perfidy

Bare Bones Software, makers of renowned text editor that doesn't suck BBEdit, have a side project called Yojimbo. It gets occasional updates, but doesn't seem to have ever been a primary, or even really secondary focus for them. I imagine that it exists solely to scratch a particular itch that one of the developers had - a need for a useful note-taking and information-organizing tool that worked just the way they wanted it to. And since it does whatever it was that that developer needed it to do, it doesn't get much of a push. The itch, it got scratched.

I love Yojimbo. Unlike every other note taking tool I've ever used or even tried, it works with my mind rather than against it. I could use it for project notes and actually find the notes that I had noted. I could organize world-building and background and characters for novels. And I could store random but crucial info like serial numbers and passwords, and then find them again when I needed them. The key to this utility is the tagging system. Yojimbo lets you tag things! That by itself is not very remarkable¹1in fact, it's entirely unremarkable given tagging's ubiquity. The clever bit isn't the tagging, it's the UI that allows you to use tags rapidly, easily, and purposefully to get to the information you want, and move aside the information you don't. 

Using the list of tags it only takes a couple clicks to narrow the visible pool of notes to a dozen or less, and from there, you can - nearly all the time - just visually grep which note is the note you need²2It also has a really efficient normal search.

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Here's Yojimbo being cute.

Despite Yojimbo's manifest awesomeness, I've only ever successfully evangelized one person: Mrs. Buckethead; who now happily records all her recipes and homesteading notes in it. 

I recommend it highly. Two thumbs up. But I don't use it anymore. 

But Buckethead, you may ask, "If Yojimbo is 20 pounds of awesome in a ten pound sack, why on earth aren't you using it?"  Two main reasons: syncing and storage. While Bare Bones does offer an iPad companion app, perversely, it is read-only. And there is no iPhone app at all. So even though I have all this note-taking and finding power on my laptop, I do not have any means to view, edit, or add new notes from my phone. Now, I may only get a few ideas a year, but odds are, at least some of them are happening when all I have to hand is my phone. So I've come up with clumsy workarounds to take notes on the phone and then manually move them to where I need them.

Which brings up the second issue. I store most of my project notes in git. Software, novels, games, home improvement. It's a secure backup, It automatically keeps track of versions and can merge changes from multiple users. But there's not a single note-taking app that integrates even a little bit with git. Despite the fact that any project beyond the most minimal can benefit from some note-taking and recording of supporting info. I want to be able to have my notes live in a git-versioned directory. Ideally, many of them, one per project.

I'm not seeing any hint that Yojimbo will ever be updated to scratch my itches³3Sad, but fair. Their itches are not my itches, nor should they be in a literal or metaphorical sense.. Yet, I miss my Yojimbo notes. 

Enter the LLM. I've been experimenting, rather heavily now, on using "AI" to build tools that I don't have the time to develop on my own. Top on my list⁴4After adding sidenotes to perfidy, of course. is a Yojimbo replacement. And now I have a functional Yojimbo replacement. Not complete, but it is working.

What I wanted in my own, private Yojimbo:

• Markdown support
• Desktop, web, and phone versions
• Sync between desktop, web, and mobile versions
• Local data storage in a git-amenable and platform-agnostic format
• Import from Yojimbo
• Export in readable formats
• Share notes via standard OS tools

Right now, I have the web version and the Mac desktop version going, and changes automatically sync between them. I can import my old Yojimbo notes. I can share notes. Still need to build the bulk export function, and fiddle with the local storage. But... it's alive and that's a pretty good feeling. Here's a shot of the current version:

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Went with a more modern three-pane layout. And look! Dark mode support.

In our next exciting episode, technical details and crazy ideas.