Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

None of the note-taking software I've seen has worked for me despite a ton of research (please don't recommend me existing things, I've probably already evaluated them!), so I've been thinking about building my own note-taking software.

And I'd like to ask y'all neurodiverse folks for your feedback of the ideas I have - particularly if you are also otherwise marginalized, and/or experience your neurodiversity as (partly) a disability. I'm curious whether this would also work for you.

(Feel free to reply also if you're not sure whether you fit into that category; if your instance isn't fediblocked here, chances are your feedback would be welcome)

Upfront disclaimers, before I get to the actual idea:
- I will be literally dependent on this software for my personal ability to function and I have very limited spoons, and so I won't run this as a community project, but instead make decisions by myself. I will however make it as easy to fork as I can, and make as many pieces as possible independently reusable. Community-run forks would be very much welcome.
- I may not reply to all feedback due to lack of available spoons, but I promise that I'll *read* all of it and take it into consideration.
- For all the same reasons, I don't even have a rough estimate of when this will be publicly usable, "it's done when it's done"

Alright, so, to get the boring-but-important bits out of the way first: it'll be FOSS (no open-core bullshit), perpetually non-commercial, and designed to run locally on desktop systems, primarily (but not exclusively) Linux. No magical cloud services.

So here's the idea:
- By default, adding a note involves nothing more than hitting a key combo, entering some text, hitting enter, and the window disappears again. Fire and forget, it's saved.
- All metadata (tagging etc., more detail below) will be handled through /slash commands; they can be placed anywhere in the note. Your input is entirely linear, no need to leave the keyboard or navigate UIs, and it works in the "fire and forget" process.
- Importantly, your input is live-interpreted and shown below the input box in a more 'graphical' format, so that you have immediate visual confirmation of what you've entered, without needing to mentally parse your own input commands.

Example inputs:
"feed cat /todo /time 18:00"
"/todo /project game // convert sprites"

- There's (fuzzy) full-text search through all notes, even the completely untagged ones, so that you can find them later even if you weren't in a good headspace at the moment of writing them. Likewise, /slash commands for search parameters exist.
- Notes can be tagged (eg. "project" or "todo"), have attributes added (eg. "deadline date" or "reference number" or whatever else), and they can have attachments.
- Attachments are not limited to files; they can be URLs (a local copy of the page will be made for HTTP URLs), references to e-mails, geo coordinates, whatever external thing is being referenced. This will be handled through plugins.
- Rich/formatted text will also be a (searchable) attachment, the main note text would then serve as a subject line of sorts.
- When adding an attachment, entering text yourself is optional. So you totally could just schedule a referenced e-mail for a deadline of 21:00 tomorrow without further input.
- Conversely, there will be plugins for several applications (browser, e-mail client, calendar application, etc.) that are basically "send to note pile", and that'll spawn the note-adding window with whatever you sent there prefilled as an attachment (and then you can add text or tags or whatever).
- Notes can also be attached to other notes, for cases where you need a hierarchical or wiki-like organization of notes.
- There will be some kind of not-yet-defined way to have alarms/lists based on deadlines/times/tags etc. that you've entered, to get an immediate idea of what needs to be done when.

Thoughts?

I am really uncomfortable with the increasing amount of "ADHD coach"-type accounts on Twitter that continuously post "relatable" tweets seemingly just to advertise their courses or whatever, rather than out of any genuine desire to provide support to neurodiverse folks

I'm even more uncomfortable about these accounts seemingly often being run by actual neurodiverse folks, perpetuating harmful models of interaction to do a capitalism (ie. beyond "putting bread on the table"), instead of actually providing helpful advice directly

And I'm *really* not happy that I'm starting to see some of this stuff crop up on fedi as well

@f0x Diced, because that means I can just throw them into the electric chopper thingem and push a button and not make any effort

@katnjiapus@toot.site @selea@social.linux.pizza How "dirt cheap" are we talking, in terms of monthly budget?

@retr0id @desea @cadey That's the thing though, the expectation that online social spaces must reflect your full social graph at all times is actually *very weird*, and an expectation that didn't exist at all prior to startup social media silos.

We don't expect this from any in-person social spaces - why would we expect it from online social spaces? Meeting different people in different places is a pretty normal part of social interaction, for precisely those reasons of social compatibility.

@retr0id @desea That's the thing though, that disjointedness is a *feature*, and it is the opposite of fragility - it provides robustness, because it doesn't force incompatible people to co-exist within the same space, thereby removing a huge conflict driver.