I’ve pumped around 10k words into Deepdwn over the last week or so. There’s a lot to like, but also some issues.
this morning I tried creating some templates. They’re great, btw, thank you. Using {{ time }} in the title: frontmatter field really rustles Deepdwn’s jimmies. I reproduced this on Ubuntu and Windows. You didn’t claim it as a feature, so I wouldn’t necessarily call this a bug, but it would turn {{ time }} from a cool little feature to a killer inclusion for me if it evaluated in titles. For example, I have a lot of calls with the same people which I take notes on, so I usually include dates in document titles because “Call 16 with Adam” doesn’t tell me enough. 25 Aug 15:30 Call with Adam, though, that’s the stuff.
in a similar vein, it might be helpful to add ctrl+click multi-selection between and within categories, tags, and directories for deeper filtration. E.g., selecting tags “Adam” and “Julie,” in category “Calls,” in folder “Work” would help in cases where “Adam” and “Julie” occur across directories, projects, and other contexts. This may only start to show its value in cases where Deepdwn manages a significant corpus over a long period of time. But I’d like to use Deepdwn to do just that.
I use a 65% keyboard. The laptop keyboard emulates a numpad with Fn, but still the create-from-template shortcut doesn’t work. I think that if you aren’t going to offer rebinding to cut down on settings you have to maintain, then a paradigm which sticks to keys 99% of laptops have, maybe Ctrl+T+Numrow, would be a better replacement that doesn’t overlap Heading collapse shortcuts
nested lists apply inconsistent spacing beneath their elements. I think they should apply the same spacing as a top level list. An example:
performance puts a significant dampener on the prospect of using Deepdwn as a daily driver over a long period of time. I don’t know if it’s Electron or what, but Deepdwn will open using 60MB of RAM and 6 hours later use 150 even if no changes are made to any files. (The starting memory usage and continuous memory creep are actually significantly worse on Windows, now that I’ve had the chance to test it there.) This is with it only pointing at a directory of 13 files totaling about 30KB. To roughly approximate what this might look like in the future, I went and tested how Deepdwn handles progressively larger numbers of files by adding in duplicates of that folder, stopping at 25MB worth of files because the app had already become inoperable. The app becomes progressively more sluggish and difficult to use. Launching takes forever, it uses staggering amounts of memory, and editing experiences significant lag.
Maybe that’s something that simply can’t be helped because of your stack, but despite how much I enjoy using Deepdwn and want to see it succeed, if someone writes prolifically in it they will simultaneously write themselves out of being able to use it. All of the finnicky stuff above is frankly second fiddle to this. I would even argue that every feature addition in your roadmap is second fiddle to this. I’m going to be following Deepdwn’s development and trying new versions as they come out, because in terms of the composition and organization experience it’s one of the better Markdown editors I’ve used. It just needs to scale. But I don’t think I can recommend it to people until that’s addressed.
