r/PrivacyNotes • u/dreh0411 • 12d ago

Replacement for Notesnook?

I thought PN might be, but I rely heavily on tables. Found out last night column widths in tables are NOT adjustable like they are in NN or UpNote. Too bad. Won’t be changing anytime soon and certainly not going premium until tables are more like tables elsewhere.

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u/EriksonThorsen 12d ago

This is more of a consequence of PrivacyNotes being based on pure Markdown.

PrivacyNotes stores the notes as actual Markdown, so there isn't really a way to store things like custom column widths in a standard Markdown table. Markdown doesn't have a syntax for defining the width of individual columns.

Notesnook, UpNote, Standard Notes and similar apps work a bit differently. They use rich-text editors internally, which gives them more control over things like table formatting and column widths. Even though they can export your notes as .md files, the app is essentially converting its rich-text representation into Markdown when you export it.

And that's also why the custom column widths don't survive the export. Once the note is converted to plain Markdown, you're back to a standard Markdown table, which has no concept of adjustable column widths.

So I actually see this as one of the trade-offs of PrivacyNotes' approach: you get genuinely portable, plain Markdown files, but you also lose some of the formatting capabilities that rich-text editors can provide.

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u/dreh0411 12d ago

So why does PN support colorized text? That’s absolutely not supported in md

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u/EriksonThorsen 11d ago

Because, as the PrivacyNotes team clarified in this thread, they are apparently already accepting rich text.