Behind the scenes with Jotty’s developer: what’s changed

I can't begin to explain how hard I find using productivity tools and keeping things organized.

My wife has been telling me "use checklists!!" to make sure I keep my - fairly severe - ADHD in check when doing things and I have tried so many solutions, nothing worked for my type of brain, I needed something quick, snappy, with locally stored files, easy to use for non tech people (so my wife could also make use of it). Unfortunately out of the dozens of solutions I tried only a few kinda matched my needs and none had a UI I was happy with (you know, being a picky snobby front-end guy and all).

So with 15 years of software engineering at my shoulders, a half assed copy-pasted design of confluence and some spare time I built rwMarkable for myself and my wife.

... And then I learned reMarkable is a thing and I had to rebrand. Welcome Jotty!

A very professional screenshot of a totally legit production environment

The idea behind rwMarkable Jotty was to have one place for checklists and quick notes for me to reference in the most chaotic possible way, everything that's been recently edited will show up on the right screen, otherwise you have that left sidebar and a stupidly powerful search that will find anything you may or may not have written in a note at 3am in an insomnia fit.

Same goes for checklists, they are all there for my shopping lists, dumb ideas, HOUSE CHORES, it just works. My wife sends me a dump of things to do on WhatsApp, I take the whole text, bulk import it as a checklist and BOOM, Jotty converts each line in a beautiful checklist item and allows me to keep track on what's left to do.

Let me brag about a few features now

I mean, I just have been telling you how whipped I am so far, really

Right.. Jotty kinda shines in its apparent simplicity, but don't let it fool you, due to the amazing community that formed around the tool and insane requests that have been piling up since pretty much day 1, there's A TON to unpack.

  • You got industry standard and fully compliant OIDC login, which should work with any provider (please open an issue if your chosen vibe coded provider doesn't work and we'll figure it out)
  • You can actually convert simple checklists to a minimal Kanban board (come on people, board is already in the name!!) and create custom statuses for your items, with description and sub items
  • You can switch between a pretty damn powerful WYSIWYG editor and advanced markdown mode with syntax highlighting and full support (well kinda in beta right now) for shortcuts
  • TWO types of encryption (encryption is an opinionated field), PGP and xChaCha, you can either encrypt/decrypt or encrypt and edit your file from your browser without ever decrypt them on the server (looking arr you redditor).
  • You can customise it at nausea, aside from the ability to create custom themes you can just re-style the whole thing with your own css, the more customisation choices in an app the better in my opinion
  • PWA support, on mobile it all should truly feel like an app (unfortunately no offline note editing, but.. there's no database so it ain't easy. Been in a mental battle about this for months and it's still being planned/refined, it's a pain, I know!).
  • Full rest API support with CRUD operations for pretty much anything you can do from the UI, I tried so hard to make the api as accessible as possible so some good samaritan can create us a lovely client for mobile and people can stop asking ME about it - not an app developer, don't want to vibe-code it, get over it.
  • (At the moment of writing this) Translated in 6 community maintained languages - En, It, Es, Pl, De, Fr
Another totally legit screenshot of a legit production environment

I really enjoyed this journey so far...

...and I absolutely love the self-hosted communities around the place, Reddit, Lemmy, various Discord servers, it has been a fun year diving into this fantastic landscape as a developer rather than a consumer for once.

If you need a cool self-hosted app that's constantly being developed by someone who is happy to be paid in hugs and compliments and does it for the love of the game, you're in the right place! Feel free to check the repo/code base/issues/discussions on github and if you want to say hi join our discord server. If not just use Joplin, starts with J as well, must be good.

Repo: https://github.com/fccview/jotty
Demo: https://demo.jotty.page
Website: https://jotty.page