After many years with google keep, evernote, standard notes, simplenote, org mode, plain files in git etc. I finally found joplin and couldn't be happier.
+1. I remember checking out Standard Notes and their longevity mission is very positive. They seem to have a solid product, but their approach just doesn't click for me.
Been using Joplin for a couple years. It's one of those few open-source apps that managed to find a golden ratio of functionality but still to the point, a coherent pleasant experience across desktop and mobile.
Missing a basic collab or note sharing functionality though. It's all open formats and that, sure one could hack around it, but more in the spirit of mutual access to encrypted notebooks for example.
When I tried the joplin app 9 months ago, the mobile app on iOS was just plain broken.
As far as E2EE note apps with mobile and desktop apps that sync go when I last looked in 2020, you have Standard Notes, Joplin, Inkdrop, Amplenote, Day One and DevonThink. I tried out Inkdrop seriously, but it wasn't better enough for me to switch and was more expensive than standard notes.
A lot of these apps are $5/month, and I feel like that is too much compared to the $3/month far more sophisticated utility apps like 1password are sold for.
For Joplin, review the sync settings. Sorry I forget which one it is but on iOS there was a bad default and once you change it the mobile app works like a dream.
No it was broken to the point where I couldn't even just write a note with a keyboard properly. Even if that was fixed the fact you have to change a bad default out of the box is indicative alone.
I wish more apps used git as a sync option. GitJournal is a great client for Android phones and then any editor on desktop platform works fine (plain text or markdown notes). I use it with vs code and Dendron.
Yup. I switched from evernote which was syncing poorly to Joplin and it's been great. Writing ~daily notes for over 2 years between ~three devices and it's had a problem exactly once due to onedrive changing their APIs out from under Joplin
As a second data point, I've been using Standard for a little over a year now, and haven't had any syncing issues. Maybe I've been lucky, or maybe it's gotten better than it used to be.
I sometimes (once every few months?) get a duplicated/conflicting file-pair appear. It's a bit annoying, but not very annoying. Can't remember it happening recently.
The main reason is actually data freedom. By having all the data as plain text I can sync it and backup as I like, move between platforms (macOS, Linux) and if I get bored with those apps or they disappear I switch easily or even write my own.
After clicking around in growing confusion, I finally found a single screenshot of the application in action in the GitHub README file. Spoiler: it looks like any other note-taking application.
Yeah if there's anything that will prevent me from downloading a free application like this.. it would be the complete lack of a preview of what the thing is. Strange decision not to include a screenshot or gif of the application in action ANYWHERE on the marketing site.
You can also use the web version. To me that's what I like about SN. Joplin/Obsidian seem cool, but I'd rather everything be in the cloud, so that if change computers I don't have to go through endless setup.
The usual arguments include performance waste of an entire browser for a single tab, especially while running concurrently with a web browser, and that is an "easy way out" of doing cross platform.
Side note: this is why I run Trilium Notes, another notes app, in the web browser instead of as a desktop app; I am already good at managing tabs, and not being able to merge the electron tab into my browser makes it harder to deal with (and less performant)
A piece of paper doesn't have the same level of privacy as something like Standard Notes. Anyone who finds your written paper notes can read them.
Standard Notes is encrypted, and password protected. It can't ever be read by the provider or the host (which is the major problem with the majority of syncing notes apps), and it can't be read by a nosy friend or family member, unless you leave your computer unlocked and unattended (at which point all bets are off anyway).
It offers much, much better privacy than a piece of paper.
I mean, if you never want to read your notes again, sure, that's more secure. But writing stuff you will immediately burn and never want to read again in the future is such a different thing from using a syncing notes tool that the comparison doesn't really make sense.
I just thought the implication of the copy was funny, wasn't really making a serious comparison of every possible use case and threat model for pen and paper versus this tool. Each has its own advantages.
I am 100% sure there is no root kit installed on my piece of paper transmitting every pen stroke to the internet. I am 100% sure there is no defect in the design of the piece of paper that could make it instantly readable to the entire world once discovered.
You can't say that about any software or hardware.
Private journaling is likely to end up encrypted forever and not accessible to the families of deceased persons. Sure, it could be argued that it was encrypted on purpose but one never knows. Someone may suddenly pass and their loved ones would never get access to this piece of their work even if the author intended to share it and never got to leave the encryption key (they never expected their sudden departure)
Sure, this same thing could be argued about electronic mail, computers and other encrypted devices but I feel something deeper would be lost a lot more often.
Imagine Kafka used an encryption tool on his work or countless of other silent authors whose work only came to life after their death when somebody else discovered it.
That's a problem with encrypted stuff in general, and as a society we really haven't worked out any better way to manage that yet than measures like "keep a clearly-labeled master password in a safe deposit box where your estate can get at it".
So, I had a look. Their GitHub has dozens of repos, and the desktop one depends on the web one? Wait, the whole thing is written in typescript? I have absolutely nothing against typescript, but I honestly would have expected a boring language, with a simple repo, not with git submodules....and definitely not something that depends on web tech, of any kind.
One thing to note is the yarn.lock is probably the transitive closure of the compile-time dependencies (`devDependencies`) and run-time dependencies (`dependencies`), so it's possible that the dependencies that actually ship with the application are quite a bit smaller.
For example, `webpack` is in the devDependencies, which is the build tool. So the `yarn.lock` is listing all of the dependencies both for the runtime libraries that get used, but also the dependencies for all the build tooling as well.
Is it really that surprising they’re using web tech?
Putting whether it’s an appropriate use of web technology or not aside, I’m not quite sure how they would be able to build a cross platform application [2] with a small team [1] without largely relying on code reuse of some kind. For better or worse, web tech has been the status quo for some time. Ironically making this the boring route for making these apps.
As much as I hate how resource intensive these apps are, it’s also not really that surprising they’re built this way, knowing the current alternatives and their barriers to entry.
Maybe one day we’ll have lighter weight alternatives, that are just as easy to use. or maybe they exist and they’re just not that well known ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But yeah their “building something that lasts” just sounds like marketing speak
[1] I’m assuming it’s a small company (since I’ve never heard of this before)
[2] the app appears to support iOS, Android, Linux, macOS, windows & the web
I'm aware that some browsers (ie, chrome & friends) do this, by default at least. I find it pretty hostile behavior. I don't think this site did anything wrong.
I'm happy with Standard Notes. I just checked and my oldest note is from 13/04/2017 so it has been a few years.
I don't use the desktop app as the web version works fine. The Android app works fine as well. Sync is great and note edit history is great. I mostly use plain text and the task editor for ticking off things.
It works, it's open source, it gets out of your way and Mo and team are responsive when rare issues come up. I use it every day and I'm happy to be paying for it to support it.
SN's free version is...very limited. Almost all their cool features are in the paid version. Cool features being different editors. But even with that, their feature parity across platforms is not really great.
(Aside: you can check Notesnook (https://notesnook.com) out as an alternative. Disclaimer: I am the dev).
I used Standard Notes paid for over a year, and switched to Obsidian recently.
My experience with SN was that the editors are half fleshed out, incompatible with each other, and make it hard to use with other tools. The notes can be markdown, html, text, or other formats as well as being encrypted. This makes exporting very annoying to use.
Contrast to other tools like obsidian.. it’s just markdown. I can sync it across devices just by sharing the folder. SN is a great concept, but there’s a lot of design decisions I hated while using it.
I did the exact same swap recently. Obsidian is far superior.
I even paid for the 5 year Standard Notes subscription as I believed in the project and assumed design improvements would come, but the editor experience never improved and just feels clunky.
I bought the 5 year sub and completely agree on the desktop app clunkiness, it's been so many years but there's still no right click menus. I use it once in awhile and still find myself trying to right click > archive or right click > pin or whatever.
Same here. I'm unlikely to renew. I'm now using Joplin and synchronizing it to a small Nginx WebDAV server, which I back up to Rsync.net using Borg. It's certainly "cloud" enough for me. But too involved and technical for most people.
I've liked Standard Notes. It's really nice that it's open source and encrypted. However I ran into some instances of cross-device conflicting edits which were a bit annoying, and Obsidian's UI and Second Brain features swayed me to try it. The graph view is really cool and I realized I didn't need syncing as much as I thought.
Obsidian does seem to also have a paid sync feature (no mobile app yet). For now I've been emailing myself from my phone and taking small audio memos, then typing them into Obsidian when back at my laptop. Not an ideal workflow but it's not bad and has some advantages.
Conflicts are normal in syncing. Even git has conflicts. Although SN's conflict resolution is a bit weird where it creates multiple copies of the note...I think this may be because they mark conflicted notes on the server using timestamps.
I set up syncthing on my two computers and my phone. It was surprisingly simple and works pretty well (after I turned off battery optimisation on it on the phone).
using Markor as an acceptable way of making small edits and notes on my phone for fleshing out later.
Also moved everything to Obsidian. The free plugins from developer contributors are fantastic. Sync to mobile is free with some know-how, otherwise the paid option seems fairly priced.
Maybe try Roam Research if you want cloud based notes. The fact that there's no cloud based functionality in Obsidian is one of the major reasons why I chose it though.
I see here - https://standardnotes.org/knowledge/2/what-is-end-to-end-enc... the claim is:
"Whenever we move your encrypted data over a network, in order to deliver services to you, it is sent over a strictly secure connection to only our private servers. Because this data is encrypted, we can't read it, and we can’t sell it."
(I use Standard Notes, and if there's some element of the security model that I'm misunderstanding, I'd like to know :) )
it doesn't say that anywhere indeed, but this is my understanding: if you reload the page your login is being preserved without re-entering your password. there's no way to maintain this without storing a key on the server (i.e. either the master key (MK), or a key that encrypts the MK, if the MK is stored locally
you can. however, i hope they don't store it unencrypted - it's a very bad security practice for many reasons. assuming they store it encrypted with a temporary session key, the session key will necessarily be on the server. honestly, storing it on the server in a session storage is not a big deal. my original points are that a) web security is hard b) web e2ee is sort of hype on practice
Even though I mostly stay away from the Google ecosystem, I do use Keep for several years now. Mainly because of how easy it is to export notes as sorted individual html files that I can import as formatted text into Scrivener where I organize all my writing. I wish the native MacOS Notes app would be better but I lost once all of my notes after an iCloud error. Even Apple couldn't help me on the phone. The structure was still there on their servers, but strangely the notes were empty.
After almost a decade of use I moved away from Simple Note (originally with notational velocity...) to Standard Notes over a year ago (their obligate unencrypted cloud storage was a deal-breaker for me. I use standard notes for a more or less unfiltered brain dump, so security is my #1 priority), and have been pretty happy with it, using it cross-platform. The support is pretty good - the forums (well, the slack) are quite active.
There're one or two minor issues (not being able to search within individual notes, and some scrolling bugs on iOS iirc that I need to report at some point), but given that I'm using it across 4 platforms (iOS/macOS/Windows/Android), it seems to be working really well.
And the lead developer seems quite sincerely committed/principled to the software's principles, which is nice.
edit: I haven't tried out Joplin/Obsidian, which people seem to like here. Oh gosh I think I'm ok for now - my current solution solves my problem.
I don't mean to be snarky, but what's the purpose of apps like this? Notepad.exe is 227 KB, runs instantly and flawlessly on even ancient environments, and gives all the basics. If you need something more "Power User," Notepad++ gives some language-sensitive formatting, tabs for easy switching between files, and plugins for custom use cases.
If you need something more specific to a given language, that's an IDE, not a note taking program. If you need to write something with a bunch of rich formatting, that's a word processor, not a note taking program.
The point of a note taking program is to be as blindingly simple, fast, and reliable as possible. It's the software equivalent of grabbing a scrap of paper (or maybe a little flip notebook) and scratching something down before you forget it. All this complexity defeats the purpose. A 200MB Electron app with web integration definitely defeats the purpose.
For the curious and lazy, this is what it looks like: https://files.catbox.moe/kcelmg.PNG. Note that this was after I clicked off a large, complex dialog nagging me to create an account and sign in. Already this looks way too complex for my taste.
Why are people so endlessly fascinated with forcing everything on the cloud? I have txt and rtf documents from decades ago that have survived through backup after backup. Meanwhile, if this program's servers go down tomorrow, tough luck.
I see comments like this from time to time and can’t help but wonder if they’re serious or just satire at this point. People have mobile devices. People have windows and Mac (and Linux!) devices. People want seamless sync and sharing, simple formatting, for it to work across platforms, and for it to be exportable into some portable format.
Sure, you can spend a lot of time forcing notepad and word into some sad version of a real app. Or you can pony up $5-10 a month, save your time for something valuable, and actually have a note taking app that’ll serve you well.
You are forgetting that a huge category of people need all their notes in one place, organized and separate from everything else. Sure you can do this with Notepad and manage everything in folders etc. but that takes significant effort. Effort that many people don't want to put in. That is why most note apps, even something like Notion, exist. To simplify the organising process. You aren't paying for the editing experience but everything else.
Of course, for very simple note taking you don't need this but it again comes back to my original point that by using a dedicated app, everything, including the rough 1 minute notes, are in one easy-to-find place.
I myself take a lot of txt notes but easily lose them as well. Fortunately for me, they aren't important and I rarely need to access them again but it's always nice if I have them all in once place so I can go over them and see what I wrote/did.
Disclaimer: I am a developer of a note-taking application called Notesnook[1]. Some might say it is a (hopefully better) alternative to Standard Notes.
I think for this app, the purpose is a convenient and secure writing space that's available across devices. I've been a Standard Notes customer for several years now, and I went with it because I was looking for a secure solution for my journaling. I wanted a secure place to write my deepest thoughts at home and on the go, and also a way to quickly and easily access, edit, and review those thoughts across all of my devices. That's a tall order.
This conflict of desires lead me to the age old trade-off of security versus convenience. If I want security / privacy, I should use only local text editing tools and keep everything on an encrypted volume, preferably on an airgapped machine. If I want pure convenience, I should use any of the million great cloud-based note and document options that are available on any device. If I want to fall anywhere between those extremes on the spectrum, I'll need to decide the most convenient option I can bear that provides the most security. And for me, I landed on Standard Notes when exploring this question for myself.
It's a lightweight and easy text editing program that is encrypted and secure anytime my writing leaves my sphere of control. It allows for search of my notes, filtering by title and date created/modified, and it has great sync between all of my devices to the point that I can pick it up any device and write a thought as it comes and not worry about sync conflicts if multiple instances of my note are open across devices. There are easy options to automate encrypted local backups and even daily cloud-based ones if you're a paying customer. I can export everything to plain text quite easily - which is my preferred format - so I'm in no way dependent on their continuing to exist.
If you want to read/write notes seamlessly across all of your devices and you also want to stay private and secure, your options grow limited right away. Standard Notes is the best compromise of these competing interests that I've found so far for my own situation. So even though I have the ability to use other tools as you've described - and many of them are better writing tools than Standard Notes - I still choose to pay SN as a customer.
I was thinking the same thing, but instead of notepad, emacs with org-mode. Keeping files in sync is a separate problem that your note taking app should not have to solve, there's already many good solutions out there.
For some people, notepad.exe is sufficient, but not for everyone. I’m a professional researcher and writer. My notes are much more than “the software equivalent of grabbing a scrap of paper.” They’re an essential information management and organization tool without which I couldn’t do my job.
This comment is absurd and contradictory, if the software is supposed to be the equivalent of "grabbing a scrap of paper and scratching something down" then at bare minimum it needs to support images since you can draw pictures on a piece of paper. Do notepad or notepad++ support images?
I have a love/hate relationship with Standard Notes (and with most encrypted editors in general).
Standard Notes is one of the few apps that has end-to-end encrytion AND password protection on the desktop (or Face ID on mobile devices). Joplin is E2E but refuses to encrypt locally, meaning someone who browses your computer can view your notes unless you use Joplin Portable in an encrypted container (with the added performance overhead).
However, compared to Joplin, uploading images to notes is a pain. Standard Notes has multiple text editor options and they all suck. Only the "bold" editor allows you to upload images, and using FileSafe is extremely fiddly. Personally I would rather have one really good text editor than a bunch of half-baked ones.
But Joplin is sluggish compared to both Standard Notes and Obsidian.md. Obsidian.md has the benefit of having everything as plain text files, for easy editing in other apps (there's also no need to export anything if they go out of business compared to Standard Notes/Joplin). But Obsidian's mobile app is still in development, and I'm a bit iffy about buying another subscription just for encrypted sync.
...And, if open source doesn't matter to you, there's always Microsoft OneNote.
> But Obsidian's mobile app is still in development, and I'm a bit iffy about buying another subscription just for encrypted sync.
Obsidian's pricing seems a bit weird to be in general, in that its publish/hosting functionality is priced around individual workspaces rather than either users or total usage.
Because of that I'm never going to actually use said publish functionality (even though I would have paid for it in an instant if it was set up differently), because my use cases for it would involve publishing from a number of different small workspaces for entirely different audiences, and the devs apparently haven't considered at all that people may want to do that.
You should give Notesnook[1](i am the developer) a try as well. It should solve most, if not all, of the above issues and its cheaper than every other notes app out there as well.
> What happens to note access when off subscription?
Nothing at all. You can still edit and access them as normal. There's no limit on the amount of notes you can make on the free tier.
> is dark mode an option on the free tier?
Yep.
As for the subscription model, it's necessary to support development of a Web & mobile app where versioning is much harder as opposed to a desktop version.
I don't mind paying, but I've never cared for this product's pricing. If you want to pay monthly, it's $10 a month, which no sane person would pay for a plain notes editor and nothing else. The reasonable price is $30/year but you have to pay for five years in advance. Sure, we all have to eat, but it's not a sign of confidence if you're trying to push me to pay for five years in advance. If you believe in what you're selling, charge me $2.50 a month and give me a reason to stay.
For this, you might find Notesnook (https://notesnook.com/) a better alternative. I mean its still $4.49 but I suppose that's still a lot cheaper. (Disclaimer: I am the developer so this may be a shameless plug, idk).
I really miss tomboy (not the new ng version). I used it for years and it was amazing. Rich text without having to use markdown. Razor fast responsiveness when searching. Instant hyperlinks just by typing the name of another note. Excellent keyboard shortcuts too.
I really miss it but it was no longer maintained and falling into disrepair on newer OSes due to lacking support for DPI scaling and dark modes.
I use onenote now as it comes with O365 anyway but like most things microsoft it's bloated and slow. It offers a lot more features (tomboy couldn't even do inline pictures!) But fast responsiveness means more to me.
I'd consider standard notes but there's so many of these apps around and most are not WYSIWYG editors but instead markdown with a separate preview window. I hate that. And they tend to be slow electron stuff which makes them no better than onenote.
Not sure if this one is an exception but if so I might try it.
I've read this a couple of times on HN. Can someone fill me in here? Is the claim that electron apps are slow justified? If so why, technically, are they slow?
The main one I use is Slack and it is perfectly fine on my machine.
It's mostly hearsay. Electron is highly optimized (it's chromium after all). Making an electron app doesn't make it automatically slow and clunky. That's absurd. Sure it is a browser and it takes a little more Ram than you are used to (but most machines nowadays have 8 to 16 gigs of RAM so not a huge issue).
What does make an electron app slow is the app itself. Obviously. You have VSCode that is blazing fast even for humongous files and you also have some other not so fast apps.
Another huge issue raised is size. To be honest, 100 MB isn't abnormal for a desktop app. Look at any Qt app, it can be around 100 MB too. Same for dotnet.
Of course native is better but most developers don't have the resources for that.
Edit: I see people down voting without giving any reason. I know this is an unpopular opinion but come on. The days when you could use VSCode as an example of slow, clunky Electron app are gone. What's slow and huge is Jetbrains IntelliJ or Visual Studio; both native. VSCode proved that you can make a fast electron app; it just needs work like any other thing.
What makes you think they didn't have a reason? I didn't downvote you but you've made a few divisive assertions. For example, your "blazing fast" is my "performs acceptably".
Try opening a big complex html file and scroll immediately in VS Code and in Sublime text. Sublime Text blows VS Code out of water. This lag made me switch back to Sublime Text from VS Code.
Are you referring to the way VS Code is slow to display the syntax highlighting on file open sometimes? (Is that when it's getting highlighting via LSP?)
Yes. While syntax highlighting is getting rendered, scrolling lags a lot which is really annoying when you want to get to a specifc part of the file quickly. Once I noticed this, it was very hard not to see the same lag everywhere.
LSP-I don't know how this works.
Curious if you tried with extensions disabled? I just attempted opening both a 100k and 1m line html file in both VS Code and ST, in the 100k case they both were quick to open but Code was a bit smoother in scrolling, in the 1m case ST took a long time to open (showed a loading progress bar for a few seconds before anything), and while Code was choppy to scroll ST was almost unusable.
That being said, with extensions enabled it can be a totally different story - some extensions will try to load the text content on every editor opening or even edit, which gets unusable very quickly. (Yes they run in a separate process, but that’s not a cure-all)
Tested on 2018 MBP.
(On VS code team, had nothing to do with the editor perf)
IntelliJ is not native, it’s Java, which ironically used to be considered a slow VM unsuitable for desktop apps, until Electron came along and was like “you think that’s slow? Hold my beer!” Now I much prefer Java desktop apps over Electron ones.
VS Code is the exception to the rule. MS has spent lots of time optimising it.
However most apps don't, and even MS' other apps are total crap, like MS Teams. If it was so easy to take the lessons learned from VS Code and apply it to their other apps they would do so I'm sure.
I do consider the Slack desktop app to be a resource hog. Even on my brand-new M1 MacBook Air it sometimes takes a few seconds for channels to load. On my older Windows computer it's borderline unusable with how bad the text inputs lag. Sometimes I will have typed out an entire message and hit send before any of the text appears in the input box.
In fact, this morning a colleague of mine was showing me on Zoom that their Slack desktop app never finishes loading instead just displaying a white screen, so they need to use the website instead. Although I guess that's more of a comment on software quality than bloat.
I don't mean to say that all Electron apps are slow and clunky. VS Code for example is very impressive for an Electron app.
I guess you're right! I'd never noticed the laggy resizing (I use a laptop so nearly always have apps taking up the full screen). But I see that also (recent MBP w/ 32Gb RAM).
I just did a comparison with slack running in chrome and, maybe I'm saying something silly here, but the difference seems to be that I'm simply unable to resize the chrome window at the same speed when the tab inside is displaying slack. So I was unable to "leave the content behind" as you did in your video of the electron app (and as I was also able to do with the electron app).
The problem with Electron apps is that they're using an embedded browser. As more and more apps are moving to Electron you're running a whole lot of browsers altogether on one system.
I don't want to waste hundreds of MBs of memory just on one small app :)
There's good Electron apps, yes. Like VS code, which is fast and optimised and uses very little resources. But most Electron apps are wasteful. Even the other ones from MS like Teams are horrible.
Agreed but I don't really care about the privacy of my notes tbh. They're mostly web clippings and technical information I spent time to dig up, not my innermost thoughts.
However something self-hosted would be nicer.
With other O365 services it's more of a problem indeed. I use cryptomator on top of OneDrive to mitigate.
> I really miss tomboy (not the new ng version). I used it for years and it was amazing. ... I really miss it but it was no longer maintained and falling into disrepair on newer OSes due to lacking support for DPI scaling and dark modes.
You could contribute to it, and try to bring the project back to life!!! (I mean, any/most of us here on HN could!)
Tomboy is free and open-source software, licensed under the LGPL license[1]. It's also written in C# (which is pretty wonderful language to work with on a GUI application, especially compared to C or C++ or even maybe Vala).
It would be wonderful to breathe a new life to it.
I can't really, I haven't developed for years anymore. I don't have the chops to do it.
Also, the Gnome team seems to have deprecated it in favour of a rebuild called tomboy-ng that's written in something new (Delphi I think?). And lacks the benefits of the old one like fast responsiveness and auto hyperlinking. I don't like it at all :)
Hey if you want to give my app https://bangle.io a try, it checks off your requirement of being a WYSIWYG note taking web editor.
I would say the friction to try it out is pretty low as there is nothing to lock you in. It simply reads and writes data in a markdown format directly to your hard drive -- think VSCode but for notes.
Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits.
With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don't mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but:
1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can't even try out many of their editors.
2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am not sure how having 3 kinds of rich text editors is helpful but they have them.
3. They don't allow any form of account recovery. Which sounds really epic on paper but once you forget your password, you lose all your data.
4. The feature parity between their different apps across platforms is abysmal. The android app is notoriously feature lacking compared to the Web version. (They did put out an update which hopefully changes things).
5. In my extensive usage of the app, conflicts are very normal. I have no issue with that but there's no way to resolve them without creating duplicate copies of the note which clutters up the UI.
5. the UX is poor. No right click on notes, no distraction free mode, no way to collapse the huge notes list.
6. Search and organization seems like an after thought. The only way to organize is via tags. Tags are nice and all but there's not much you can do with them.
7. Their pricing seems absurd.
8. The development seems to be going no where. They are active but many of the above issues are still not addressed.
But as I said, it's not all bad. Most people won't notice the above in their initial usage. They have a solid app with okay features.
If you are a new user looking for encrypted notes and all that hosh posh or just an alternative to SN, you should also give Notesnook[1][2] a try; it solves all of the above issues in a sensible way. Do note that I am the dev so I am obviously biased. It's not perfect but I think it is a better alternative.
Well yeah they don’t offer any account recovery — that’s a sign the encryption might be trustworthy. It’s only a negative if you don’t care about that.
I myself thought no account recovery automatically meant safety. It sounds very cool. However, in the past week alone, around 10 users of Notesnook came asking for a way to recover their account because they had forgotten their password.
I mean, why should privacy be at such a huge risk to users' data?
For the tech savy, Notesnook offers account recovery by giving the user option (actual kind of forcing) to save the encryption key someplace safe. Not ideal, of course, but better than nothing.
So they download the encryption key (unprotected so no password needed) as a file, and they keep the file safe? That's the kind of thing I've been thinking about for an idea of mine. What did those 10 users ask about? How to use the encryption key file?
I see. Were they able to restore access once you explained? Or had they not saved it somewhere safe? I'm trying to understand the communication requirements around such a feature.
For most of them it seemed unnecessary; people don't realize the meaning of client-side encryption. I try to keep explanations very short and to the point.
> had they not saved it somewhere safe?
I had to delete 2 user accounts because they hadn't saved the key at all. All others had saved and were able to recover access. However, most didn't even realize they had saved it until I asked them to check their phone storage. A normal user would do anything to get past dialogs and popups, including clicking on random buttons.
The problem with that sort of thing is that you now have one of two situations
1. Either the key is only as secure as what ever random online service you have it backed up on (in which case, it might as well be stored at SN and save the user all kinds of headaches)
2. The key isn't backed up, and this won't be realized until the worst possible time.
Well, putting a couple of USB drives in a sock drawer, garden shed, etc. is pretty secure. Point 2 is the tricky one, as communicating that necessity seems challenging.
Yes, that's why the garden shed or some other non-house location is good (leaving it with relatives in another city would be good too, and at work would be an option for some).
1. That is up to the user. They can save it wherever they like: a secure online storage, a USB, a piece of paper...
2. True but there are a couple of things you can do: i) regularly remind the user via email and in-app notification to backup their recovery key. ii) force the user to download/copy the recovery key on login/signup.
By force, I really do mean force. Don't let the user use the app until they click the download recovery key button.
Thanks for posting! It checks most of the boxes for me. I've been using Simplenote which is perfect and minimal for note taking. But when I start to blog I find the lack of live preview and spellcheck inconvenient.
Looking forward to the desktop apps and possibly offline support!
What's great about Simplenote, is that it's backed by a nice company that seems to be a good steward year in, year out. No unnecessary features, just continued stable maintenance.
> But when I start to blog I find the lack of live preview and spellcheck inconvenient.
What platform are you using Simplenote on? On macOS at least, you can write in Markdown and preview it with Cmd+Shift+P. Spellcheck also seems to work for me, but maybe that's a macOS thing and not specifically a Simplenote thing.
Disclosure: I work at Automattic, but not on Simplenote.
I'm on windows and unfortunately I can't find the spellcheck option. I'd like to sometimes write on iPad, that's why I want an app with cross platform support.
I actually really like their pricing model. You can buy years in advance, and they occasionally offer steep discounts (I think I bought two decades in advance around new year?). In a time where more and more services offer me no other way than some crappy monthly subscription that I cannot pay in advance and without auto-renewal, this is really much appreciated.
That being said, a lot of your points seem valid - I've started using SN quite some time ago and haven't really noticed any new features since (except for some editor-improvements). Organization is indeed something that probably could use some love, the tags do suffice for me personally (especially with that one extension that lets you create folders with tags), but barely. While I appreciate their stability with regards to UX (it looks/feels the same since forever), the features you mentioned (collapsing, rightclick-menu) would not hurt.
Their 'lack of new features' however is, as far as I understood, somewhat intentional - back when I bought it I've read somewhere on the page that they explicitly have the philosophy to also say 'No' to new features if they think it threatens their guarantee of long-term stability/support. Which I think is a very admirable stance these days where short-term-KPIs seem to dominate entire industries.
> Their 'lack of new features' however is, as far as I understood, somewhat intentional.
Um that sounds great but I don't see how a simple thing like a "right-click menu" endangers longevity? All their talk of simplicity and yet they allow you to add a whole spreadsheet editor? I suppose adding editors is simple stuff that's why they have so many. Maybe longevity = less work?
Features are not bad. Some features are necessary. Some features enhance the general user experience and even make things simpler. Stagnation is not longevity, it's just slow death.
As for pricing: sure, the long term plan is appealing but they ask $9/mo? Which is the most expensive note taking app out there, I think.
You buy for 5 years or 20 years but what if nothing in the service changes in 20 years but your situation/use case changes drastically as is normal? What do you do of the additional money you paid? You can't get it back.
I don't think 5 year commitment speaks of longevity, that's just marketing. Longevity would be them taking the money after 5 years, not before.
I personally love monthly models because I spend exactly the amount I need and I can stop/pause when I want and start it again when I want. Its freedom and there's no commitment. That's why I added only 1 monthly plan in Notesnook.
A service should ask you to commit long term because the risk is always too high. Instead it should allow for multiple ways to get your data out in case it ever goes down. And if it goes down, you can be sure that you lose only 1 month of fees.
I have tried many note-taking apps. From Evernote to Google Keep to OneNote to Standard notes yo plain old notepad to Zotero to Word and really honestly many more.
If you say this list is all over the place, then that is because requirements vary depending on purpose, not the other way around.
After almost a decade of experimenting, I have come to realise that the best note-taking tool by far is org-mode.
It is free, it is extensible, it is not going anywhere in next decade+, it let's me encrypt on my own terms, it let's me store and share on my own terms, it is as lightweight or as heavyweight as I want, it can be as pretty or as ugly as I want, I can edit it anywhere, search and organization is ridiculously advanced compared to anything else out there (or everything else is ridiculously behind).
Its biggest strength and arguably biggest weakness is its tied to Emacs. It is a horrible learning curve for beginners, which is why it took me a decade to get to org-mode in the first place, but once you have climbed that hill, you are basically on top of the world.
Everybody serious about note-taking should give org-mode a try.
I read the Wikipedia entry for it but it didn't really shed a lot of light on these types of questions:
1. Can I embed images and more specifically can I embed animated GIF files?
2. Can I embed MP3s and play them within the note?
3. Does it support rich text editor functionality including the ability to insert tables easily from programs like Microsoft excel?
4. Can I use multiple fonts in the same individual note including monospaced ones and broad support for Unicode?
5. Can I easily sync and edit the data on my iPad, then on my android phone without having to worry about where the data is stored?
6. Will it automatically OCR embedded images and allow me to do text searches across my entire set of notes based on that text?
If the answer to most of these questions is no, then it doesn't sound like org-note is the best note taking editor as you claim, it just sounds like it's the best editor for your specific set of criteria which does not apply to all notetakers. And that's the problem with trying to narrow down the best note editing tool, it's such a broad area that every notetaker will have their own idiosyncratic needs and priorities.
As for me, I have also experimented with a great deal of note editing utilities and the only one that has reasonably met most of my requirements is Evernote.
EDIT: of course if the answer is yes, then I may just have a new favorite note editor.
1. Embedding of images is pretty much file linking. It can display and let you intract with images inline, but that may not be up to your requirement.
2. Same as above, except playback will require a plugin.
3. Absolutely! Tables are fully supported, with automatic formatting and formulae and lots more. This is one of the strong areas of org-mode.
4. You can get bold, italic, monospaced varieties inline, with minimal markdown-like syntax. If you are asking for rich text mixing two different fonts, then no.
5. Yes! Since everything is stored in text files, you can syc them via any means you deem fit. I personally have multiple Syncthing nodes (desktop, laptop and phones) and it works flawlessly.
>it's the best editor for your specific set of criteria
You are right. Perhaps better description would be org-mode is the worst note-taking tool, except all others.
Why I would deem it best is because after decade of experimenting, I've cone to realise that plaintext is the king. Rich editors with inline images, media and fancy fonts are nice and necessary when you're preparing presentations or impressing someone, but when time comes to actual utility when talking about years upon years of notes and other documents, everything else falls short very quickly.
Images and videos cannot be grepped, searching through formatted documents like Word where search program has rk ignore all the formatting is inherently slow and ultimately inaccurate. Compressing and encrypting and sharing plaintext is a breeze. Plaintext can be read thoroughly or skimmed through as needed. While writing plaintext, I don't have to worry about messing up formatting of whole document by entering right character at wrong place and then fiddling about it for hours.
Rich text is nice for when your notes are small. They are nice to feel. But when you are rummaging about a mountain (which everyone eventually builds up if they document anything seriously), nothing matches sheer speed and utility of plaintext.
Which leaves either dumb text or markdown. Markdown is nice, but org-mode is markdown in steroids. Even the simple act of being able to collapse sections with single key is a huge huge QoL improvement. Then there or org-babel for inline programming like Jupyter, org-roam for back links, org-ref for bibliography, pdf-tools with org roam for inline PDF annotation, and you can still grep everything mentioned here.
Ultimately the purpose of notes (for me, goes without saying) is to preserve and eventually refer to, information. And plaintext, in my personal anecdotal opinion and experience, beats every other medium for storing, transferring, modifying and analyzing information.
What’s the experience of searching and editing your org-mode notes on your (presumably Android, since Syncthing doesn’t exist on iOS) phone like? I’ve been interested in org-mode for a while, but most advocates seem to spend all their time in front of a keyboard.
After using org-mode since beginning of pandemic, I've realised that I do little to no editing on my phone.
But for that little editing, Orgzly all from f-droid is pretty great. As a side bonus, it handles TODOs from my org-agenda to generate Android notifications! Very handy and very private.
I'm not sure of Syncthing story on iOS as I don't have an apple device, but you can always store your notes on dropbox/icloud/whathaveyou. Unfortunately I lack any experience to be helpful with Apple devices otherwise.
How do you organize suites of notes in org-mode? Do you keep very big documents or one file per project or current task, or how is it divided? And is it possible to have links and hierarchies?
I'm still shopping for a good vim-based note taking solution.
Like the sibling comment said, org-deft is pretty fantastic. I have a single folder with many many org files. I have tags in them for general attributes and link/backlink via org-roam so I can instantly get a bird's eye view of which notes relate to which.
While actually editing, org-roam has simple double-bracket syntax that auto-completes existing filenames. If filename doesn't exist, it is created when the link is accessed first time automatically.
Hierarchy gets established automatically as I track back links, or via org-roam graph view. But really, once I started linking notes extensively (because its so easy with org-roam), I realised that my structure ended up mostly as a graph rather than tree. However, org-mode itself has excellent tree style syntax within individual file, which comes in handy.
Searching/analyzing can be done either from withing Emacs via elisp or externally via ripgrep/fd (I'm still noon at elisp)/
Having used it extensively, you can setup org-mode however you want: a file per month, a file per thought, a file per project and everything in between.
It is also the only note taking system I have seen that will let you link to an email. If you want to add a todo entry deep in some meeting notes reminding you to checkup on that email in 3 weeks, you can. And those todos will then show up in your agenda view.
Unfortunately this doesn't work if you don't already use Emacs as your email client, which I guess you don't if you aren't also using org-mode.
I understand what you're saying wrt to rtf versus text but I completely disagree and I say this as somebody who used to have all of my notes in thousands of plain text files.
I've never felt like rich text editor's have gotten in my way, I can start immediately typing into a note in Evernote without ever feeling like the rich text somehow hinders my ability to be able to quickly transfer my thoughts.
For you, as you've said, you don't see the utility of rich text outside of presentations. But when I'm drawing up and working on new projects I like to have embedded imagery for my flow charts, when I'm working on music I like to include snippets of melodies, and I like to be able to easily take screenshots of things I'm working on and transfer them and embed them easily.
I like the ability to be able to copy code blocks from programs like visual studio and web storm knowing that I can preserve the color scheme and monospaced font. It makes readability great.
When I want to make a note about remembering how to perform some complicated task in Photoshop (for example) I might make a quick animation as a gif file and I want to see it animated and embedded in the note.
Evernote also lets me link notes to each other and can even do some interesting auto related suggestions for notes that are similar in context as well as allowing me to tag notes in addition to putting them in a traditional folder like hierarchy.
I am not a casual user at this point as I have about 5000 notes with folders and tags associated with them. I've been building this note store for the last 10 years in Evernote after switching from One Note. And at least for me the search capabilities are for all intents and purposes instantaneous. Evernote in particular does have a few minor issues with the inability to be able to do regex searches or partial word versus whole word searches but they're minor and don't really impact my daily experience.
Another key priority for me is set up and ease-of-use, it took me less than five minutes to understand how Evernote worked and to have it syncing and searchable across my Macbook, my PC, my android and my iPad.
I do think you make strong points but fundamentally we have very different workflows and that's what makes our requirements so vastly different.
You said that you used Evernote in the past, I'm honestly curious why you abandoned it. If it has limitations with regard to notetaking I certainly haven't encountered them - of course as a safety measure I also make weekly back ups of my Evernote store as a series of exported HTML files. To me this is the biggest shortcoming, ultimately I don't control the central repository, if I ever found an Evernote competitor with comparable features that could connect to an s3, FTP or even dropbox i would switch in a heartbeat.
> I like the ability to be able to copy code blocks from programs like visual studio and web storm knowing that I can preserve the color scheme and monospaced font. It makes readability great.
org-babel allows this, with added ability to (optionally) execute and see and interact with output inline.
> Evernote also lets me link notes to each other and can even do some interesting auto related suggestions for notes that are similar in context as well as allowing me to tag notes in addition to putting them in a traditional folder like hierarchy.
Fully supported via org-roam, with added bonus of backlinks.
> When I want to make a note about remembering how to perform some complicated task in Photoshop (for example) I might make a quick animation as a gif file and I want to see it animated and embedded in the note.
This is a pretty nifty workflow, and I admit a useful one. I am not sure if gifs can be viewed inline withing Emacs, but so far I haven't seen nor tried, so this is a definite shortcoming.
> Another key priority for me is set up and ease-of-use,
Emacs is absolute horrific experience here. It is a terrible match for anyone looking to setup and start in under 5 minutes, especially because it is wildly different from anything you might have come across.
> You said that you used Evernote in the past, I'm honestly curious why you abandoned it
Evernote, way when I used it was still pretty cool. It allowed saving whole webpages directly, and linking them inside notes. But for a broke student from not-so-rich country, its free tier of 60MB ran out very very quickly. Paid tiers were prohibively expensive as $1 meant a day's sustenance or more. I also had a crappy laptop and Evernote wasn't the fastest thing around. It also forced me to think in terms of Notebooks and hierarchy. The notes and notebooks are also not so easily greppable. The UI of Evernote, its biggest strength during on boarding, became crippling for me. As for why kicked it for me in the end is, as you mentioned, single commerical entity ultimately controlling my collected knowledge and its structure. I am personally not comfortable putting thousands of hours of work so someone else can control it. I also write my journal in org-mode, with detailed analysis of social interactions (I'm not good at people, if its not clear by now :)) and I don't want anybody but me taking a peek.
Fortunately, Evernote works for you! And thanks to detailed requirements, someone might refer this conversation in future and make an informed decision based on it, as I once did :)
> 1. Can I embed images and more specifically can I embed animated GIF files?
This would use a lot of resources and quickly burden Standards Notes' servers. If it means we can't add images and Standard Notes is free because of that, that's a price I'm willing to pay.
"Encrypt, store, share [files] on your own terms" is elegantly handled by (Rob Pike's) Upspin.
Practically: upspinfs fusermounts a cloud storage bucket. (TCO: $0.01/GB/mo.) Transparent public-key crypto. Sharing is built into the protocol. Sane defaults.
like u said notes are really personal. I personally prefer paper the most, but if its about electronic notes, I settled with a folder that gets synced with syncthing to all devices and also got git for easy offsite backups with push. (yeah, syncthing does that too, but I like to have a history in my backups, to allow for single file and state restores)
In this folder I categorise with subfolders and use simple markdown files to write down stuff and todo.txt for when I need tasklists. A dedicated file in root is used for collecting random stuff before there get sorted and another to collect all links that I wanna bookmark.
This works very well on different types of devices at the same time. On android Markor is a good editor for it, on desktop/macs I recommend typora for the nice interface and obsidian.md for the nice navigation between files, if you don't have already have setup a favourite editor. Also works well with vim/emacs/vscode or anything else that handles plain text files.
I use Syncthing too! I will have to look into got backups sometime soon, so thanks for reminder.
I once waivered between markdown and org-mode. But the ecosystem of Emacs packages that build on top of org-mode is mindblowing. Tables with formulae, inline programming (in your language of choice), back links, PDF annotations, bibliography, automatic conversion to HTML/PDF/LaTeX, still unmatched repetitive tasks in TODOs, even simple text collapsing, and so much more. And none of this weighs down your particular setup because you just ignore what you don't use and it never loads!
I personally realised that I'm never going todo any serious editing on my phones so Orgro/Orgzly work very well on Android. And since everything is plaintext, any org file can be opened in any editor and edited normally. I have a simple editor app from f-droid which works very well.
"What's emacs?" that's what a your every day Joe is going to ask you. The very reason note apps/platforms exist is to simplify the on boarding process. Of course that's a two edged sword. You give normal users an easy way out but now pro users get frustrated because they can't use their favorite tool.
Yes, Emacs for average Joe is a non starter. Which is why I mentioned anyone serious about note taking. Most average joes are not really serious about maintaining, organizing and retrieving information. Anybody who is, OTOH, eventually builds up a monstrosity. Its like putting floors on a tent and one day waking up to Empire State. Now the very foundation that allowed quick start starts limiting your construction and daily use. Emacs is exact opposite of that. It is only useful if you are already aware of complex requirements of your note taking flow, and allows to mould itself to suit them.
One more factor hindering Emacs adaptability is its very unique nature. There nothing else like it out there, nobody encounters it before they explicitly start off on it with clear intent.
Can you pull it up on your phone when you're out and need to jot something down? (Honestly wondering, I've always toyed with org mode, but half my notes are taken on the run.)
the way they have their free and paid features separated seems pretty lame. with other note taking services, if i decide to go back to the free tier for a while it will still be useable for the most part but with standard notes i would lose basic features like the ability to organise notes or to edit them in the same way. so basically once you start paying you are locked in for life
I used the app quite actively for a couple of years and maybe had one conflict at most.
Maybe I don’t do edits as intensely as you do.
The free plan was perfectly adequate for the first year, then I explored the editors in the paid plan but found I got used to plain text much more so switched off all the add-ons. Was happy to compensate developers for a great app.
Forgotten password recovery is very simple:
Export an unencrypted backup on one device, delete the account from everywhere, recreate the account, reimport the backup.
Search in a single big list worked absolutely fine for me but maybe it’s just the way my brain works :-)
I didn’t notice much feature disparity but then again maybe I just like minimalism.
Same about the UI - it’s perfect. Very fast and no clutter.
Not sure what is absurd about their pricing. I paid the 5 year plan mainly as a token of thanks, because the app is absolutely perfect for my taste and use.
It's great that SN works well for you but reading about your workarounds/compromises do not make SN better but you as a user better.
For example, as you detailed, there is a way to recover your password but you have to do all the steps manually (although I still don't know how you are going to delete your account without your password...).
> Same about the UI - it’s perfect.
I am curious as to how no context menu for notes makes for a perfect UI for you.
The point is of course there are workarounds and ways to make things work for you and that's okay for a free app. If you pay for a service, you want that service to do every thing you want because that's the whole point.
The link on your website under the end-to-end heading leads to the Privacy Policy, that only mentions "XChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF & Argon2" which is far from enough details, especially for a closed source app with no audits.
From the names it sounds like you use libsodium, which is good, but it doesn't make rolling your own protocol safe.
We are a bit lacking on the documentation side currently. However, there is no new protocol. It says "XChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF & Argon2" because that's the core part. Everything else is standard.
I'll write up a doc on how encryption + syncing works though. And I have full plans to open source the security related parts of the app.
> 3. They don't allow any form of account recovery. Which sounds really epic on paper but once you forget your password, you lose all your data.
I actually like this. It's not a misfeature, but a feature. Too often email is a single point of failure and it's how the bulk of account takeover attacks happen. Compromise an email account, and you compromise every account attached to that email. Just don't forget your password to Standard Notes. Can't be hard right?
It's inconvenient and unnecessary. I don't get what can be so hard about just giving the user the encryption key. In the recovery flow you can just ask the user for the recovery key to decrypt the data and reset the password. That's how Notesnook does it. The email can never become a single point of failure like this.
If there is another piece of data that can be used in the same way as the password (or to override/reset the password) then it is completely equivalent to the password itself from a security perspective.
If you can lose the password, what prevents you losing both the password and this secondary key at the same time? If you store them in separate places, then just store two copies of the original password in those two places.
What you say is right and that is how password managers work. However, human habit is that people generally keep their password in their heads. The point of giving a secondary key is that:
1. Since it is longer, the user is forced to store it in a file or some other place
2. The message behind "recovery key" is different to the "password" so users react different to it. Giving it more value and attention.
3. Encryption keys are still rare in clients so it stands out and the user again gives it more attention.
With that said, it is entirely possible that the user won't save the key or lose it. In which case, nothing can be done.
It isn't an ideal solution to account recovery problem but so far I have found this to be the only solution if you are going the zero-knowledge route.
> Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits.
> They don't allow any form of account recovery. Which sounds really epic on paper but once you forget your password, you lose all your data.
You can't have both. If the service has account recovery after you lose your password or encryption keys, it can only mean that there is no any meaningful encryption. Just don't lose your passwords, it's quite simple these days with passwords managers.
> You can't have both. If the service has account recovery after you lose your password or encryption keys, it can only mean that there is no any meaningful encryption.
Incorrect. Check Notesnook[1]. It solves both of those things.
Since the encryption key is basically derived from your password, Notesnook allows you to backup the encryption key.
This encryption key + a random salt is used to encrypt all the data client-side.
In case you forget your password but have the encryption key somewhere safe, you can easily use the encryption key to have your data decrypted.
Notesnook does the above by sending a recovery link to your email. After you click on the email, it authenticates you for a short period of time (30m) and shows the recovery UI. You can put your recovery key in the input. The app downloads the encrypted data from the server, decrypts using the key you gave, and if successful, asks you for a new password. Once you give the new password, it re-encrypts everything using the new encryption key.
All this happens in 2 steps. You can try it out yourself.
If you have the encrypted key 'somewhere safe', it is not account recovery because your key was never lost. It is just a more elaborate password change.
As I've said, you can't have both meaningful encryption (as in service operators can't decrypt data by themselves) and account recovery (as in you've lost credentials necessary to access account).
> If you have the encrypted key 'somewhere safe', it is not account recovery because your key was never lost. It is just a more elaborate password change.
Uh...what? I think you misunderstood. You use the "password" to access your account, encryption key to decrypt the data. You lose the password, you lose access to your account and your data. However, server has the ability to grant you access to your account without the password. BUT Access is not equal to decryption of data.
The key that you have is used to decrypt your data on your device. The "service operator" is never involved in the decryption step; only the access step.
This is the only way to recover account access + data for zero knowledge apps. It is similar to the [backup data -> delete account -> create new account -> restore backup] process but it's automated and much more secure.
> The key that you have is used to decrypt your data on your device.
Oh so you need a safely stored key and your own device to decrypt data. Lol. Why do you say we need to use that service, if all is done on user's device?
but being serious, everything you say just proves my point, yet, somehow, you refuse to see it.
Almost all the features you mentioned are related to UI. Personally, I'd rather have something that prioritizes no account recovery over too much UI magic. As long as they make it easy to move my data around (import/export), I'm not too worried.
But yes, it would be nice to have a better rich text editor.
UX is very lacking. You can’t have local text files (that you can backup on your own). The entire thing is, and feels just like, a web app in a poorly designed wrapper app.
There were few more glaring issues the last time I was comparing note apps to replace notion + nv (+ Dyrii) setup. I’ve decided to give FSNotes a try. Hope I like it and it doesn’t go Electron or subscription later.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadBeen using Joplin for a couple years. It's one of those few open-source apps that managed to find a golden ratio of functionality but still to the point, a coherent pleasant experience across desktop and mobile.
Missing a basic collab or note sharing functionality though. It's all open formats and that, sure one could hack around it, but more in the spirit of mutual access to encrypted notebooks for example.
The sync works flawlessly and this is one of the strongest features it has.
I set it up using WebDAV and never ever had to worry about it working.
As far as E2EE note apps with mobile and desktop apps that sync go when I last looked in 2020, you have Standard Notes, Joplin, Inkdrop, Amplenote, Day One and DevonThink. I tried out Inkdrop seriously, but it wasn't better enough for me to switch and was more expensive than standard notes.
A lot of these apps are $5/month, and I feel like that is too much compared to the $3/month far more sophisticated utility apps like 1password are sold for.
https://gitlab.com/stavros/notes/
It's a bit ad-hoc, but it works well.
I use it with NextCloud sync to a Heztner NextCloud instance. Data is all mine, they can even be E2E-encrypted if I want.
Now a healthy plugin ecosystem is forming as well.
I've already sent some money once or twice and I am actively looking for places where I can contribute code as well.
Recommending others consider that as well.
The main reason is actually data freedom. By having all the data as plain text I can sync it and backup as I like, move between platforms (macOS, Linux) and if I get bored with those apps or they disappear I switch easily or even write my own.
VSCode is 69 MB, this is 101 MB
Yea because no one ever needs to access their notes anywhere with bad/no connection.
Also, Electron makes this a no-go for me.
Side note: this is why I run Trilium Notes, another notes app, in the web browser instead of as a desktop app; I am already good at managing tabs, and not being able to merge the electron tab into my browser makes it harder to deal with (and less performant)
Not a native application, not my cup of tea.
This made me laugh. You mean like on a piece of paper?
Standard Notes is encrypted, and password protected. It can't ever be read by the provider or the host (which is the major problem with the majority of syncing notes apps), and it can't be read by a nosy friend or family member, unless you leave your computer unlocked and unattended (at which point all bets are off anyway).
It offers much, much better privacy than a piece of paper.
You can't say that about any software or hardware.
Sure, this same thing could be argued about electronic mail, computers and other encrypted devices but I feel something deeper would be lost a lot more often.
Imagine Kafka used an encryption tool on his work or countless of other silent authors whose work only came to life after their death when somebody else discovered it.
Food for thought though, for sure.
With an encrypted hard drive and a strong key, the files remain private even when the physical security is breached.
Even folks who love the philosophy want screenshots.
After the long rant about software complexity, I wanted to see their code to see if they walk the walk.
> We believe in building software that lasts.
(emphasis theirs).
So, I had a look. Their GitHub has dozens of repos, and the desktop one depends on the web one? Wait, the whole thing is written in typescript? I have absolutely nothing against typescript, but I honestly would have expected a boring language, with a simple repo, not with git submodules....and definitely not something that depends on web tech, of any kind.
That’s pretty insane if so. Especially for a “simple” note taking app.
This file contains their list of direct dependencies (which is a lot smaller, but that just tells you how much of a dependency explosion you get when you use `npm` packages): https://github.com/standardnotes/desktop/blob/develop/packag...
One thing to note is the yarn.lock is probably the transitive closure of the compile-time dependencies (`devDependencies`) and run-time dependencies (`dependencies`), so it's possible that the dependencies that actually ship with the application are quite a bit smaller.
For example, `webpack` is in the devDependencies, which is the build tool. So the `yarn.lock` is listing all of the dependencies both for the runtime libraries that get used, but also the dependencies for all the build tooling as well.
Putting whether it’s an appropriate use of web technology or not aside, I’m not quite sure how they would be able to build a cross platform application [2] with a small team [1] without largely relying on code reuse of some kind. For better or worse, web tech has been the status quo for some time. Ironically making this the boring route for making these apps.
As much as I hate how resource intensive these apps are, it’s also not really that surprising they’re built this way, knowing the current alternatives and their barriers to entry.
Maybe one day we’ll have lighter weight alternatives, that are just as easy to use. or maybe they exist and they’re just not that well known ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But yeah their “building something that lasts” just sounds like marketing speak
[1] I’m assuming it’s a small company (since I’ve never heard of this before)
[2] the app appears to support iOS, Android, Linux, macOS, windows & the web
The app store preview shows iPad form factor so that's pretty useful.
But for desktop, I clicked on windows expecting a Microsoft store link, but instead it starts an immediate 101MB binary download, so beware.
I don't use the desktop app as the web version works fine. The Android app works fine as well. Sync is great and note edit history is great. I mostly use plain text and the task editor for ticking off things.
It works, it's open source, it gets out of your way and Mo and team are responsive when rare issues come up. I use it every day and I'm happy to be paying for it to support it.
(Aside: you can check Notesnook (https://notesnook.com) out as an alternative. Disclaimer: I am the dev).
Nice shade of blue.
My experience with SN was that the editors are half fleshed out, incompatible with each other, and make it hard to use with other tools. The notes can be markdown, html, text, or other formats as well as being encrypted. This makes exporting very annoying to use.
Contrast to other tools like obsidian.. it’s just markdown. I can sync it across devices just by sharing the folder. SN is a great concept, but there’s a lot of design decisions I hated while using it.
I even paid for the 5 year Standard Notes subscription as I believed in the project and assumed design improvements would come, but the editor experience never improved and just feels clunky.
I've liked Standard Notes. It's really nice that it's open source and encrypted. However I ran into some instances of cross-device conflicting edits which were a bit annoying, and Obsidian's UI and Second Brain features swayed me to try it. The graph view is really cool and I realized I didn't need syncing as much as I thought.
Obsidian does seem to also have a paid sync feature (no mobile app yet). For now I've been emailing myself from my phone and taking small audio memos, then typing them into Obsidian when back at my laptop. Not an ideal workflow but it's not bad and has some advantages.
I see here - https://standardnotes.org/knowledge/2/what-is-end-to-end-enc... the claim is: "Whenever we move your encrypted data over a network, in order to deliver services to you, it is sent over a strictly secure connection to only our private servers. Because this data is encrypted, we can't read it, and we can’t sell it."
(I use Standard Notes, and if there's some element of the security model that I'm misunderstanding, I'd like to know :) )
There're one or two minor issues (not being able to search within individual notes, and some scrolling bugs on iOS iirc that I need to report at some point), but given that I'm using it across 4 platforms (iOS/macOS/Windows/Android), it seems to be working really well.
And the lead developer seems quite sincerely committed/principled to the software's principles, which is nice.
edit: I haven't tried out Joplin/Obsidian, which people seem to like here. Oh gosh I think I'm ok for now - my current solution solves my problem.
If you need something more specific to a given language, that's an IDE, not a note taking program. If you need to write something with a bunch of rich formatting, that's a word processor, not a note taking program.
The point of a note taking program is to be as blindingly simple, fast, and reliable as possible. It's the software equivalent of grabbing a scrap of paper (or maybe a little flip notebook) and scratching something down before you forget it. All this complexity defeats the purpose. A 200MB Electron app with web integration definitely defeats the purpose.
For the curious and lazy, this is what it looks like: https://files.catbox.moe/kcelmg.PNG. Note that this was after I clicked off a large, complex dialog nagging me to create an account and sign in. Already this looks way too complex for my taste.
Why are people so endlessly fascinated with forcing everything on the cloud? I have txt and rtf documents from decades ago that have survived through backup after backup. Meanwhile, if this program's servers go down tomorrow, tough luck.
Sure, you can spend a lot of time forcing notepad and word into some sad version of a real app. Or you can pony up $5-10 a month, save your time for something valuable, and actually have a note taking app that’ll serve you well.
1. Note organization via tags with a searchable database 2. Secure off-site backup 3. Device-to-device syncing
I'm sure there are more. I wish it wasn't written in Electron, but it wouldn't exist otherwise.
As a web application: https://app.standardnotes.org/
> Meanwhile, if this program's servers go down tomorrow, tough luck.
It is open source, you can run the server yourself: https://github.com/standardnotes/syncing-server
Of course, for very simple note taking you don't need this but it again comes back to my original point that by using a dedicated app, everything, including the rough 1 minute notes, are in one easy-to-find place.
I myself take a lot of txt notes but easily lose them as well. Fortunately for me, they aren't important and I rarely need to access them again but it's always nice if I have them all in once place so I can go over them and see what I wrote/did.
Disclaimer: I am a developer of a note-taking application called Notesnook[1]. Some might say it is a (hopefully better) alternative to Standard Notes.
[1] https://notesnook.com/
This conflict of desires lead me to the age old trade-off of security versus convenience. If I want security / privacy, I should use only local text editing tools and keep everything on an encrypted volume, preferably on an airgapped machine. If I want pure convenience, I should use any of the million great cloud-based note and document options that are available on any device. If I want to fall anywhere between those extremes on the spectrum, I'll need to decide the most convenient option I can bear that provides the most security. And for me, I landed on Standard Notes when exploring this question for myself.
It's a lightweight and easy text editing program that is encrypted and secure anytime my writing leaves my sphere of control. It allows for search of my notes, filtering by title and date created/modified, and it has great sync between all of my devices to the point that I can pick it up any device and write a thought as it comes and not worry about sync conflicts if multiple instances of my note are open across devices. There are easy options to automate encrypted local backups and even daily cloud-based ones if you're a paying customer. I can export everything to plain text quite easily - which is my preferred format - so I'm in no way dependent on their continuing to exist.
If you want to read/write notes seamlessly across all of your devices and you also want to stay private and secure, your options grow limited right away. Standard Notes is the best compromise of these competing interests that I've found so far for my own situation. So even though I have the ability to use other tools as you've described - and many of them are better writing tools than Standard Notes - I still choose to pay SN as a customer.
Standard Notes is one of the few apps that has end-to-end encrytion AND password protection on the desktop (or Face ID on mobile devices). Joplin is E2E but refuses to encrypt locally, meaning someone who browses your computer can view your notes unless you use Joplin Portable in an encrypted container (with the added performance overhead).
However, compared to Joplin, uploading images to notes is a pain. Standard Notes has multiple text editor options and they all suck. Only the "bold" editor allows you to upload images, and using FileSafe is extremely fiddly. Personally I would rather have one really good text editor than a bunch of half-baked ones.
But Joplin is sluggish compared to both Standard Notes and Obsidian.md. Obsidian.md has the benefit of having everything as plain text files, for easy editing in other apps (there's also no need to export anything if they go out of business compared to Standard Notes/Joplin). But Obsidian's mobile app is still in development, and I'm a bit iffy about buying another subscription just for encrypted sync.
...And, if open source doesn't matter to you, there's always Microsoft OneNote.
Obsidian's pricing seems a bit weird to be in general, in that its publish/hosting functionality is priced around individual workspaces rather than either users or total usage.
Because of that I'm never going to actually use said publish functionality (even though I would have paid for it in an instant if it was set up differently), because my use cases for it would involve publishing from a number of different small workspaces for entirely different audiences, and the devs apparently haven't considered at all that people may want to do that.
[1]https://app.notesnook.com/ (it has a 14 day free trial)
is dark mode an option on the free tier?
Nothing at all. You can still edit and access them as normal. There's no limit on the amount of notes you can make on the free tier.
> is dark mode an option on the free tier? Yep.
As for the subscription model, it's necessary to support development of a Web & mobile app where versioning is much harder as opposed to a desktop version.
The price $2.48/month means $1488/50 years, I would rather choose a buyout payment for $200.
I really miss it but it was no longer maintained and falling into disrepair on newer OSes due to lacking support for DPI scaling and dark modes.
I use onenote now as it comes with O365 anyway but like most things microsoft it's bloated and slow. It offers a lot more features (tomboy couldn't even do inline pictures!) But fast responsiveness means more to me.
I'd consider standard notes but there's so many of these apps around and most are not WYSIWYG editors but instead markdown with a separate preview window. I hate that. And they tend to be slow electron stuff which makes them no better than onenote.
Not sure if this one is an exception but if so I might try it.
I've read this a couple of times on HN. Can someone fill me in here? Is the claim that electron apps are slow justified? If so why, technically, are they slow?
The main one I use is Slack and it is perfectly fine on my machine.
What does make an electron app slow is the app itself. Obviously. You have VSCode that is blazing fast even for humongous files and you also have some other not so fast apps.
Another huge issue raised is size. To be honest, 100 MB isn't abnormal for a desktop app. Look at any Qt app, it can be around 100 MB too. Same for dotnet.
Of course native is better but most developers don't have the resources for that.
Edit: I see people down voting without giving any reason. I know this is an unpopular opinion but come on. The days when you could use VSCode as an example of slow, clunky Electron app are gone. What's slow and huge is Jetbrains IntelliJ or Visual Studio; both native. VSCode proved that you can make a fast electron app; it just needs work like any other thing.
What makes you think they didn't have a reason? I didn't downvote you but you've made a few divisive assertions. For example, your "blazing fast" is my "performs acceptably".
Also, I'd be interested to know what you count as blazing fast.
That being said, with extensions enabled it can be a totally different story - some extensions will try to load the text content on every editor opening or even edit, which gets unusable very quickly. (Yes they run in a separate process, but that’s not a cure-all)
Tested on 2018 MBP.
(On VS code team, had nothing to do with the editor perf)
However most apps don't, and even MS' other apps are total crap, like MS Teams. If it was so easy to take the lessons learned from VS Code and apply it to their other apps they would do so I'm sure.
Skype for Business for Mac also comes to mind. Sometimes it takes up 800MB of memory. For an IM app..... :X
In fact, this morning a colleague of mine was showing me on Zoom that their Slack desktop app never finishes loading instead just displaying a white screen, so they need to use the website instead. Although I guess that's more of a comment on software quality than bloat.
I don't mean to say that all Electron apps are slow and clunky. VS Code for example is very impressive for an Electron app.
takes ages to open, takes ages to resize, etc etc. my hands shake whenever I have to interact with that mess (thankfully ripcord exists)
my computer is an intel 6900k (16-core) with 64 gb of ram and a gtx 1080 so processing power is not an issue.
I just did a comparison with slack running in chrome and, maybe I'm saying something silly here, but the difference seems to be that I'm simply unable to resize the chrome window at the same speed when the tab inside is displaying slack. So I was unable to "leave the content behind" as you did in your video of the electron app (and as I was also able to do with the electron app).
I don't want to waste hundreds of MBs of memory just on one small app :)
There's good Electron apps, yes. Like VS code, which is fast and optimised and uses very little resources. But most Electron apps are wasteful. Even the other ones from MS like Teams are horrible.
However something self-hosted would be nicer.
With other O365 services it's more of a problem indeed. I use cryptomator on top of OneDrive to mitigate.
You could contribute to it, and try to bring the project back to life!!! (I mean, any/most of us here on HN could!)
Tomboy is free and open-source software, licensed under the LGPL license[1]. It's also written in C# (which is pretty wonderful language to work with on a GUI application, especially compared to C or C++ or even maybe Vala).
It would be wonderful to breathe a new life to it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomboy_(software)
Also, the Gnome team seems to have deprecated it in favour of a rebuild called tomboy-ng that's written in something new (Delphi I think?). And lacks the benefits of the old one like fast responsiveness and auto hyperlinking. I don't like it at all :)
I would say the friction to try it out is pretty low as there is nothing to lock you in. It simply reads and writes data in a markdown format directly to your hard drive -- think VSCode but for notes.
Good stuff!
With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don't mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but:
1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can't even try out many of their editors.
2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am not sure how having 3 kinds of rich text editors is helpful but they have them.
3. They don't allow any form of account recovery. Which sounds really epic on paper but once you forget your password, you lose all your data.
4. The feature parity between their different apps across platforms is abysmal. The android app is notoriously feature lacking compared to the Web version. (They did put out an update which hopefully changes things).
5. In my extensive usage of the app, conflicts are very normal. I have no issue with that but there's no way to resolve them without creating duplicate copies of the note which clutters up the UI.
5. the UX is poor. No right click on notes, no distraction free mode, no way to collapse the huge notes list.
6. Search and organization seems like an after thought. The only way to organize is via tags. Tags are nice and all but there's not much you can do with them.
7. Their pricing seems absurd.
8. The development seems to be going no where. They are active but many of the above issues are still not addressed.
But as I said, it's not all bad. Most people won't notice the above in their initial usage. They have a solid app with okay features.
If you are a new user looking for encrypted notes and all that hosh posh or just an alternative to SN, you should also give Notesnook[1][2] a try; it solves all of the above issues in a sensible way. Do note that I am the dev so I am obviously biased. It's not perfect but I think it is a better alternative.
[1]https://notesnook.com/
[2]https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook/ (it's not open source but the repo has some good FAQ that you might be interested in reading).
I mean, why should privacy be at such a huge risk to users' data?
For the tech savy, Notesnook offers account recovery by giving the user option (actual kind of forcing) to save the encryption key someplace safe. Not ideal, of course, but better than nothing.
> had they not saved it somewhere safe?
I had to delete 2 user accounts because they hadn't saved the key at all. All others had saved and were able to recover access. However, most didn't even realize they had saved it until I asked them to check their phone storage. A normal user would do anything to get past dialogs and popups, including clicking on random buttons.
1. Either the key is only as secure as what ever random online service you have it backed up on (in which case, it might as well be stored at SN and save the user all kinds of headaches)
2. The key isn't backed up, and this won't be realized until the worst possible time.
2. True but there are a couple of things you can do: i) regularly remind the user via email and in-app notification to backup their recovery key. ii) force the user to download/copy the recovery key on login/signup.
By force, I really do mean force. Don't let the user use the app until they click the download recovery key button.
The refund process is not automatic either, be prepared for a back-and-forth with customer support if you want to cancel a subscription.
Looking forward to the desktop apps and possibly offline support!
That's awesome. I am glad you liked it!
> Looking forward to the desktop apps and possibly offline support!
The desktop apps are coming soon. You can track our roadmap on Github: https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook/blob/main/ROADMAP...
What platform are you using Simplenote on? On macOS at least, you can write in Markdown and preview it with Cmd+Shift+P. Spellcheck also seems to work for me, but maybe that's a macOS thing and not specifically a Simplenote thing.
Disclosure: I work at Automattic, but not on Simplenote.
I actually really like their pricing model. You can buy years in advance, and they occasionally offer steep discounts (I think I bought two decades in advance around new year?). In a time where more and more services offer me no other way than some crappy monthly subscription that I cannot pay in advance and without auto-renewal, this is really much appreciated.
That being said, a lot of your points seem valid - I've started using SN quite some time ago and haven't really noticed any new features since (except for some editor-improvements). Organization is indeed something that probably could use some love, the tags do suffice for me personally (especially with that one extension that lets you create folders with tags), but barely. While I appreciate their stability with regards to UX (it looks/feels the same since forever), the features you mentioned (collapsing, rightclick-menu) would not hurt.
Their 'lack of new features' however is, as far as I understood, somewhat intentional - back when I bought it I've read somewhere on the page that they explicitly have the philosophy to also say 'No' to new features if they think it threatens their guarantee of long-term stability/support. Which I think is a very admirable stance these days where short-term-KPIs seem to dominate entire industries.
Um that sounds great but I don't see how a simple thing like a "right-click menu" endangers longevity? All their talk of simplicity and yet they allow you to add a whole spreadsheet editor? I suppose adding editors is simple stuff that's why they have so many. Maybe longevity = less work?
Features are not bad. Some features are necessary. Some features enhance the general user experience and even make things simpler. Stagnation is not longevity, it's just slow death.
As for pricing: sure, the long term plan is appealing but they ask $9/mo? Which is the most expensive note taking app out there, I think.
You buy for 5 years or 20 years but what if nothing in the service changes in 20 years but your situation/use case changes drastically as is normal? What do you do of the additional money you paid? You can't get it back.
I don't think 5 year commitment speaks of longevity, that's just marketing. Longevity would be them taking the money after 5 years, not before.
I personally love monthly models because I spend exactly the amount I need and I can stop/pause when I want and start it again when I want. Its freedom and there's no commitment. That's why I added only 1 monthly plan in Notesnook.
A service should ask you to commit long term because the risk is always too high. Instead it should allow for multiple ways to get your data out in case it ever goes down. And if it goes down, you can be sure that you lose only 1 month of fees.
If you say this list is all over the place, then that is because requirements vary depending on purpose, not the other way around.
After almost a decade of experimenting, I have come to realise that the best note-taking tool by far is org-mode.
It is free, it is extensible, it is not going anywhere in next decade+, it let's me encrypt on my own terms, it let's me store and share on my own terms, it is as lightweight or as heavyweight as I want, it can be as pretty or as ugly as I want, I can edit it anywhere, search and organization is ridiculously advanced compared to anything else out there (or everything else is ridiculously behind).
Its biggest strength and arguably biggest weakness is its tied to Emacs. It is a horrible learning curve for beginners, which is why it took me a decade to get to org-mode in the first place, but once you have climbed that hill, you are basically on top of the world.
Everybody serious about note-taking should give org-mode a try.
1. Can I embed images and more specifically can I embed animated GIF files?
2. Can I embed MP3s and play them within the note?
3. Does it support rich text editor functionality including the ability to insert tables easily from programs like Microsoft excel?
4. Can I use multiple fonts in the same individual note including monospaced ones and broad support for Unicode?
5. Can I easily sync and edit the data on my iPad, then on my android phone without having to worry about where the data is stored?
6. Will it automatically OCR embedded images and allow me to do text searches across my entire set of notes based on that text?
If the answer to most of these questions is no, then it doesn't sound like org-note is the best note taking editor as you claim, it just sounds like it's the best editor for your specific set of criteria which does not apply to all notetakers. And that's the problem with trying to narrow down the best note editing tool, it's such a broad area that every notetaker will have their own idiosyncratic needs and priorities.
As for me, I have also experimented with a great deal of note editing utilities and the only one that has reasonably met most of my requirements is Evernote.
EDIT: of course if the answer is yes, then I may just have a new favorite note editor.
2. Same as above, except playback will require a plugin.
3. Absolutely! Tables are fully supported, with automatic formatting and formulae and lots more. This is one of the strong areas of org-mode.
4. You can get bold, italic, monospaced varieties inline, with minimal markdown-like syntax. If you are asking for rich text mixing two different fonts, then no.
5. Yes! Since everything is stored in text files, you can syc them via any means you deem fit. I personally have multiple Syncthing nodes (desktop, laptop and phones) and it works flawlessly.
>it's the best editor for your specific set of criteria
You are right. Perhaps better description would be org-mode is the worst note-taking tool, except all others.
Why I would deem it best is because after decade of experimenting, I've cone to realise that plaintext is the king. Rich editors with inline images, media and fancy fonts are nice and necessary when you're preparing presentations or impressing someone, but when time comes to actual utility when talking about years upon years of notes and other documents, everything else falls short very quickly.
Images and videos cannot be grepped, searching through formatted documents like Word where search program has rk ignore all the formatting is inherently slow and ultimately inaccurate. Compressing and encrypting and sharing plaintext is a breeze. Plaintext can be read thoroughly or skimmed through as needed. While writing plaintext, I don't have to worry about messing up formatting of whole document by entering right character at wrong place and then fiddling about it for hours.
Rich text is nice for when your notes are small. They are nice to feel. But when you are rummaging about a mountain (which everyone eventually builds up if they document anything seriously), nothing matches sheer speed and utility of plaintext.
Which leaves either dumb text or markdown. Markdown is nice, but org-mode is markdown in steroids. Even the simple act of being able to collapse sections with single key is a huge huge QoL improvement. Then there or org-babel for inline programming like Jupyter, org-roam for back links, org-ref for bibliography, pdf-tools with org roam for inline PDF annotation, and you can still grep everything mentioned here.
Ultimately the purpose of notes (for me, goes without saying) is to preserve and eventually refer to, information. And plaintext, in my personal anecdotal opinion and experience, beats every other medium for storing, transferring, modifying and analyzing information.
But for that little editing, Orgzly all from f-droid is pretty great. As a side bonus, it handles TODOs from my org-agenda to generate Android notifications! Very handy and very private.
I'm not sure of Syncthing story on iOS as I don't have an apple device, but you can always store your notes on dropbox/icloud/whathaveyou. Unfortunately I lack any experience to be helpful with Apple devices otherwise.
I'm still shopping for a good vim-based note taking solution.
https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/
While actually editing, org-roam has simple double-bracket syntax that auto-completes existing filenames. If filename doesn't exist, it is created when the link is accessed first time automatically.
Hierarchy gets established automatically as I track back links, or via org-roam graph view. But really, once I started linking notes extensively (because its so easy with org-roam), I realised that my structure ended up mostly as a graph rather than tree. However, org-mode itself has excellent tree style syntax within individual file, which comes in handy.
Searching/analyzing can be done either from withing Emacs via elisp or externally via ripgrep/fd (I'm still noon at elisp)/
It is also the only note taking system I have seen that will let you link to an email. If you want to add a todo entry deep in some meeting notes reminding you to checkup on that email in 3 weeks, you can. And those todos will then show up in your agenda view.
Unfortunately this doesn't work if you don't already use Emacs as your email client, which I guess you don't if you aren't also using org-mode.
I've never felt like rich text editor's have gotten in my way, I can start immediately typing into a note in Evernote without ever feeling like the rich text somehow hinders my ability to be able to quickly transfer my thoughts.
For you, as you've said, you don't see the utility of rich text outside of presentations. But when I'm drawing up and working on new projects I like to have embedded imagery for my flow charts, when I'm working on music I like to include snippets of melodies, and I like to be able to easily take screenshots of things I'm working on and transfer them and embed them easily.
I like the ability to be able to copy code blocks from programs like visual studio and web storm knowing that I can preserve the color scheme and monospaced font. It makes readability great.
When I want to make a note about remembering how to perform some complicated task in Photoshop (for example) I might make a quick animation as a gif file and I want to see it animated and embedded in the note.
Evernote also lets me link notes to each other and can even do some interesting auto related suggestions for notes that are similar in context as well as allowing me to tag notes in addition to putting them in a traditional folder like hierarchy.
I am not a casual user at this point as I have about 5000 notes with folders and tags associated with them. I've been building this note store for the last 10 years in Evernote after switching from One Note. And at least for me the search capabilities are for all intents and purposes instantaneous. Evernote in particular does have a few minor issues with the inability to be able to do regex searches or partial word versus whole word searches but they're minor and don't really impact my daily experience.
Another key priority for me is set up and ease-of-use, it took me less than five minutes to understand how Evernote worked and to have it syncing and searchable across my Macbook, my PC, my android and my iPad.
I do think you make strong points but fundamentally we have very different workflows and that's what makes our requirements so vastly different.
You said that you used Evernote in the past, I'm honestly curious why you abandoned it. If it has limitations with regard to notetaking I certainly haven't encountered them - of course as a safety measure I also make weekly back ups of my Evernote store as a series of exported HTML files. To me this is the biggest shortcoming, ultimately I don't control the central repository, if I ever found an Evernote competitor with comparable features that could connect to an s3, FTP or even dropbox i would switch in a heartbeat.
org-babel allows this, with added ability to (optionally) execute and see and interact with output inline.
> Evernote also lets me link notes to each other and can even do some interesting auto related suggestions for notes that are similar in context as well as allowing me to tag notes in addition to putting them in a traditional folder like hierarchy.
Fully supported via org-roam, with added bonus of backlinks.
> When I want to make a note about remembering how to perform some complicated task in Photoshop (for example) I might make a quick animation as a gif file and I want to see it animated and embedded in the note.
This is a pretty nifty workflow, and I admit a useful one. I am not sure if gifs can be viewed inline withing Emacs, but so far I haven't seen nor tried, so this is a definite shortcoming.
> Another key priority for me is set up and ease-of-use,
Emacs is absolute horrific experience here. It is a terrible match for anyone looking to setup and start in under 5 minutes, especially because it is wildly different from anything you might have come across.
> You said that you used Evernote in the past, I'm honestly curious why you abandoned it
Evernote, way when I used it was still pretty cool. It allowed saving whole webpages directly, and linking them inside notes. But for a broke student from not-so-rich country, its free tier of 60MB ran out very very quickly. Paid tiers were prohibively expensive as $1 meant a day's sustenance or more. I also had a crappy laptop and Evernote wasn't the fastest thing around. It also forced me to think in terms of Notebooks and hierarchy. The notes and notebooks are also not so easily greppable. The UI of Evernote, its biggest strength during on boarding, became crippling for me. As for why kicked it for me in the end is, as you mentioned, single commerical entity ultimately controlling my collected knowledge and its structure. I am personally not comfortable putting thousands of hours of work so someone else can control it. I also write my journal in org-mode, with detailed analysis of social interactions (I'm not good at people, if its not clear by now :)) and I don't want anybody but me taking a peek.
Fortunately, Evernote works for you! And thanks to detailed requirements, someone might refer this conversation in future and make an informed decision based on it, as I once did :)
This would use a lot of resources and quickly burden Standards Notes' servers. If it means we can't add images and Standard Notes is free because of that, that's a price I'm willing to pay.
Practically: upspinfs fusermounts a cloud storage bucket. (TCO: $0.01/GB/mo.) Transparent public-key crypto. Sharing is built into the protocol. Sane defaults.
https://upspin.io/doc/faq.md
https://youtu.be/ENLWEfi0Tkg
Building notes on top feels almost too straightforward to monetize. (For that matter: 1password, any number of small-scale B2C things, ...)
In this folder I categorise with subfolders and use simple markdown files to write down stuff and todo.txt for when I need tasklists. A dedicated file in root is used for collecting random stuff before there get sorted and another to collect all links that I wanna bookmark.
This works very well on different types of devices at the same time. On android Markor is a good editor for it, on desktop/macs I recommend typora for the nice interface and obsidian.md for the nice navigation between files, if you don't have already have setup a favourite editor. Also works well with vim/emacs/vscode or anything else that handles plain text files.
I once waivered between markdown and org-mode. But the ecosystem of Emacs packages that build on top of org-mode is mindblowing. Tables with formulae, inline programming (in your language of choice), back links, PDF annotations, bibliography, automatic conversion to HTML/PDF/LaTeX, still unmatched repetitive tasks in TODOs, even simple text collapsing, and so much more. And none of this weighs down your particular setup because you just ignore what you don't use and it never loads!
I personally realised that I'm never going todo any serious editing on my phones so Orgro/Orgzly work very well on Android. And since everything is plaintext, any org file can be opened in any editor and edited normally. I have a simple editor app from f-droid which works very well.
"What's emacs?" that's what a your every day Joe is going to ask you. The very reason note apps/platforms exist is to simplify the on boarding process. Of course that's a two edged sword. You give normal users an easy way out but now pro users get frustrated because they can't use their favorite tool.
I am sure org-mode is as good as you say though.
One more factor hindering Emacs adaptability is its very unique nature. There nothing else like it out there, nobody encounters it before they explicitly start off on it with clear intent.
Can you pull it up on your phone when you're out and need to jot something down? (Honestly wondering, I've always toyed with org mode, but half my notes are taken on the run.)
Maybe I don’t do edits as intensely as you do.
The free plan was perfectly adequate for the first year, then I explored the editors in the paid plan but found I got used to plain text much more so switched off all the add-ons. Was happy to compensate developers for a great app.
Forgotten password recovery is very simple:
Export an unencrypted backup on one device, delete the account from everywhere, recreate the account, reimport the backup.
Search in a single big list worked absolutely fine for me but maybe it’s just the way my brain works :-)
I didn’t notice much feature disparity but then again maybe I just like minimalism.
Same about the UI - it’s perfect. Very fast and no clutter.
Not sure what is absurd about their pricing. I paid the 5 year plan mainly as a token of thanks, because the app is absolutely perfect for my taste and use.
For example, as you detailed, there is a way to recover your password but you have to do all the steps manually (although I still don't know how you are going to delete your account without your password...).
> Same about the UI - it’s perfect.
I am curious as to how no context menu for notes makes for a perfect UI for you.
The point is of course there are workarounds and ways to make things work for you and that's okay for a free app. If you pay for a service, you want that service to do every thing you want because that's the whole point.
Context menu? Not sure what would I be using it for. But then again it’s my mode of operation.
I also have Simplenote, which also works well, but the e2e encryption (and lack of account recovery!) is what attracts me to standard note.
About the plan. The point is: the free plan is absolutely perfect for me, and I choose to pay just to say thanks for a great product.
The only thing missing for me is ability to see multiple accounts merged in a single UI - that would allow very easy sharing of notes.
For that I use iCloud or simplenote.
The link on your website under the end-to-end heading leads to the Privacy Policy, that only mentions "XChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF & Argon2" which is far from enough details, especially for a closed source app with no audits.
From the names it sounds like you use libsodium, which is good, but it doesn't make rolling your own protocol safe.
I'll write up a doc on how encryption + syncing works though. And I have full plans to open source the security related parts of the app.
I actually like this. It's not a misfeature, but a feature. Too often email is a single point of failure and it's how the bulk of account takeover attacks happen. Compromise an email account, and you compromise every account attached to that email. Just don't forget your password to Standard Notes. Can't be hard right?
It's inconvenient and unnecessary. I don't get what can be so hard about just giving the user the encryption key. In the recovery flow you can just ask the user for the recovery key to decrypt the data and reset the password. That's how Notesnook does it. The email can never become a single point of failure like this.
If you can lose the password, what prevents you losing both the password and this secondary key at the same time? If you store them in separate places, then just store two copies of the original password in those two places.
1. Since it is longer, the user is forced to store it in a file or some other place
2. The message behind "recovery key" is different to the "password" so users react different to it. Giving it more value and attention.
3. Encryption keys are still rare in clients so it stands out and the user again gives it more attention.
With that said, it is entirely possible that the user won't save the key or lose it. In which case, nothing can be done.
It isn't an ideal solution to account recovery problem but so far I have found this to be the only solution if you are going the zero-knowledge route.
> They don't allow any form of account recovery. Which sounds really epic on paper but once you forget your password, you lose all your data.
You can't have both. If the service has account recovery after you lose your password or encryption keys, it can only mean that there is no any meaningful encryption. Just don't lose your passwords, it's quite simple these days with passwords managers.
Incorrect. Check Notesnook[1]. It solves both of those things.
[1]https://notesnook.com/
Since the encryption key is basically derived from your password, Notesnook allows you to backup the encryption key.
This encryption key + a random salt is used to encrypt all the data client-side.
In case you forget your password but have the encryption key somewhere safe, you can easily use the encryption key to have your data decrypted.
Notesnook does the above by sending a recovery link to your email. After you click on the email, it authenticates you for a short period of time (30m) and shows the recovery UI. You can put your recovery key in the input. The app downloads the encrypted data from the server, decrypts using the key you gave, and if successful, asks you for a new password. Once you give the new password, it re-encrypts everything using the new encryption key.
All this happens in 2 steps. You can try it out yourself.
As I've said, you can't have both meaningful encryption (as in service operators can't decrypt data by themselves) and account recovery (as in you've lost credentials necessary to access account).
Uh...what? I think you misunderstood. You use the "password" to access your account, encryption key to decrypt the data. You lose the password, you lose access to your account and your data. However, server has the ability to grant you access to your account without the password. BUT Access is not equal to decryption of data.
The key that you have is used to decrypt your data on your device. The "service operator" is never involved in the decryption step; only the access step.
This is the only way to recover account access + data for zero knowledge apps. It is similar to the [backup data -> delete account -> create new account -> restore backup] process but it's automated and much more secure.
Oh so you need a safely stored key and your own device to decrypt data. Lol. Why do you say we need to use that service, if all is done on user's device?
but being serious, everything you say just proves my point, yet, somehow, you refuse to see it.
But yes, it would be nice to have a better rich text editor.
There were few more glaring issues the last time I was comparing note apps to replace notion + nv (+ Dyrii) setup. I’ve decided to give FSNotes a try. Hope I like it and it doesn’t go Electron or subscription later.