleasant to use. If the whiteboard-style interface appeals to you, then give it a go!