A lightweight note-taking app built with Go + HTMX, featuring nested pages, templates, shared spaces, and OCR to make scanned PDFs searchable. The web app uses responsive design to make it scale to desktop or mobile.
Comments
peterwoodman•2mo ago
Hi HN! I’m the creator of Panto and wanted to share why I built it.
I was having a hard time finding a simple replacement for Evernote where I could keep my notes organized and make scanned PDFs searchable. There are tools that do this, but none that felt simple or fast enough. At the same time, my software team was looking for a Confluence replacement. Markdown would have been enough for us, and we never needed the heavy “wiki” layer. That’s why Panto includes shared spaces for team documentation but keeps everything much simpler than a full wiki.
Panto is built with Go + HTMX and focuses on speed, minimalism, and predictable performance. It uses server-rendered HTML with small sprinkles of interactivity via HTMX, and no frontend framework. Notes are stored in a nested tree with no depth limit, revision history can be scrubbed through with a timeline-style UI, and there’s a lightweight server-side OCR pipeline so PDFs become searchable.
Most of the time I write plain Markdown pages, but I added templates for cases where structured, repeatable data is useful. Templates are composed of typed fields (text, numbers, checkboxes, files, etc.). Unlike an object-based note tool like Notion, where you build structure as you go, Panto templates are designed to be defined up front when you know the shape of your content.
I’d really appreciate feedback on the architecture, performance, and any rough edges you encounter. Happy to answer questions about how it works internally.
peterwoodman•2mo ago
I was having a hard time finding a simple replacement for Evernote where I could keep my notes organized and make scanned PDFs searchable. There are tools that do this, but none that felt simple or fast enough. At the same time, my software team was looking for a Confluence replacement. Markdown would have been enough for us, and we never needed the heavy “wiki” layer. That’s why Panto includes shared spaces for team documentation but keeps everything much simpler than a full wiki.
Panto is built with Go + HTMX and focuses on speed, minimalism, and predictable performance. It uses server-rendered HTML with small sprinkles of interactivity via HTMX, and no frontend framework. Notes are stored in a nested tree with no depth limit, revision history can be scrubbed through with a timeline-style UI, and there’s a lightweight server-side OCR pipeline so PDFs become searchable.
Most of the time I write plain Markdown pages, but I added templates for cases where structured, repeatable data is useful. Templates are composed of typed fields (text, numbers, checkboxes, files, etc.). Unlike an object-based note tool like Notion, where you build structure as you go, Panto templates are designed to be defined up front when you know the shape of your content.
I’d really appreciate feedback on the architecture, performance, and any rough edges you encounter. Happy to answer questions about how it works internally.