Noter

Noter is a note-taking webapp that helps you write by automatically organizing and surfacing other relevant notes. It is a personal project and very much still a prototype. Noter uses a vector database to display related notes alongside the current note. Notes are automatically summarized and the resulting summaries are displayed beneath the full content of each note to give you a quick overview. All features are available with local compute for privacy, but users have the option to add an OpenAI API key for better and quicker summarization and embedding.

Setup

• install poetry link
• poetry env use python3.9
• poetry install
• create .env file in project directory
  • add OPENAI_API_KEY if you want to use openAi API features
  • add NOTER_NOTES_DIR='~/path/to/your/notes'
  • optionally add NOTER_CACHE_DIR='~/path/to/.noter', defaults to .../notes/.noter

Usage

• optionally pre-cache summaries:
  • locally generated: poetry run cli summarize_all (takes about 4-5 seconds per file)
  • openai generated: poetry run cli summarize_all --use-openai (takes 1-1.5 seconds per file)
• start web server:
  • run everything locally: poetry run cli server
  • use openAI API: poetry run cli server --use-openai
• go to http://localhost:31337

Test

• run non-network tests with poetry run pytest in the tests/ dir
• run all tests with poetry run pytest --runapi in the tests/ dir

TODO

• similarity search
  • vector database to search for text embeddings
  • invalidate existing embeddings when we use different embedder or model
  • add instructor embedder https://huggingface.co/hkunlp/instructor-xl
• document summarization
  • cache summarizations based on file hash
  • invalidate existing summaries when we use different summarizer
  • use summarizer in web app
  • auto summarize documents in background (added explicit summarize_all cli command)
  • recursively summarize large files with LocalSummarizer
  • test more local summarizers, look into larger contexts
• full text search
  • add text search to webapp
  • look into ripgrepy for local full text file search
• usage / ergonomics
  • rethink how to specify where .noter is stored, shouldn't be based on run dir
  • allow webapp to toggle openai with cli param
  • fully support nested notes directories
  • consider making openai toggle in webapp