Totes

Three Notes Apps In Nine Days

In late January 2025 I wanted my own markdown notes app, so I built one in Tauri 2 with the Milkdown editor on ProseMirror. A vanilla TypeScript and Vite shell, and app-v0.1.0 on January 27, a day after I started. Then I built it twice more: totes-web on the 31st, and totes-next on February 3, on Next.js with Radix UI. Three versions in nine days.

I wasn't really building a product. I wanted to find out which shell felt best around an editor, and building the same app three ways was the quickest way to find out.

This was two weeks after I finished the Pay It Forward License and four months before Anise, when most of what I made was about trying out what to build on. Dependency scanners in April, a pile of egui bindings in May. Totes never got a second release, but the Tauri and Rust side of it is where I ended up going.