MinimalNote

Ultra-simple tag-based keyboard-optimized note application.

MinimalNote was developed for the purpose of learning (C++11, MVC/MVP, Qt, cross platform dev, sqlite). The plan is to extend it from time to time and to replace my heavily used Evernote at any time (getting slower and slower).

You can download a portable version in the release folder

Features

• Ingredients of a note: Title, tags and content
• Tag based organization: In combination with fulltext search this is all you need to store and organize all your information. Way better than document and folder oriented.
• Incremental Search: see results as soon as you start typing
• 100% keyboard optimized (in progress)
• Global hotkey ALT-SHIFT-F resumes from Tray Icon (planned for MacOSx/Linux)
• Platform independent:
• Automatic save: No need to save, will be done in background.
• Learning Features: I plan to add learning capabilities later (missing in Evernote)
• Links to Dropbox files are planned (Evernote attachments are slow and fat)

Implementation

• Based on C++11, Boost, Qt and sqlite
• Using C++11 style whenever possible: No raw pointers, RAII, no arrays (vectors instead), move-semantics (e.g. return unique_ptr)
• Built with VS2010 (for Qt support). Many C++11 features are not yet available;(
• Based on Model View Presenter approach (Passive View). See below (architecture) for more details
• Only the View is implemented in Qt, but it should be easy to replace the view by another UI framework. Other parts don't have dependencies on Qt (except Logging)
• Uses a mall custom sqlite wrapper (could not find a simple c++11-style wrapper without heavy use of raw pointers)

Architecture

This is based on a very simple implementation of Model View Presenter. Model has no way to access View and vice versa. All goes through Presenter. The view is defined by an interface (AbstractView.h) and can be replaced easily (e.g. for testing or using another ui framework). See this great comparism of MVP/MVC or the even better article from M. Fowler.

Todo

• Static linking deployment
• Make global hotkey platform independent
• Add Unit Tests (should have done this first...)
• Replace Qt logging mechanism by something else. Didn't find a great logging library yet.
• There are tons of pending issues...