org-noter: I'm an official maintainer!

May 22, 2023 2 minutes read

I haven’t contributed to open source software much until last year. It’s been an interesting and rewarding process.

My first large contribution was last year when I released my scheduling package for Emacs, org-hyperscheduler. Later in 2022 I found a fantastic package for taking notes, org-noter.

When I dicovered org-noter in the summer of 2022, it was not actively maintained. The last update was at the end of 2019. I asked if anyone wanted to collaborate on a fork on github and made a post on reddit.

The first feature I wanted to add to org-noter was highlighting. I made a youtube video about it and posted it in /r/emacs and /r/orgmode. Around that time, Peter Mao reached out to me. He has been using org-noter extensively and wanted to collaborate on maintaining it. We spent some time chatting about what our goals are for the project.

Since then we have:

added precise highlighting to PDF mode
standardized the note taking shortcuts
fixed a few bugs
added unit tests
added a continuous integration workflow (via github actions).

The biggest change has been taking over maintenance from the original author, Gonçalo Santos. Both myself and Peter have tried contacting him via various means with no success. The goal was to continue updating org-noter’s current users via MELPA. In the end Peter contacted MELPA admins and they have assigned the ownership to us.

The feedback from the existing community has been positive.

Not only am I “scratching my own itch” but I’m also giving back to the OSS community. I’ve been enjoying the open source development process. Though “The Cathedral and Bazaar” is controversial, there is a lot of truth in it. org-noter is growing and becoming better through no effort of a centralized authority. Rather, people are contributing to it in a decentralized fashion.