Has development stopped?

[faldor20]

I have looked at this tool a few times and have always found a few of the features (good spellcheck and a shortcut to use it) extremely compelling. However in a world where products like typora offer almost identical functionality i don't see much point using or buying an undeveloped piece of software. Just looking to check in and see where this lovely tool is going (if anywhere).

[astoilkov]

Hi,

The development hasn't stopped. Our latest statement still holds. We are working full time every day (including Saturday and Sunday).

The product is almost finished and we really like the end result. We have some other related work in order to release everything to the public but work is going great.

If you have any additional questions feel free to ask.

Update: We now have a website at https://nota.md and you can request early access.

[gibranlp]

Do you guys have an estimated ETA for the new product?.

[astoilkov]

We have a good sense of what time it will take to finish the tasks we have in hand. But what we have noticed is that we can't estimate correctly because tasks that we haven't expected come up.

You can expect the new product to go public in a month or two. However, this is a rough estimate. A month is enough for unexpected things to come up. So keep those dates in mind as we are working really hard to make them true but be aware of the possibility of taking a little longer.

[astoilkov]

Let me give you an example of unexpected tasks that have come up recently:

• Notarization. When we started the new product notarization didn't exist.
• User feedback. As we test with some users both the product and the website we see things we've missed that become apparent. Those problems need to be fixed before we unveil to the wider public – this takes time.

[gibranlp]

Is there a way to apply for testing?

[astoilkov]

Sure.

Email us at contact@caret.io and tell us about your experience with Caret — how you use it, what you use it for, what you'd change.

[Li-An]

Great news. I use Caret for writing my WordPress content (using WithExtEditor Chrome extension). It’s nearly perfect.

Some suggestions:

• in dark mode, headings symbols are difficult to read (I mean ##)
• create a real Wiki help page. Each time I struggle to find informations or tips.

[astoilkov]

@Li-An Both suggestions are on their way. We changed the colors for the headings in the new product and we are already working on a documentation that will help the users.

[dxps]

@astoilkov Oh, btw, Antonio: is there anything I can help on the new release? Something like testing, documentation, review?

[astoilkov]

@devisions We will be grateful to receive feedback about the product and website when we are ready to share it. That would help us a lot especially from users that are familiar with the previous product. Thanks!

[dxps]

@astoilkov I'm a daily user of Caret, love to use it for journaling and knowledge mgmt and I can't wait to see the new version (especially the theming/colors aspects of it, as a starting point). So, count on me for feedback and suggestions. 😄

[sguergachi]

@astoilkov do you have a build of the Windows app? I would love to help beta test it if so.

[astoilkov]

@devisions Great to hear. We will contact you.

@sguergachi We will start out by rolling out for macOS. The windows version will come later so the answer, for now, is No.

[faldor20]

Hey you mention that your Twitter post still stands. Are you still planning to continue to bug fix caret?

I mean it's great but It has some pretty serious issues on windows. I've tested it on a number of machines and they all have carry totally lock up pretty regularly

[astoilkov]

@faldor20 Is there a logged issue that describes the problem you are talking to? We will be glad to fix it if we know where the problem is. Thanks.

[Li-An]

The only problem I meet on Win10 64 bits Caret 3.4.6 is a cursor problem: sometimes, it shows a space that don’t exist. On Caret 4 beta, it’s impossible to work on a long text, it will hang up.

[faldor20]

I thought making an issue it would be a duplicate of @Li-An 's issue #867 or issue #675.

I have never used caret 3.4.6. I have just downloaded it and it is noticeably snappier and doesn't freeze all the time. It's not quite as pretty though :). Even the spellcheck works at a reasonable pace in the older version. I can normally count at least 2 seconds before the ctrl+space menu pops up, and changing words often takes the underlines a while to catch up.

However, I would be very happy to make an issue or add these comments to one of those other issues @astoilkov .

[astoilkov]

@faldor20 and @Li-An Thanks for the details.

These kinds of issues are the reason we rewrote the entire software from scratch. It didn't match our values of building extremely stable software.

Some of the issues you posted are buried into technical debt and are very hard to fix. This is why we aren't still fixing them. Some time ago we decided that it is better to put the effort into introducing the new product and not into fixing all those issues.

I am not sure what the right balance is and I apologize if that is causing you problems. Our hope is to make up for it by giving the new product(years worth of work) for free to our old customers.

[faldor20]

I totally understand. I just wanted to get an understanding of what's happening. :)

[Li-An]

Hello, another suggestion:

• the ability to paste directly an URL into <https://site.com>

I use it a lot in my blog.

[mrbbp]

Well, i'm using Caret every day til covid containment for writing course.

• I use a lot of footnotes and i really appreciate a place to manage ( add / remove) footnotes at the bottom of my doc ( going back and forth in the page is tiring)...
• a button on the left to swipe the file menu On/OFF (not a 3 keyboard shortcut) like in Atom.io
• a way to manage versionning of my files ? :s
• perhaps a menu bar with shortcut styling like in ia-writer, there is to few keyboard shortcuts for structuring (and use menu is disturbing when writing) with strikethrought and Mark

perhaps Caret is not design to work like i do... nevermind. I Love Caret and have lot of pleasure with it.

[CerebralMischief]

Greetings! Is there any update on this? I was going to ask on Twitter but saw that you sent people here. It's been quite some time since anything has been mentioned. Just today I was going to purchase a license, decided to pause and try to see if I could find a coupon code, and here I am. I have to tell you that Caret is easily the best Markdown editor there is, so thank you for all the hard work!

[faldor20]

Hey @CerebralMischief , currently the Devs have moved on and are working on a new piece of software that appears to be a slightly larger scope note taking and management app. Slightly less "Word" and more "OneNote". It is called nota and can be found at https://nota.md/. Basically caret is no longer under active development, but there is something new. I am really just paraphrasing what astilkov has said above

[Li-An]

Hey @CerebralMischief , currently the Devs have moved on and are working on a new piece of software that appears to be a slightly larger scope note taking and management app. Slightly less "Word" and more "OneNote". It is called nota and can be found at https://nota.md/. Basically caret is no longer under active development, but there is something new. I am really just paraphrasing what astilkov has said above

Well, it’s a surprise for me as it was said there will be a new version this summer. So another program…and another licence.

[faldor20]

@Li-An I believe it has been mentioned that your license will carry over. If @astoilkov could confirm that's be great.

[Li-An]

@Li-An I believe it has been mentioned that your license will carry over. If @astoilkov could confirm that's be great.

But where did you get all these informations ? I come here every week to find any information of update and did not read all these.

[faldor20]

Okay so i found out about nota because i was looking at https://github.com/erusev 's (the other devloper working on caret) other repositorys on GitHub. The license carryover comes from this tweet here : https://twitter.com/careteditor/status/1136198029357264896?s=20

And as to why..... i care about writing apps and love Caret except for the fact that it randomly freezes, uses half my cpu power constantly doing spell checking and god knows what else and seems to get exponentially slower with each new open document.... its pretty and has nice spelling suggestions though.... :)

However, nota is mac only at this time.something i regularly shake my fist at the sky and curse the gods for. (Though Linux and windows support is planned: https://github.com/notaapp/issues/issues/9 )

[dxps]

I must admit that currently I switched to Typora, which runs great on macOS, but it doesn't have tabs for Win/Linux. It's also Markdown based, but it has that nice behavior as you can see in Bear (more of a WYSIWYG, no need to preview it). And copy pasting (from a Browser to the Editor) works also great.

I am still keeping on eye on Caret's future... or any follow-up, such as the aforementioned Nota.

@astoilkov Maybe you could bring some light about strategy and future. Thanks!

[Li-An]

@faldor20 thanks for the informations. I read this twit but was confused with the Caret beta 4.xxx. I supposed this was a new Caret. I do not meet your problems as I don’t work on big files (I use Caret mainly for Wordpress blog posts in Markdown). I’ve tested a lot of WD editors for Windows and Caret is the more convenient and easy to use for me.

[faldor20]

@devisions I actually much prefer carets ability to both show the formatting characters and the resultant formatting. I would use vscode but it doesn't have support for font size adjustment and Emacs is to much of a pain to setup everwhere. Look they all have problems but as mentioned caret is peak features. Just not peak stability.

[astoilkov]

@astoilkov I can confirm everything @faldor20 said. We are working on the new product https://nota.md. We won't implement new features for Caret because Nota has almost the same features + more. The licenses for Caret will work for Nota.

I should note that one of our main goals for Nota was stability.

Regarding the future of Nota you can look at https://github.com/notaapp/roadmap/projects/1. You can also request early access and see what the product looks like.

[Li-An]

@astoilkov Thanks for the informations. As my OS is Win 10, I will have to be very patient I suppose.

[dxps]

@astoilkov Thanks for the details. For macOS users like myself, when can we play (and why helping you with testing) with Nota?

I am asking since I just tried using Nota 0.15.0 (currently available). Besides having to do a xattr -cr ./Nota.app to be able to open it, it crashes immediately on my macOS 10.15.6.

[astoilkov]

@devisions This is a bug in 0.15.0 only, the next version will fix the bug and I will write you to let you know.

@Li-An Nota is also Electron so porting should be easy.

[Li-An]

@astoilkov Cool.

[astoilkov]

@devisions Can you share why you needed to do xattr call? What happened when you opened it directly?

[dxps]

@astoilkov Sure. Because by default I got that standard macOS message: the app is damaged and can't be opened. And that looks like the solution to get rid of it.

[astoilkov]

@devisions Did you download Nota as a .zip or as a .dmg?

[borekb]

I had the same problem – the 0.15 release doesn't contain the DMG; I had to download the 0.13.1 release (make sure to get the Nota-0.13.1.dmg file, not the ZIP!) and then let Nota auto-update itself to 0.15.

Spent like 15 minutes banging my head against the wall 😄.

[astoilkov]

@borekb Why did you do it manually? Didn't the auto-updater work for you?

[borekb]

I switched to a new machine, went to https://github.com/notaapp/releases/releases, the current one is 0.15.0, there's only a single big file in the assets section:

so I downloaded that and then ended up in the same situation as @devisions. I then tried the same with 0.14.0 which has the same problem. Only the 0.13.1 version seems to have the DMG file attached.

[dxps]

@astoilkov Exactly. Version 0.15 release has only a zip, that gets extracted as a Nota.app.

As @borekb mentioned, I tried with 0.13.1. Initially, I get this: and that's the reason I did xattr -cr ./Nota.app. Still, it crashes immediately:

[CerebralMischief]

@astoilkov I can confirm everything @faldor20 said. We are working on the new product https://nota.md. We won't implement new features for Caret because Nota has almost the same features + more. The licenses for Caret will work for Nota.

I should note that one of our main goals for Nota was stability.

Regarding the future of Nota you can look at https://github.com/notaapp/roadmap/projects/1. You can also request early access and see what the product looks like.

Hello @astoilkov! You guys have an incredible editor here and I'm VERY pleased to hear this news, THANK YOU! Now that I've gotten an official response I will be purchasing a license. Thank you again for all your continued work on this and it sounds like I need to take a look at Nota! Also, for what it's worth, I had to do some digging to find this info. It may be beneficial to update caret.io to mention this or something as it does seem like Caret is abandoned and it initially stopped me from giving you cash.

Thank you again for your continued work and I look forward to future updates!

[dxps]

@borekb Actually, 0.13.0 release provides a .dmg installer. Tried that again and it starts ok. 👍 Thanks for sharing! @astoilkov Finally, I have it started and updated.

[astoilkov]

@devisions We actually intentionally don't include working versions of Nota so it's not freely available for now. I will now remove those Nota versions. However, because you started Nota can you send us feedback if you have some at support@nota.md.