December 29, 2025
Notion killer or native poser?
Developing a Beautiful and Performant Block Editor in Qt C++ and QML
Fast, pretty notes app ignites anti-bloat cheers and Apple vs ‘native’ drama
TLDR: Daino Notes launched a fast, “native‑like” block editor built with Qt and QML, aiming to beat bloated web tools. Comments erupted: some applaud the speed, others want KDE’s KTextEditor or Logseq‑style customization, while Apple’s Swift and PKM data standards became lightning rods—because performance and interoperability matter.
Daino Notes just dropped a hand-built block editor that ditches web bloat for speed, using Qt (a cross‑platform app toolkit) and QML (a simple way to describe interfaces). The pitch: look and feel “native,” be Notion‑style flexible, and run fast—like, allegedly 60x faster than web editors. The crowd? Loudly anti‑bloat and loving the “native‑like” swagger.
Then the comment section lit up. One camp yelled “just use KTextEditor!” kicking off the eternal “build vs borrow” slap‑fight. Another waved pom‑poms for Qt while roasting Apple for “forcing Swift,” calling it slow and gate‑kept. A veteran dropped a mini history lesson on QtWidgets vs QML, with mixed feelings about all the glue code—cue eye rolls and knowing nods.
Feature nerds showed up too. Logseq die‑hards praised the polish but insisted tags, templates, and block references beat everything, while PKM (personal knowledge management) folks begged for a shared format for tasks and dates. The funniest thread? People joking that Notion is a space heater, and dreaming of a block that’s literally a video game: “Play Doom inside your grocery list.” Whether you want clean WYSIWYG or immortal Markdown, this editor poked the hive—and the hive buzzed.
Key Points
- •The Daino Notes block editor was built from scratch using Qt C++ and QML to achieve cross-platform, native-like performance and UI.
- •The author argues Qt can deliver apps that look and behave like native software while performing well, despite not using OS-native frameworks.
- •The new editor offers WYSIWYG formatting while retaining Markdown as the underlying format, balancing usability with data longevity.
- •The block model, inspired by Notion, treats each content piece as an individual block, enabling flexible arrangement and complex embedded views.
- •The article claims significant performance advantages over web-based editors, stating MarkText is 60× slower and uses six times more RAM than Daino Notes.