Rewrite Textpod to Go

2026-04-21 Tue 12:00:00

On <2026-04-21 Tue> I rewritten Textpod from Rust to Go.

While I'm on vacation with the new MacBook Pro M4 Pro and I have installed only bare minimum on it, I don't have Rust toolchain but do have Go. So, asked Claude to do rewrite. The only external dependency is goldmark package to render Markdown as HTMLs.

Updated Elisp helpers:

(use-package textpod
  :config
  (setq textpod-token (cadr (auth-source-user-and-password "finita.myaddr.dev" "textpod"))
        ;;textpod-url "/notes"
        textpod-url "http://localhost:3000/notes"
        ))

(let ((default-directory "~/Developer/src/github.com/velppa/textpod"))
  (async-shell-command "go build -o ~/.local/bin/textpod ." "*textpod-build*"))

(let ((default-directory "~/Developer/src/github.com/velppa/finita-la-comedia/textpod")
      (buffer-name "*textpod-server*"))
  (when (get-buffer buffer-name)
    (kill-buffer buffer-name))
  (async-shell-command (format "textpod --token %s --base-path notes" textpod-token) buffer-name))

(browse-url (format "%s?token=%s" textpod-url textpod-token))

Trying Textpod once again

2026-04-14 Tue 22:49:44

On <2026-04-13 Mon> I installed Textpod on Mac Book Pro M1 using Cargo (Rust tooling).

Good:

• Separate from notes, and from blog.
• Managing ton of markdown files for small notes that I produce - huge overkill
• I want something like this, write in org-mode, press a button (call elisp function) and heading is sent to website.
• Open source, so I can fork and improve it for my needs.
  • ☑ make a fork - ~/Developer/src/github.com/velppa/textpod
• Can make it prettier.

Open questions:

• ☑ Does it have an API? Like I would select a Org text, convert it to Markdown and send to Textpod.
  • use {M-x textpod-org-region-to-note} function
• ☑ How to increase font? Increased in the sources.
• ☑ Token access, for hosting on finita-la-comedia
• ☑ Internal Org Roam links are pasted as markdown files. So in theory, I could somehow expose them.

I ended up forking it to https://github.com/velppa/textpod and greatly improving it for my needs. You're reading notes served by Textpod v0.2.0. It is my project.

Notable changes:

• Read-only mode with token authentication: The app now supports an optional --token flag that enables authentication. When a token is set, users without the token see a read-only interface where they can only search notes. Access is granted via a ?token=X query parameter (which sets a cookie) or a Bearer token in the Authorization header. The UI dynamically adjusts based on authentication status, hiding edit/delete controls and changing the editor placeholder for unauthenticated users.
• Enhanced note management: Notes now have unique IDs based on timestamps, enabling direct access via /note/:id URLs. PUT method allows editing notes (upserting if not found).
• Subpath support: to deploy on your domain under subpath, supply --base-path notes flag. Then notes will be under /notes subpath.
• The app watches the notes file for external changes and automatically reloads.
• The link archiving feature lets users prefix URLs with + to both raw urls and Markdown-formatted.
• Special handling of links to .md files: They appear when exporting from Org-roam. These are internal links and Textpod now turns them into search by filename, effectively returning all mentions of this concept. Poor man zettelkasten import.
• UI improvement: larger fonts, footer, better code snippets for dark mode, tags on the heading.
• textpod.el: Companion Emacs package for quick sending notes to Textpod.

Later changes to setup will go into separate notes.