Alright folks, help a coder out. The last time I tried to write an engineering notebook app for myself, I got bogged down in the interface, then sent myself down a rabbit hole where I was planning to store all of my notes in sealed PDFs, which I then had to read back so that I could search. Clearly, this is not the way.

After that, I tried to just beat TiddlyWiki into unsealed project note shape. It works, but it's buggy.

It occurs to me that I could quickly bang out something with an interface similar to my note-taker in TiddlyWiki, in .NET, use a little local DB to store the notes, then once that behaves, work on figuring out how to encrypt the contents of each set of notes...that seems doable. I can add more useful bits later.

Friends, allow me to share my progress from you. Please yell at me if I try to add too many things at once.

@Lwasserman The abvious answer at first glance would seem to be jupyter notebook, but I presume there is a reason that wont work?

@freemo It really complex for what I want. I don't need a web service, and am not really looking to share my notes. I'll add the ability to export stuff as a PDF, I think. What I really need is a lightweight way to store project notes by date and project, where I can't change the notes once they've been written. Ultimately, I'd like to have them timestamped by a trusted authority and sealed with a cert. Also, it'd be nice if my program could interpret some standard HTML and SVG markup.

I'm not a scientist; I don't run experiments or need to write papers. I'm an engineer, whose razer-sharp memory is starting to go to crap. I'm hoping I can write something small enough to be moderately portable, that won't drive me crazy. I'm so bad at keeping notes.

@Lwasserman If thats all you need just use Emacs :)

@freemo Not sure that qualifies as less complicated...