Folio is a pretty basic notetaking app

8 April, 2026 - Categories: notetaking apps, blogging, Zola - Tags: Folio, front matter, toml, Markdown

By Steven Rosenberg

A lot of notetaking apps are pretty basic. They don't have extensive menus, and a lot of formatting options are in the toolbar.

Folio is kind of basic, but it does two things that other basic notetaking apps don't do: Notes can have custom names and can be exported as Markdown files.

The custom names are nice. But in Folio they aren't critical because you still have to type in a file name when exporting your .md file. And if you do change a note name, there is a short yet annoying lag between the change and it appearing in the list of notes to the left.

The ability to export a file is critical for my main use case, which is writing Markdown posts with TOML front matter for static site generators such as Zola and Hugo.

Two of the things that pretty much all notetaking apps have in common are:

• The ability to work on multiple notes at the same time and easily switch between them
• Auto saving of notes

These two features are why I'm looking at notetaking apps as possible replacements for traditional text editors for the writing of blog posts. I want to streamline the writing process in terms of the computing mechanics. Are notetaking apps actually helpful in this task? I'm not sure yet.

That slightly existential question aside, Folio does these two core features as well as any app. But one thing Folio does better than most apps I've tried is the writing and display of Markdown. You could say that Folio is as much a Markdown editor as it is a notetaking app.

Folio, which I installed as a Flatpak on my Bluefin Linux system, somehow became the system's default app for handling Markdown files. That's probably not an accident — or not much of one, anyway.

Most of the basic Markdown formatting — headings, bold, italic, strikethrough, links and code blocks — can be accessed from the toolbar at the bottom of the app.

For those who care about such things (including me), Folio is a native desktop app written in the Vala programming language, which is a common (or at least encouraged) language that is object-oriented yet generages C code and uses the GObject type system. It is meant to be a close fit with the GNOME desktop environment.

Recommended install methods for Folio are Flatpak, Snap and AppImage. And it's a true open-source app under the GPL 3 license.

One thing I like in a notetaking app, very much aside from how well it allows me to write blog posts, is the ability to add a checkbox function to to-do lists. This is my second requirement in a notes app, and I'm willing to use two apps, one for blogging and another for to-do lists.

Folio doesn't do the checkboxes, even with the usual Markdown, which I believe is:

- [ ]

It renders Markdown so well that I'm surprised this isn't a feature. There's an issue for it in GitHub, but it hasn't been added to the app.

And one bug keeps coming up. When switching between notes, often one will display with only one line in it, even though it's longer. Continuing to toggle between the notes resolves the issue. It's a bit unsettling. I don't want to lose any work, though it hasn't come to that yet. I haven't quite figured out the pattern, which would help me avoid it.

I'll have to check out the GitHub issues to see if anybody else has noticed.

It could be https://github.com/toolstack/Folio/issues/300, but it's more likely https://github.com/toolstack/Folio/issues/293, and the project hasn't cut a release since before it was fixed.

Why hasn't there been a release in almost a year? I don't know.