Improved paste in tables + other minor ideas

[the-moog]

I just came across this project. I've been looking for a decent well designed note taking, cross platform, remote hosted and secure note app for a while. I started with one of the early web based ones "EverNote", I think it was until they wanted to hold my data to ransom so I binned it and I went to OneNote, which tbh is actually quite good. Until M$ decided to turn it into a web-only thing, refuse to make it cross platform, demand you log into it and start mining it for data. So after getting a QNAP NAS drive I moved to Notes Station, pre-built into it, but found it to be terrible and outdated. So I have, for a long time, tried many packages but they all seem to promise more than they deliver, or are bait towards some sort of lock in. To often I find Open Source projects that are abandonware, unfinished or unmaintained, which is sad. Choosing AGPL for this is perfect as it provides people considering adopting it and/or contributing the surety that it can't become a liability at some point in the future. This is important for a note taking app as it is far more than a 'word processor'. Instead is a digital home for one's thoughts, memories , aspirations and inspirations that could even surpass their own lifetime! Or as trivial and long lived as a packing list for a short vacation.

BTW I came across this app on myqnap.org, who have ported it to that platform. This will bring some excellent possibilities which I am looking forward to building! For those with a QNAP you will find myqnap.org have an amazing library of third party apps built for what is a slightly outdated and locked down Linux. Some of which work much better some of the apps available from qnap or their partners.

I love the concepts of page templates, making this feel more wiki or CMS (e.g. Wagtail) the UI is very flowing and fast, and I like and using CSS + tags (which I need to get better at now)
So I am really convinced this is the one I can live with for a long time.! Enough to consider merging my many notes from all over the place into it. So as with any project I think is going places I am happy to lend a hand if there is work to be done. But I am not a web programmer so not sure what....

The suggestion:
I'd love to see some features with table editing which I miss. So I am not suggesting the current UI is lacking or in need of improvement at a basic level. Far from that. It seems that as what is there works better than most it would probably makes a good platform for some useful editing features that would have good effort vs value. E.g. There are some other really nice ideas ergonomic UI principles in OneNote that could perhaps be emulated. Even sub-tables that auto-resize.

Just a few of OneNotes table editing UI 'hidden' usability features to consider or take inspiration from .
Pasting tabulated (anything) creates a table. Which is a huge time saver. As many websites use a hidden table mechanism it aids documenting things too. Also the UI is clever. It detects from the context, what is in the cell and where you are in a cell then either adds a new line, a new row, a new column. Selecting rows/cols and pressing delete or insert adds/removes. Pasting in the margin between a selected row column automatically formats and inserts new rows/cols. And the best one is pressing backspace/tab in tabulated data automatically joins rows and turns almost unstructured text into a table.
There is a conversion feature too when pasting tabulated data (lines and spaces, image arrays, lines and tabs, lines and semicolons, HTML, CSV) perhaps it could (again like onenote) assume that if you paste into a table, or perhaps to a convert to table that the common horizontal and vertical non single-space non word charcter(s) one note even detects if the borders are visible.