I was trying out ElementaryOS last week and discovered one of the apps in its appstore is a great Markdown-based notebook. For quick notes I usually find a plain text file to be too limiting, but the complexity and power of a full system like OneNote, KDE Basket, or Zim gets in the way of just writing something down in a structured format.

The feature that sold me on Notes Up is the ability to very quickly switch between a “View” mode and an “Edit” mode. In edit mode you see your markdown text with a nice level of syntax highlighting. One click from there to view mode and it renders the markdown text, including scaling to the window size. I was using Notes Up on a low power netbook (AMD E2-1800) and did not notice any lag. The minimal interface also suited the small screen size.

Installing on Ubuntu (unofficial build script method)

There is a script provided on the project Github for building and installing on Ubuntu systems.

The script handles most dependencies and installation. However, it is not very error tolerant so you need to watch for errors. I had to manully install libgtkspell3-3-dev.

Once installed, you can only run it by running the build script with --run argument. I made it available anywhere from terminal by:

• creating a bin folder in my home directory
• creating a file called ‘notesup’ in ~/bin
• chmod +x ~/bin/notesup
• Putting the following into notesup (change the path to build script if needed): #!/bin/bash /home/yourname/Documents/Notes-Up/build-notes-up.sh –run

Now I open a terminal, type notesup &, and it opens notesup. I believe from here you only have to make a file in a special Unity directory to make it show up in the application search or in the application bar.

Installing on Ubuntu (frankenOS method)

Note: the elementary PPAs conflict with the ubuntu ones and can do weird things to your OS as they override packages. For example, my GRUB became the elementary version and I encountered package conflicts in apt (but not apt-get, strangely).

While Notes Up installs on Elementary with no difficulties, installing it on Ubuntu requires the addition of several ElementaryOS PPAs (one for the app, and then two for dependencies). From start to finish:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/daily
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/os-patches
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip.scott/notes-up
sudo apt update
sudo apt install com.github.philip-scott.notes-up

Fixing your system after adding all those PPAs

• Use the instructions here if you want to go back to Ubuntu packages after elementary PPAs have taken over your package versions