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Adventures with Notenik

Why Is the Notenik File Format Different?

Adventure # 33 • Monday, September 23, 2024

Notenik recognizes and supports several different file formats, including MultiMarkdown with its metadata, as well as Markdown with YAML frontmatter.

But Notenik has its own file format, which is slightly different from these others.

Why is that?

There are a number of reasons.

  1. Historical happenstance. I devised the Notenik file format after learning of MultiMarkdown but before the use of YAML frontmatter became popular.

  2. A CMS/database influence. With the Notenik format, everything is a field, and everything has a label, including the Title and the Body of each note. To some extent, this just reflects my long history doing database development. And also my prior use of the Drupal content management system, in which every field is explicitly named.

  3. Maximum field flexibility. Notenik allows the use of multiple Markdown fields within a note. A second Markdown field, for example, might be used as a teaser or preview for a blog post. So rather than structure a Notenik file as a single Markdown document with some optional metadata in front, I chose to structure it so that Markdown (and a variety of other data types) could be accomodated in other fields.

  4. Preference for readability over bare-bones data entry. Because every field has a field title, and because blank lines are used to separate fields, a Notenik file is highly readable by anyone opening it using a text editor. And Notenik expects to take that formatting off of your hands when creating new notes. On the other hand, for users who create text-based notes using nothing but a text editor, the Notenik format requires a few additional keystrokes.

So while I try to maintain maximum interoperability with these other formats, Notenik continues to prefer its own – slightly different, slightly quirky, but very straightforward – format.

See the Notenik Knowledge Base for a complete description of the Notenik file format.

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Prior Adventure: Why Notenik is Shrouded in Perpetual Obscurity | 9 Sep, 2024

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