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24 votes
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Follow-up to an earlier topic I made about my hunt for a privacy-respecting notes app
after the comments in my previous topic, I proceeded to try Notesnook and Joplin after having issues with Nextcloud Notes (that I have already documented in my previous post) Notesnook ain't bad...
after the comments in my previous topic, I proceeded to try Notesnook and Joplin after having issues with Nextcloud Notes (that I have already documented in my previous post)
Notesnook ain't bad if it's your jam. I found it easy to use and quite nice U.I. the only dings against it (obviously subjective) is that it really isn't supportive of markdown in an easy way, you have to pay for it cause there's no self-hosting option and you have to pay for the ability to have more than 5 tags.
Joplin's only ding imo is just that it has no web browser interface, but beyond that, there's nothing else fuctionality-wise I can really count against it, the U.I. is rather dated but the functionality is so stable that I am more than willing to deal with a dated UI. and I can self-host using my nextcloud instance so that's a great plus in avoiding additional charge.
So I personally recommend Joplin if you don't care about a dated UI in order to avoid having to pay a subscription if you are willing to self-host.
In other news, by the time I finally imported all my Nextcloud notes to Joplin, the nextcloud Notes App had managed to wipe 60 of my notes empty. I love nextcloud and its let me do wonderful things but the notes app they have is incredibly buggy when combined with their android app and how they are trying to implement markdown support.
11 votes -
Forever ✱ Notes — A simple and scalable digital note-taking method for Apple Notes
24 votes -
Using OrgMode note and task system with Kate text editor
8 votes -
Most reliable privacy-conscious notes app?
as the title indicates, I am in search of a reliable privacy-conscious notes app, I have tried the following which have the indicated bugs that I frequently experience and make the notes app feel...
as the title indicates, I am in search of a reliable privacy-conscious notes app, I have tried the following which have the indicated bugs that I frequently experience and make the notes app feel unreliable or just too inconvenient:
- NextCloud Notes:
- https://github.com/nextcloud/notes/issues/1187
- bug is that sometimes I have to rename a note 2-3 times in the browser for it to take
- bug where the pop-up menu doesn't go away after favoriting a note
- and the nextcloud android app has its own slew of issues
- StandardNotes app: I remember the app being really buggy on Firefox to the point where I had to regularly use Brave just for that app.
32 votes -
Looking for a good note-taking app
Looking for recommendations for a multiplatform note taking app. Needs to support Windows and Android. Some things I'm looking for: Markdown support offline/local support (should be stored in an...
Looking for recommendations for a multiplatform note taking app. Needs to support Windows and Android. Some things I'm looking for:
- Markdown support
- offline/local support (should be stored in an easily accessible and movable format e.g. markdown)
- is free or only a one time fee
- Syncing (either a one time fee via app dev or built in support for GDrive or OneDrive)
- Mind mapping functionality (including linking between notes)
- flexibility to be both a knowledge base and a place to keep todo lists and general small notes
Obsidian hits most of these features but without paying $8/mo, syncing is a huge pain in the ass. I got it to sync between machines if I store my vaults in Google Drive, but I'd prefer to have them locally then synced. I don't mind paying for software, but I'm trying to avoid another monthly fee on top of everything else I'm paying for. I'm open to staying with Obsidian if I can solve the syncing issues, too.
34 votes -
What Obsidian plug-ins do you use?
It seems that Obsidian is a very popular note-taking software within the community here, so I would like to know what plugins you use for your daily workflow in Obsidian. I will start: Advanced...
It seems that Obsidian is a very popular note-taking software within the community here, so I would like to know what plugins you use for your daily workflow in Obsidian. I will start:
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Advanced Tables: Very useful for adding and managing markdown tables using simple intuitive keyboard strokes.
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Callout Manager: I tend to abuse the callout function (in my academic vault, I organize any kind of information inside a callout with the source of the info as the title), so it is good to have control of the colors for different kinds of callouts.
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Minimal Theme Settings: Nothing much to talk about. Just some eye candy to make my notes easier on the eyes. Plus, the focus mode is very good for study sessions.
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Obsidian Matrix: Allows me to organize some mathematical LaTeX code properly.
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Reading Time: Useful to grasp the length of a longer note at a quick glance.
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Recent Files: Helps me set myself around my files.
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Style Settings: Complement of "Minimal Theme Settings" to achieve maximum eye candy.
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List Callouts: I use it only in my personal projects vault. It helps me give particular emphasis to specific topics within my lists.
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Table of Contents: Useful for longer, heavily-structured notes.
Aside from that, I also have four CSS snippets:
- Align: Aligns my linked figures to the center of the page.
- Callout: Specifies the size of callouts (useful, as I mainly structure my notes inside callouts).
- Hide: Hides my "resources" folder from the Obsidian explorer (this folder contains files such as figures and PDFs that I link into my notes).
- Justify: Justifies all the text in read-mode.
18 votes -
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An update on Standard Notes early pricing and roadmap
11 votes -
Standard Notes completes penetration test and cryptography audit
14 votes -
Obsidian is now in public beta - A knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files
20 votes -
First release of my native Markdown notes app, Notementum (v0.1.0)
Screenshot I posted a few days ago about a notes app I was working on called Notementum, and I'm happy to show you the first release (0.1.0). Installation instructions are available on the Github...
I posted a few days ago about a notes app I was working on called Notementum, and I'm happy to show you the first release (0.1.0). Installation instructions are available on the Github repo: https://github.com/IvanFon/notementum
There's still lots of things I'd like to add, both big and small, and definitely a few bugs here and there, but I've been going for too long without sharing it, and I find it's best to release as early as you can to start getting feedback, and perfect it later.
One things that's missing is documentation. I'd like to start on this soon, but I'm probably not going to share this anywhere other than Tildes just yet, so this comment will do for now :)
Right now, the app only runs on Linux. I'd like to add Windows support, and it almost works, the problem is that WebKit2Gtk, the embedded web view I use to show note previews, doesn't support Windows. I'm going to explore some other options in the future, whether that's figuring out how to compile it, or allowing other preview methods (user's web browser, PDF, etc.).
The app is also very much in alpha, so you shouldn't use this for anything important, there may be bugs that can cause you to lose some of your data. If you do use this for anything, make sure you backup your notes database.
If you want to use it, here's a wall of text on usage:
Usage
The notes database is located at
~/.notes.db
. When you launch the app, it'll load it, or automatically create it if it doesn't exist. I'd eventually like to allow choosing different locations, but it's hard coded for now.The interface is fairly simple. The leftmost sidebar displays a list of notebooks, and the "middlebar" displays a list of notes. Selecting a notebook will display the notes within it in the notes list. Selecting a note will open it in the editor, which is to the right.
To create a new note, press
Escape
to focus on the searchbar above the notes list, and start typing a title. If no existing notes are found, press enter, and a note will be created with the title you entered.To rename a note, double-click on it in the notes list.
The editor has a toolbar with 4 buttons, from left-to-right:
- Toggle between editor and preview (shortcut:
Ctrl+E
) - Assign the current note's notebook
- Add an attachment
- Delete the current note
The green circle all the way to the right turns into a loading indicator when you have unsaved changes. Once you stop typing for a few seconds, your changes will be saved, and it'll switch back into a green circle.
Notebooks
Notebooks aren't created directly, they're based on what notebooks your notes are assigned to. This means that, to create a notebook, assign it to a note. To delete a notebook, just delete all the notes contained within it, or assign them to a different notebook.
Clicking on the notebook toolbar button brings up this dialog. To create a new notebook, double click on
<New notebook>
and type in a name.Attachments
The notes database also stores attachments. This means that the entirety your notes can be contained in your database. Clicking on the attachment toolbar button brings up this dialog. The toolbar allows you to upload an attachment or delete it respectively. Pressing
Insert Selected
will insert the image at your cursor in the editor (![](image.png)
).Theme
The screenshots show the app with my desktop Gtk theme, Arc Dark. On your desktop, it'll use whatever your theme is. It should look good with any Gtk theme, but at some point I may bundle Arc Dark with it.
The note preview currently has it's colours hard coded to look good with Arc Dark, so it may look a bit off on other themes. I'll try to sort that out at some point.
Planned features
- load/save database to/from different path
- Windows support
- note exports
- database encryption
- changing syntax highlighting theme
- note tags
- full-text search
- proper documentation
- more keyboard shortcuts
- integrated sync
- although you should already be able to use Git, Synthing, Dropbox, etc.
- Vim mode for editor
- maybe somehow embed a terminal to allow using vim/emacs/whatever
Boring technical stuff
The app was made with Python and Gtk+ 3. I've done this before and I really enjoy the development experience, especially with Glade to design the interface. There are still some Gtk features that I should really be using to make things simpler (GtkApplication, actions, and accelerators) that I'll be adding later.
The database uses sqlite 3. This is convenient, as it allows for storing everything in one file, and will make fast searches easier in the future. Attachments are stored as base64 directly in the database. This makes it easy to have all your notes be contained entirely in the one database, but I may have to think about a more efficient method in the future.
Markdown rendering is done using mistletoe, which has been great to use. Syntax highlighting and MathJax renderers were already available, so it was just a matter of combining both and adding custom image loading from the database, which was very easy. Mistletoe has a very easy to use API, so this was no problem.
For LaTeX math rendering, I'm using MathJax. It supports pretty much everything, which is nice, but it can take a while to load. I'm currently loading it from a CDN in a
<script>
tag, so I'm hoping once I load it from a local file it'll be a bit faster. If not, I may have to find another solution.Like I said, the app still has a few bugs that need to be fixed. If you find any problems, it would be great if you could leave a comment here or open a Github issue (or if you have any feature requests).
21 votes - Toggle between editor and preview (shortcut:
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Online markdown editors that are capable of handling loads of text
I have discovered hackmd.io a few months ago and started digitalizing my massive mess of handwritten nodes together with all the terrible notepad/word mixed notes into one big personal "wiki" of...
I have discovered hackmd.io a few months ago and started digitalizing my massive mess of handwritten nodes together with all the terrible notepad/word mixed notes into one big personal "wiki" of knowledge. But I ran into a problem. HackMd can only handle ~50k characters before starting to lag and 100k characters is the limit per note, this doesn't even fit my one summary/tips note on one programming language. Do you know any alternatives? I really like markdown, since all of the notes look clean and organized, I can insert pictures and link to websites easily, but also love to work with them online, since I have to switch between 3 computers between university, home and my laptop.
7 votes