If you search 'Markdown' on HackerNews, it'd seem like the 'market' for markdown editors is fragmented: there isn't a single dominant editor yet. I think every week there's a new editor posted (Joplin is an exception given that it's been here for a while). Why is that the case?
Joplin isn't a Markdown editor, it's a note taking and todo list app. It just happens to use Markdown as its entry format. It seems like it's a "Markdown editor" in the same way as reddit or github.
I think it is because each comes with its own opinionated workflow, and missing features. Each has a way of writing markdown/connecting notes that is novel, which means each other option is missing that feature.
A take away from this scenario might be that this design space is wanting for a meta-editor. Some tool which allows feature creation in the same context as these markdown/note tools. An analogy might be that this meta-editor is to digital note keeping as racket is to programming languages.
Of course all the obvious requirements apply. Has to be usable out of the box, has to just work, has successfully convey it's ability to be changed to the end user.
I think emacs is such a solution, there are no features in the list of hn posts under the search "markdown" that it doesn't have. But emacs is missing all the requirements. It is not usable out of the box.
I think this meta editor could best be built on top of emacs, but this will require a lot of work. I have been playing around with this idea for a couple of years now and it's slow going but fun to think about.
I've been looking at the ProseMirror as a way of building this meta-editor that could have plug-and-play components. The issue is, although the library is open-source, there hasn't been many open-sourced components that people have built. Ideally, we could go one step forward and abstract away the npm library; then everybody could build their custom editor by mixing components. One editor that sort of does this is StandardNotes but I haven't tried building something for it yet.
The reason is that existing solutions are inadequate/not-powerful-enough, so the moment a developer is limited by what the app has to offer there's a chance a new note-taking app gets developed to solve that specific need.
I'm looking for an Evernote alternative since long. Evernote is one of my favourite applications, but I fear the moment when Amazon or Google or Microsoft buys it like Fitbit or Nest. It is going to happen, and I put more and more info into that app.
I'm definitely going to try this and I truly hope it is good enough for me.
I'm not sure the best response to "I'm worried the cloud service I use might get bought and changed" is recommending another VC funded cloud service. But I've heard good things about Notion as a product too.
I found that Notion had great features, but I found it to just be terribly slow in general. The app takes upwards of 25 seconds to open on my phone, and even on my computer where the app opens quickly, I still can't flick back and forth between different notes without the app trying to re-sync with the server and slowing everything down.
I'm currently using Typora and have it set up to automatically open to a certain folder and autosave. That folder is a git repository, and in cron, I simply have an hourly task that stages all files, commits, and pushes.
This might not be an ideal solution, but if you find an editor you really like, its an easy way to add git and backup to your notes.
Have you considered Emacs + Org-mode? Works wherever Emacs works (Linux, Mac) and there are apps for Android and iOS. Org files are basically text files that you can commit to git or sync via Google drive, Dropbox, OneDrive etc. Not exactly markdown but GitHub renders org file pretty well.
After trying out multiple note taking apps this is what I settled on. You can use it as simple as a note taking app or configure it to do lots of complicated things like managing your to-dos, appointments, agendas. And my favorite feature is inline code-block that I can execute.
I spent years in the same position we've all been in, searching and hoping for the perfect note taking app to boost my productivity, have a "second brain", write down my fleeting inspirations, etc. etc.
After finding Emacs last year, I feel like I've been under a spell my whole professional life that's been broken. I'm a little embarrassed of the time I've spent griping and pining for the perfect note app. It took me far less time to learn Emacs than it did to try out the 20+ todo and notebook apps on the market.
To all who are still on the hunt: there is no perfect app, and we're all kidding ourselves. You're looking for someone to give you a fish. This is just text we're talking about, it's easy enough to learn to wield it, manipulate it, and organize it, and soon you become the man who has been taught to fish on his own. Plus, when you have the epiphany of how much more quickly you can manipulate text with the control of Emacs and/or Vim, you'll wonder how you spent so much of your life in typing in software without these capabilities.
Learning Emacs has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my computing journey, I highly recommend checking out a well-configured distribution like Spacemacs.
I started using (and subscribed to) Inkdrop[1] after recommendations here and have been very happy with it. Yes, it's $5 a month, but it automatically syncs (encrypted locally first), and has a way of doing full local directory backup that you could sync with github. The the editor is really nicely done (full github-flavor syntax highlighting too).
I'm using clients for Mac, Android and linux (manjaro) and all work well. There are also clients for the other major platforms.
One of the things I really like about it is I can do a screenshot on both Mac & linux, saving to the clipboard rather than a file, and paste it directly into an editor and inkdrop handles everything, including creating a file and corresponding markup. And that all syncs too.
After years of searching I’ve pretty much settled on one note-taking app: Apple Notes. Quite unexpected to me as well because I started off just to sort of “cache” random notes in it before sorting them out in OneNote. Then I found myself almost stopped using OneNote. It’s just ubiquitous enough when you have a few extra PC devices, (unlike say, Bear) and versatile enough so it’s not limited to texts like Notational Velocity or SimpeNote, and quick and easy enough so I never have to wait for launching or syncing like with OneNote. It’s not enjoy-sparking to use and the text is a bit cramped. But it gets stuff done and I forget about it most of the time. So it’s just almost perfect for me.
I was a big Apple Notes user, but I've read horror stories about losing notes in upgrades, which bothers me. Exporting notes for backup is tedious, too. I've switched to Notion for notes and it's been excellent minus one thing: it's slow to start. Otherwise I haven't really missed Apple Notes.
The only thing that makes me keep looking for an alternative to Apple Notes is search.
1. You can't restrict search to just one folder.
2. You can't use tags (would be better than folders) and search by them. I have a partial work around (I just type #tag and search for that) but it does't work that well -- the search correctly filters for "#foo" but shows "foo" highlighted in the sidebar...and doesn't scroll to the match.
A small amount of additional functionality would pretty much nuke any need for Evernote or any of these other apps (though exporting is...tedious).
I have nothing but good things to say about Quiver except on the rare occasion and even then I would describe it as performing ok in that regard. It just gets it done and it’s full of features but not too fancy.
Probably the only thing that’s so-so is search but worst case I have to check a couple of notes to find the right one.
I really tried to use Quiver for almost a year. I converted to it from Org-mode in Emacs. The reason for converting was to get better typography and layout. I really want to get header rendered in different sizes, bold really looking bold etc. Quiver looked really nice ans pleasing. But the rendering engine in Quiver is flaky. Headings of the same type end up having different sizes for example. I also never felt a benefit of the cell concept. Instead often accidentally creating new cells that had to be fixed.
I've now moved to Bear, and the experience is much better. Yes, it stores notes in a DB, not as files. But it is a standard, open SQL DB you can talk to if needed. Bear renders markdown nicely, has nice themes. And syncs between devices quick. I now read and write journal notes etc on desktop, iPad and mobile. And Bear supports inline images. This, together with nice rendering of quotes, code etc makes making complex notes possible. If I only could change the caret to a non-blinking, block everything would be great. Notes in Bear really are beutiful and pleasant to write and read.
I’m actually currently getting a POC built out for a note taking web app that’s entirely focused on capturing/tagging/filtering, because of these exact reasons. The idea of folders in all note taking apps is just not efficient, and doesn’t leverage the power of searching and filtering solutions.
My app is intended for multi tasking individuals.
@iamdchuk is my twitter handle if you want to connect and check it out soon. I plan to start using the app this week for work myself.
Apple Notes is wonderful until you decide to replace your MacBook with anything else and attempt to get by with the painfully slow iCloud web version of Notes. The same goes for Apple Reminders.
That's true. But here in China Android is much much more aggressively spied and surveilled by both manufacturers and government I'm more than happy to stay with Apple.
I make a folder called "notes" on any given machine and make a new text document inside of it when I have a note I want to make. I know this isn't clever and "it doesn't scale!!!" but I have multiple computers and it's easy to merge the notes into a single backup, and I always know where to go for the notes I take.
If I need to share a note, I use a github gist but it's also just a linear text storage so I'll prolly replace it with something else at some point...
Even if you don't mind the scalability issues, having to deal with possible conflicts if the same note was modified in different places, and barebone UI with no attachments, consider the importance of metadata:
- info on where the note came from (that's why I like web-clip-ability)
- note history and possibly versions
- tags are really great for categorizing and quick/efficient search, etc.
Simplenote would work pretty well in this case. Barebones third party clients for it on all major desktops OSes are available that allow usage of file system.
I'm looking to move away from Notes because it has a serious bug (possibly only when using Exchange, I'm not sure) where notes longer than about 3 pages get truncated without warning. I found this out the hard way when my "big list of ideas to work on later" note turned out to be missing about a year's worth of data.
It's had this bug for several years across a number of versions. I now have a huge buffer of sacrificial text at the bottom of any important note, which I then split if part of that buffer goes missing.
I replaced Evernote with Joplin a year or so ago and am pretty happy. It's a little rough around the edges, but it works great and is actively updated. And all my data is stored where I want it to be, with no monthly bill, and no one trying shove "chat" or "enterprise" features down my throat.
Also, as the desktop client is a JavaScript app, it was relatively easy to go in and change a few things that I wanted tweaked. I hate MarkDown with a passion, so I just turned off all that stuff in the toolbar and use it as a plain text notepad that syncs. Works great. (At some point I need to make the effort to figure out the options dialogs they have and submit a pull request where this can be turned off/on permanently.)
I do wish it would clean up the weird note/todo item duality (at least in the options). You can treat a note as a todo item, so the list of notes acts as your list of todos. Or you can just use a note and put the todo items in it (which is what I do). I just don't think the folder interface works well for the todo item paradigm.
Anyways, highly recommended if you're still spending money on Evernote and don't use any advanced features. If you're using web clips or other stuff, someone else will have to chime in.
I moved to Joplin from Evernote a little over a year ago. It has had ongoing development and new features being added the entire time. The development is very iterative, and functionality comes before fashion, but the UI has been getting improved too.
The backup/sync system is great. Fully encrypted and numerous cloud configuration options. I use it with Fastmail’s $5/mo. service and it’s very easy to setup.
The iOS app could use some more improvements but far better than not having one at all.
Overall Joplin is highly recommended because of it’s compatibility, flexibility, privacy, and no-frills functionality.
I’m 20 days into my trial of DevonThink and I’m getting close to pulling the trigger. I’m using it as a hybrid read-later pocket replacement + personal knowledge database. The combination of “See Also” auto suggestions for inbox sorting and deep search capabilities is everything I had been wanting in a PKM suite. I wish they had extended the auto-sorting/suggestions to the tags feature, it’s my favorite feature of Pocket.
This subpackage called Webclipper would be cool for parsing articles like Instapaper but instead of a better web version it saves to a markdown file than opens in Vim (or similar).
For some reason I like those old long readme.txt files from the 1990s. The ones formatted with max 80-120 characters wide per line, black background, etc.
I haven't tried this one yet. But the biggest problem with that approach is the links typically don't work, nor will citations render properly for Wikipedia. So maybe it's preferable using Lynx or w/e just for long-term reading or articles on news sites with disaster web design.
I would recommend https://standardnotes.org/ after trying all other (OneNote, Boostnote, QOwnNotes, etc.) note taking SWs. Encrypted linked storage (S3, Dropbox, ...) for files, encrypted notes, multiplatform, multiple editors (code, 2FA, markdown, spreadsheets, your own!, ...) & can be self hosted. Easy (also encrypted) backups. I only miss the diagrams tool (like draw.io) or handwriting (touch/pen) support.
I was a Standard Notes user, including a premium plan, but recently switched to Joplin and I've been very happy with it.
I like Standard Notes' no-nonsense business model, with the downside that the free version is heavily feature-crippled (not even a Markdown editor, just plain text).
The Standard Notes server is self-hostable, but it requires a dedicated backend server [0] which was more hassle than I wanted to deal with. Joplin integrates much more nicely with Syncthing for self-hosted but still peer-to-peer replication.
The reason to use Standard Notes, IMO, is the zero-knowledge encryption. I’ll check out Joplin and the others I’m learning about in this thread but I’m happy with Standard Notes at the moment though.
Yes. There is a CloudLink extension for saving the history & notes itself I think, which supports Dropbox, Google Drive & OneDrive. Backup can be also sent daily by the email. And then there is a FileSafe for files - you will simply generate the key (there's a button for it) and upload you files, which will be offline encrypted and then uploaded to your configured cloud storage - Dropbox, Google Drive, WebDAV, AWS S3. The size is currently limited to 50MB (because of the offline encryption).
Joplin supports Latex-like equations. And Typora and Mark Text have inline Latex support, but they're only on desktop. So there's not really any mobile & desktop solution that has Latex and Markdown as a priority feature.
> Recognition data - Evernote images, in particular scanned (or photographed) documents have recognition data associated with them. It is the text that Evernote has been able to recognise in the document. This data is not preserved when the note are imported into Joplin. However, should it become supported in the search tool or other parts of Joplin, it should be possible to regenerate this recognition data since the actual image would still be available.
This is the feature that has me locked in to Evernote and no one else seems to have. I'll be watching this repo and jump over as soon as it becomes supported.
I recommend Ulysses app due it ability to sort notes by drag and drop an export multiple notes as one document. Didn’t find this functionality so far in any other app. Only minus is Ulysses it is fact that runs only Apple devices
I checked out the CLI for Joplin and it's a multi-pane environment with a command line at the bottom. This is also true of Vim, especially if you like panes, or "splits". For those of us hooked on Vim (I am silent on its merits), there is a state of flow that is quite pleasant, and you find that you want that flow wherever you can get it. The arrow keys just are j,k,l,; for example, and just lifting a hand from the home row position feels awkward if you're in deep enough. :)
Todo.txt [1] is not VIM-only, but text-based and simple. I use and enjoy both the Android and CLI clients, but since it's text-based and (typically) Dropbox synced, you could feel free to edit with VIM, which I do from time-to-time.
I've been using [vim-pad](https://github.com/fmoralesc/vim-pad) with Dropbox and it's been wonderful. It just saves markdown files to a directory so you could swap Dropbox for Syncthing or what have you.
I felt that Evernote was becoming increasingly constraining and slow/flaky, so after trying a few alternatives (text files/dirs, SimpleNote, Apple Notes, BoostNotes, Zim, etc), I've made a leap of faith to Joplin.
My requirements: multi-platform, multi-device, auto-sync (more than 2 devices in free ver.), tags, webclip-ability, preferably markdown format with code rendering. Text diagramming such as PlantUML is a big plus. The idea of owning my notes is very appealing.
My early attempts at synchronizing encrypted notes over OneDrive experienced repeated hiccups (stopped syncing for no apparent reason), so currently trying without encryption. Win10 and Android clients seem to chug along just fine, but the Linux client shows weird errors in the log - trying to hunt down the root cause.
The fact that Joplin is WIP and open source is encouraging. I'd like to be able to have separate DBs, e.g. for personal and business use.
ADDED: forgot to mention that the lack of dark mode on Windows EN client was a constant source of irritation.
More on color schemes: in addition to Joplin including a few built-in themes, the appearance of rendered pages can be adjusted via CSS. Playing with it felt more liberating for me than I care to admit.
Sadly my experience with the Android app has been less than inpressive, with a memory leak related to React that has yet to be patched, and slows down the keyboard system-wide.
Could you provide a link to the memory leak bug report? I’d like to know more and cannot find one that isn’t closed or doesn’t affect a small subset of devices under particular conditions.
I can second Notion! I've switched over from Notability + Google Keep + an overstuffed bookmark folder, and it's been working great to keep my notes/projects/shopping lists together.
I just switched from Notion (and Evernote, Google Keep) to Joplin, and currently I'm quite satisfied with its offering.
Some cons I felt while using Notion:
- Mandatory to log in using a Google account is a _very_ big pushback for me - I need it to work all the time offline.
- E2EE encryption? I don't think it's there. It's something I strongly desire for privacy reason.
- It's a freemium subscription modal, I have nothing against it, but imho, completely free one is of course better
- It's not open sourced, but Joplin is.
Take a look at Standard Notes. It can be self hosted and has E2EE. It's not quite a replacement for some features but there is a web clipping add-on in development.
Note that it is paid, the company has a longevity statement around that.
I use Zim for work use. I find I don't actually need a mobile app since I don't really need to take anything more than temporary notes on my phone.
The nice thing is it uses 17mb ram so I can leave it running all the time which is a helpful thing since all the other electron apps keep my laptop at 18gb memory usage
I use it all the time - it's great but mostly for lists such as TODO, etc. - it is very convenient for syncing across devices where I login with my G. account. My notes are usually longer articles, often with images, tables, diagrams, code snippets, etc.
To add to the list for those willing to try alternatives, here is a multiplatform markdown note taking application I've been using for a while: https://tamlok.github.io/vnote/en_us/
Disclosure: I work at a competitor note-taking app called Notable [0], so I'm somewhat biased.
I've made a comparison table [1] comparing Joplin and other popular note-taking apps, you may find it useful.
Joplin could have been my go-to note-taking app, but IMO they made a few bad design decisions and there are few things I really don't like about it, maybe listing some of them from my point of view could be useful either to Joplin's maintainers or potential users:
- Notebooks are indefinitely nestable but tags are not, why?
- Joplin's icon is SO out of proportions, it looks way out of place in my dock, it may sound silly but I might not have used it just because of this alone.
- There's a button for opening the current note via a third-party editor, this is quite powerful because it means you can use all the fancy plugins and capabilities your general purpose text editor has, but why are all metadata about a particular note stored who-knows-where rather than putting them in the note itself as YAML front matter so I could have edited them directly too?
- Attachments are stored on disk as plain files, that's great because now you can find them and edit them without going through Joplin if necessary, but those files are named with unique ids so actually finding the files you're looking for will be a problem.
- And why not storing all notes on disk directly too, so that you could have done fancy things like running a global search and replace on them, run git on them...? Storing them in a database is generally better for performance, but you can do both.
- Notes have a separate title field, why wouldn't I want to write my titles in an H1 heading in the Markdown content directly instead? The default notes look a bit silly because of this, coming effectively with 2 identical titles.
- The UI looks pretty ugly, there are too many buttons, the interface isn't properly responsive (at some widths the toolbar gets cropped, labels spawn multiple lines etc.), useless things like the "Watching..." label are displayed etc.
- The database location is not customizable, if it were you would have the ability to store multiple notes collections separately, and you could achieve synchronization for free just by putting your database inside Dropbox for instance.
- Some shortcuts are weird and/or missing, for example there's a shortcut for cycling between previewing, editing, and the split editor. That might be useful sometimes, but don't people just want to toggle between editing and previewing or between previewing and the split-editor most of the times? There should be shortcuts for doing that instead.
There's been some discussion about this here [0], the TL;DR is that as developing it has become my full-time job, and I'm trying to make it sustainable/profitable, releasing everything as open-source comes with some risks that may go against that objective.
If your opinion is biased, as you said, why do you even share it? Just be honest that you want to advertise your (commercial) product.
Your "comparison" is just a long list of what you think if bad about Joplin, as if there could not be a single good thing about it - there's nothing neutral or fair about any of it. You're just denigrating competition and advertising your own stuff.
I guess it's to be expected from someone whose tagline is "the app that doesn't suck", yet heavily copying features from all these other apps, which presumably, suck.
> If your opinion is biased, as you said, why do you even share it?
I think I may have something interesting to say given that I'm writing one of these apps myself, and mentioning for example that in Joplin tags aren't indefinitely nestable but notebooks are is not like I'm making stuff up, if I weren't writing one of those note-taking apps that wouldn't really change that fact.
> Just be honest that you want to advertise your (commercial) product.
Partially my comment was prompted by the opportunity to target new potential users, i.e. people reading this thread are people interested in Joplin, which is an app very similar to mine.
Partially I want to share what I think about Joplin from my perspective.
> Your "comparison" is just a long list of what you think if bad about Joplin
Well, I started my sentence with: "Joplin could have been my go-to note-taking app", meaning there's a lot about it I like, mentioning that I like that it supports Markdown is not an interesting point to make I think, plus I'm actually praising some things, like the ability to edit a note in a third-party editor, is mentioning an ever more powerful way to implement this (i.e. notes stores as plain files on disk with metadata in the front matter) not interesting?
And not all the things I don't like about Joplin are even solved in Notable, some are though, obviously, or Joplin would have been my note-taking app too.
> as if there could not be a single good thing about it
As I said that sentence started with "Joplin could have been my go-to note-taking app", which I think implicitly says a lot of good things.
> there's nothing neutral or fair about any of it.
Ok, what's not fair or neutral about stating the fact that tags aren't indefinitely nestable?
Or maybe your point is that since I'm working for a competitor app I can't talk about this?
> You're just denigrating competition and advertising your own stuff.
I don't think that's fair to say, obviously I wouldn't have made my own note-taking app if I thought Joplin didn't have any important shortcomings.
Would my comment have been fairer if I didn't mention I'm developing Notable? I mean I'm a person who tried Joplin and there were some things I didn't like, how am I supposed to be talking about these things then? How would you have phrased my comment?
> I guess it's to be expected from someone whose tagline is "the app that doesn't suck", yet heavily copying features from all these other apps, which presumably, suck.
If the very first calculator did only additions it would have sucked, if any later calculators _also_ did additions that doesn't imply that they must suck as well.
Plus that's kind of a cheeky tagline that's meant to say the following: I tried other note-taking apps, I couldn't find one that I really liked, so in this sense they sucked for me.
Like if you absolutely need a web-clipper I guess Notable would suck and Joplin would not suck _for you_.
I gotta say I’m a lot less interested in trying Notable when the owner shows up in a competitor’s thread, lists a wall of what appear to be minor nitpicks without describing their own app at all and says “here try my app, that I’ve recently switched from open to closed source!”
Well everybody has his own preferences, what are nitpicks for you may not be nitpicks for me, and btw I'm prefacing the list by saying that Joplin could have been my go-to app actually, implying: "if it only got some of the things I'm mentioning, which are relevant to me, right, according to my preferences".
I don't think it would have been right to make specifically a comparison between Joplin and Notable in a thread about Joplin, in fact my app also has some of the issues I'm mentioning, not all of them of course or I would be a Joplin user now, what does it matter what my app does to the points I'm making? I'm talking about Joplin as a person who tired it.
The link to my app is kinda there for people who might be interested in that, which is also one of the reasons I made the post in the first place, but I would have written something regardless if I'd be passionate about these note-taking apps without writing one myself.
Would my post have seemed fairer if I didn't mention I'm working in Notable? Or like am I disallowed to talk about other note-taking apps now that I'm developing one and I know something about them? Like, given that I develop Notable and there a few things I don't like about Joplin which didn't allow me to become a Joplin user, how do you think I should have phrased my post?
I've replaced both Evernote and my markdown file hierarchy with Joplin (on linux and windows, trying android next), and love it!
Only thing I really miss is the ability to have completely separate instances. While it's theoretically possible to script different configs, they can't be used simultaneously.
Syncing works well both through Syncthing and Google Drivw. Haven't tried syncing through OneDrive, and IIRC the docs had some warning about it.
Off topic, but anyone else annoyed by these walls of contributor avatars in READMEs popular in the JS ecosystem? Occasionally they only include a handful of project members, with roles, so it could be mildly useful, but more often than not it’s a pointless list of just avatar and handle of everyone who ever fixed a typo, and if I want to see the list I’d better click on “contributors” which is built into every GitHub project. To me, this seems to be a manifestation of today’s front end devs’ utmost disrespect for people’s bandwidth.
Ironically, this README loads more than a hundred images but I can’t even find a desktop screenshot.
The avatar list I guess is a way to thank the contributors, and it's at the bottom of the readme so shouldn't be a big annoyance for most readers. There's a screenshot of the desktop app at the top of the readme.
Yeah it's pretty annoying and unnecessary thanks to the Contributors tab on github. Plus, imagine the commit spam, everytime someone new contributes they have to add themselves or someone else has to. That might even deter potential contributors from wanting to contribute if adding themselves to that list is a requirement.
One great aspect is that joplin supports iOS 8+. My Ex needed to write a big dissertation that she just couldn't make progress on (unsurprisingly). Her work laptop is too bulky to carry around every day unfortunately.
So at some point I figured she could use my old ipad mini 1 with a size-fitted logitech "ultrathin keyboard" (that magnetically holds onto the ipad, making it one piece for storage) that I impulse bought and never used.
So hardware was there, but looking for a markdown editor that supported sync and that old device + her windows laptop was not fruitful. Except well, short story: joplin is awesome for that.
She could use the ipad to write a few minutes here and there during transit and was able to complete it.
The markdown file is then converted to latex/pdf using pandoc + pandoc-citeproc (for citations using a bibtex-file).
Support for antiquated iOS versions is rare (making the ipad mini 1 useless in many cases although it still appears to be a capable device) even though many apps don't seem to have a need for higher versions. I suspect that most apps use frameworks that have a version cutoff to reduce complexity if that even makes sense.
This doesnt just apply to if the application was sold, but if it is used in a commercial environment, I.E. If you plan on using it at work, this would likely be considered commercial use.
I use OneNote, and it works beautifully. I've used it for years. I use it for planning events, I use it for meal prepping, I use it for just about anything. It's like a second memory bank for me.
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[ 0.33 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadStill searching for a markdown editor that runs on both iOS & Linux and does auto save & auto sync.
You don’t even need the same editor. You can use one on Linux, one on iOS and another on Windows.
In the discussion above saw many good suggestions, none that fitted the requirements.
A take away from this scenario might be that this design space is wanting for a meta-editor. Some tool which allows feature creation in the same context as these markdown/note tools. An analogy might be that this meta-editor is to digital note keeping as racket is to programming languages.
Of course all the obvious requirements apply. Has to be usable out of the box, has to just work, has successfully convey it's ability to be changed to the end user.
I think emacs is such a solution, there are no features in the list of hn posts under the search "markdown" that it doesn't have. But emacs is missing all the requirements. It is not usable out of the box.
I think this meta editor could best be built on top of emacs, but this will require a lot of work. I have been playing around with this idea for a couple of years now and it's slow going but fun to think about.
iA Writer: Write something eloquent
[1] https://prosemirror.net/ [2] https://standardnotes.org/extensions
I'm definitely going to try this and I truly hope it is good enough for me.
Is there anything like that?
How hard would it be to extend joplin to write a service driver to sync via Git(-hub / -lab / your own server)?
https://boostnote.io/
https://medium.com/boostnote/boostnote-mobile-how-to-synchro...
This might not be an ideal solution, but if you find an editor you really like, its an easy way to add git and backup to your notes.
After trying out multiple note taking apps this is what I settled on. You can use it as simple as a note taking app or configure it to do lots of complicated things like managing your to-dos, appointments, agendas. And my favorite feature is inline code-block that I can execute.
I spent years in the same position we've all been in, searching and hoping for the perfect note taking app to boost my productivity, have a "second brain", write down my fleeting inspirations, etc. etc.
After finding Emacs last year, I feel like I've been under a spell my whole professional life that's been broken. I'm a little embarrassed of the time I've spent griping and pining for the perfect note app. It took me far less time to learn Emacs than it did to try out the 20+ todo and notebook apps on the market.
To all who are still on the hunt: there is no perfect app, and we're all kidding ourselves. You're looking for someone to give you a fish. This is just text we're talking about, it's easy enough to learn to wield it, manipulate it, and organize it, and soon you become the man who has been taught to fish on his own. Plus, when you have the epiphany of how much more quickly you can manipulate text with the control of Emacs and/or Vim, you'll wonder how you spent so much of your life in typing in software without these capabilities.
Learning Emacs has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my computing journey, I highly recommend checking out a well-configured distribution like Spacemacs.
I'm using clients for Mac, Android and linux (manjaro) and all work well. There are also clients for the other major platforms.
One of the things I really like about it is I can do a screenshot on both Mac & linux, saving to the clipboard rather than a file, and paste it directly into an editor and inkdrop handles everything, including creating a file and corresponding markup. And that all syncs too.
[1] https://inkdrop.app/
https://github.com/notable/notable
https://notable.md/
Basically, you have your notes in a git repo, and this app keeps committing the changes to your remote repo.
If you feel adventurous, you can try it here: https://github.com/tanin47/git-notes (still in early alpha)
1. You can't restrict search to just one folder.
2. You can't use tags (would be better than folders) and search by them. I have a partial work around (I just type #tag and search for that) but it does't work that well -- the search correctly filters for "#foo" but shows "foo" highlighted in the sidebar...and doesn't scroll to the match.
A small amount of additional functionality would pretty much nuke any need for Evernote or any of these other apps (though exporting is...tedious).
Probably the only thing that’s so-so is search but worst case I have to check a couple of notes to find the right one.
I've now moved to Bear, and the experience is much better. Yes, it stores notes in a DB, not as files. But it is a standard, open SQL DB you can talk to if needed. Bear renders markdown nicely, has nice themes. And syncs between devices quick. I now read and write journal notes etc on desktop, iPad and mobile. And Bear supports inline images. This, together with nice rendering of quotes, code etc makes making complex notes possible. If I only could change the caret to a non-blinking, block everything would be great. Notes in Bear really are beutiful and pleasant to write and read.
https://bear.app/
My app is intended for multi tasking individuals.
@iamdchuk is my twitter handle if you want to connect and check it out soon. I plan to start using the app this week for work myself.
If I need to share a note, I use a github gist but it's also just a linear text storage so I'll prolly replace it with something else at some point...
- info on where the note came from (that's why I like web-clip-ability)
- note history and possibly versions
- tags are really great for categorizing and quick/efficient search, etc.
It's had this bug for several years across a number of versions. I now have a huge buffer of sacrificial text at the bottom of any important note, which I then split if part of that buffer goes missing.
Also, as the desktop client is a JavaScript app, it was relatively easy to go in and change a few things that I wanted tweaked. I hate MarkDown with a passion, so I just turned off all that stuff in the toolbar and use it as a plain text notepad that syncs. Works great. (At some point I need to make the effort to figure out the options dialogs they have and submit a pull request where this can be turned off/on permanently.)
I do wish it would clean up the weird note/todo item duality (at least in the options). You can treat a note as a todo item, so the list of notes acts as your list of todos. Or you can just use a note and put the todo items in it (which is what I do). I just don't think the folder interface works well for the todo item paradigm.
Anyways, highly recommended if you're still spending money on Evernote and don't use any advanced features. If you're using web clips or other stuff, someone else will have to chime in.
The backup/sync system is great. Fully encrypted and numerous cloud configuration options. I use it with Fastmail’s $5/mo. service and it’s very easy to setup.
The iOS app could use some more improvements but far better than not having one at all.
Overall Joplin is highly recommended because of it’s compatibility, flexibility, privacy, and no-frills functionality.
For some reason I like those old long readme.txt files from the 1990s. The ones formatted with max 80-120 characters wide per line, black background, etc.
https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/master/readme/clipp...
I haven't tried this one yet. But the biggest problem with that approach is the links typically don't work, nor will citations render properly for Wikipedia. So maybe it's preferable using Lynx or w/e just for long-term reading or articles on news sites with disaster web design.
I like Standard Notes' no-nonsense business model, with the downside that the free version is heavily feature-crippled (not even a Markdown editor, just plain text).
The Standard Notes server is self-hostable, but it requires a dedicated backend server [0] which was more hassle than I wanted to deal with. Joplin integrates much more nicely with Syncthing for self-hosted but still peer-to-peer replication.
0: https://standardnotes.org/help/47/can-i-self-host-standard-n...
This is the feature that has me locked in to Evernote and no one else seems to have. I'll be watching this repo and jump over as soon as it becomes supported.
I don't use vim, so it's just a matter of curiosity for me - but it's always interesting to hear what kinds of tools other developers like to use.
[1] http://todotxt.org/
My requirements: multi-platform, multi-device, auto-sync (more than 2 devices in free ver.), tags, webclip-ability, preferably markdown format with code rendering. Text diagramming such as PlantUML is a big plus. The idea of owning my notes is very appealing.
My early attempts at synchronizing encrypted notes over OneDrive experienced repeated hiccups (stopped syncing for no apparent reason), so currently trying without encryption. Win10 and Android clients seem to chug along just fine, but the Linux client shows weird errors in the log - trying to hunt down the root cause.
The fact that Joplin is WIP and open source is encouraging. I'd like to be able to have separate DBs, e.g. for personal and business use.
ADDED: forgot to mention that the lack of dark mode on Windows EN client was a constant source of irritation.
I just wish they had an API that I could use.
Some cons I felt while using Notion: - Mandatory to log in using a Google account is a _very_ big pushback for me - I need it to work all the time offline. - E2EE encryption? I don't think it's there. It's something I strongly desire for privacy reason. - It's a freemium subscription modal, I have nothing against it, but imho, completely free one is of course better - It's not open sourced, but Joplin is.
Note that it is paid, the company has a longevity statement around that.
The nice thing is it uses 17mb ram so I can leave it running all the time which is a helpful thing since all the other electron apps keep my laptop at 18gb memory usage
I've made a comparison table [1] comparing Joplin and other popular note-taking apps, you may find it useful.
Joplin could have been my go-to note-taking app, but IMO they made a few bad design decisions and there are few things I really don't like about it, maybe listing some of them from my point of view could be useful either to Joplin's maintainers or potential users:
- Notebooks are indefinitely nestable but tags are not, why?
- Joplin's icon is SO out of proportions, it looks way out of place in my dock, it may sound silly but I might not have used it just because of this alone.
- There's a button for opening the current note via a third-party editor, this is quite powerful because it means you can use all the fancy plugins and capabilities your general purpose text editor has, but why are all metadata about a particular note stored who-knows-where rather than putting them in the note itself as YAML front matter so I could have edited them directly too?
- Attachments are stored on disk as plain files, that's great because now you can find them and edit them without going through Joplin if necessary, but those files are named with unique ids so actually finding the files you're looking for will be a problem.
- And why not storing all notes on disk directly too, so that you could have done fancy things like running a global search and replace on them, run git on them...? Storing them in a database is generally better for performance, but you can do both.
- Notes have a separate title field, why wouldn't I want to write my titles in an H1 heading in the Markdown content directly instead? The default notes look a bit silly because of this, coming effectively with 2 identical titles.
- The UI looks pretty ugly, there are too many buttons, the interface isn't properly responsive (at some widths the toolbar gets cropped, labels spawn multiple lines etc.), useless things like the "Watching..." label are displayed etc.
- The database location is not customizable, if it were you would have the ability to store multiple notes collections separately, and you could achieve synchronization for free just by putting your database inside Dropbox for instance.
- Some shortcuts are weird and/or missing, for example there's a shortcut for cycling between previewing, editing, and the split editor. That might be useful sometimes, but don't people just want to toggle between editing and previewing or between previewing and the split-editor most of the times? There should be shortcuts for doing that instead.
[0] https://notable.md
[1] https://github.com/notable/notable#comparison
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Notable/comments/dcqan6/notable_is_...
Your "comparison" is just a long list of what you think if bad about Joplin, as if there could not be a single good thing about it - there's nothing neutral or fair about any of it. You're just denigrating competition and advertising your own stuff.
I guess it's to be expected from someone whose tagline is "the app that doesn't suck", yet heavily copying features from all these other apps, which presumably, suck.
I think I may have something interesting to say given that I'm writing one of these apps myself, and mentioning for example that in Joplin tags aren't indefinitely nestable but notebooks are is not like I'm making stuff up, if I weren't writing one of those note-taking apps that wouldn't really change that fact.
> Just be honest that you want to advertise your (commercial) product.
Partially my comment was prompted by the opportunity to target new potential users, i.e. people reading this thread are people interested in Joplin, which is an app very similar to mine.
Partially I want to share what I think about Joplin from my perspective.
> Your "comparison" is just a long list of what you think if bad about Joplin
Well, I started my sentence with: "Joplin could have been my go-to note-taking app", meaning there's a lot about it I like, mentioning that I like that it supports Markdown is not an interesting point to make I think, plus I'm actually praising some things, like the ability to edit a note in a third-party editor, is mentioning an ever more powerful way to implement this (i.e. notes stores as plain files on disk with metadata in the front matter) not interesting?
And not all the things I don't like about Joplin are even solved in Notable, some are though, obviously, or Joplin would have been my note-taking app too.
> as if there could not be a single good thing about it
As I said that sentence started with "Joplin could have been my go-to note-taking app", which I think implicitly says a lot of good things.
> there's nothing neutral or fair about any of it.
Ok, what's not fair or neutral about stating the fact that tags aren't indefinitely nestable?
Or maybe your point is that since I'm working for a competitor app I can't talk about this?
> You're just denigrating competition and advertising your own stuff.
I don't think that's fair to say, obviously I wouldn't have made my own note-taking app if I thought Joplin didn't have any important shortcomings.
Would my comment have been fairer if I didn't mention I'm developing Notable? I mean I'm a person who tried Joplin and there were some things I didn't like, how am I supposed to be talking about these things then? How would you have phrased my comment?
> I guess it's to be expected from someone whose tagline is "the app that doesn't suck", yet heavily copying features from all these other apps, which presumably, suck.
If the very first calculator did only additions it would have sucked, if any later calculators _also_ did additions that doesn't imply that they must suck as well.
Plus that's kind of a cheeky tagline that's meant to say the following: I tried other note-taking apps, I couldn't find one that I really liked, so in this sense they sucked for me.
Like if you absolutely need a web-clipper I guess Notable would suck and Joplin would not suck _for you_.
I don't think it would have been right to make specifically a comparison between Joplin and Notable in a thread about Joplin, in fact my app also has some of the issues I'm mentioning, not all of them of course or I would be a Joplin user now, what does it matter what my app does to the points I'm making? I'm talking about Joplin as a person who tired it.
The link to my app is kinda there for people who might be interested in that, which is also one of the reasons I made the post in the first place, but I would have written something regardless if I'd be passionate about these note-taking apps without writing one myself.
Would my post have seemed fairer if I didn't mention I'm working in Notable? Or like am I disallowed to talk about other note-taking apps now that I'm developing one and I know something about them? Like, given that I develop Notable and there a few things I don't like about Joplin which didn't allow me to become a Joplin user, how do you think I should have phrased my post?
Only thing I really miss is the ability to have completely separate instances. While it's theoretically possible to script different configs, they can't be used simultaneously.
Syncing works well both through Syncthing and Google Drivw. Haven't tried syncing through OneDrive, and IIRC the docs had some warning about it.
Ironically, this README loads more than a hundred images but I can’t even find a desktop screenshot.
So at some point I figured she could use my old ipad mini 1 with a size-fitted logitech "ultrathin keyboard" (that magnetically holds onto the ipad, making it one piece for storage) that I impulse bought and never used. So hardware was there, but looking for a markdown editor that supported sync and that old device + her windows laptop was not fruitful. Except well, short story: joplin is awesome for that.
She could use the ipad to write a few minutes here and there during transit and was able to complete it. The markdown file is then converted to latex/pdf using pandoc + pandoc-citeproc (for citations using a bibtex-file).
Support for antiquated iOS versions is rare (making the ipad mini 1 useless in many cases although it still appears to be a capable device) even though many apps don't seem to have a need for higher versions. I suspect that most apps use frameworks that have a version cutoff to reduce complexity if that even makes sense.
this should probably be reconsidered, or least made clear to everyone.
It has all the best features, including client side encryption, while still enabling collaboration.
Android: no auto-save. type something, close it, lose everything.
Scrolling is a pain. Need to reach the end very fast? Forget it.
https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/899