Note Organiser for scientists

Objective

Provide scientists, IT professionals but also normal people, with a solid, lightweight note-taking GUI, with tag browsing and a clear interface.

Based on a customized markdown syntax, it supports mathematics. The modification of the syntax, parsed internally, allows to store tags for posts, for easier filtering when previewing a large document.

It is aimed to store small notes, remarks on program, life-pro-tips found while developing/researching, in a safe place, reachable without internet access.

Eventually, it should also support longer posts (blog-like), and more specialised types of notes, like ones for experimental work.

Installation

Note Organiser uses the standard Python distutils tool for installing. Simply issue:

python setup.py install --user

when in the main directory. It requires PySide, and pypandoc, which will be installed if not present. Be warned, PySide is a huge install. Go walk outside for a bit.

To get you started, look at the file example/example.md.

Usage

Simply run, from anywhere, NoteOrganiser.py. Create notebooks, add entries with the New Entry button in the Editing panel, and preview them. On the Preview panel, you can filter entries with tags.

Markdown

For those still not familiar with Markdown, you can check the original code, developed by John Gruber here. It is a markup language designed to be clear and readable, and easily converted to html for a better visualisation.

Note Organiser converts notes taken in markdown with an additional syntax for tags and date. The conversion is made through the python wrapper pypandoc of the pandoc document converter. The format will be recognised automatically, and supports most extensions of markdown. A useful cheat-sheet to consult is available on this Github wiki.

Current Features

• Markdown syntax for a clear source file, readable without the software.
• Tag system for entries for classification
• Html previewing of the note file, with tag sorting

see the roadmap (display in raw format, since Github does not apply the Github flavored syntax to files) for coming features, and make use of the issues page to propose improvements.

License

The code is published under the MIT license, please see LICENSE.txt for the complete notice.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, so please submit a bug-report or a feature request. Pull-Request are also very appreciated. Please think about running the tests under both python 2.7 and 3.3 before submitting, though!

Contributors

• Tobias Maier (@egolus), for his many contributions, and help in supporting Windows.