GNU Emacs, which has been in active development for over 40 years, has a thriving note taking ecosystem based on Org-mode, a plaintext system for notes, documents, computational notebooks, literate programming, maintaining to-do lists, planning projects, and lots more. Ask your doctor if GNU Emacs is right for you.
Side effects may include: excessive online evangelism, endless configuration tinkering, pain and numbness in the pinkies, and smugness.
With hundreds of note taking apps coming and going, is there any single performant cross-platform non-Electron app with great conflict resolution for simple notes? Just to be more useful than an overpowered code editor + a file cloud?
Checked just 2 of these conditions here (native Windows and macOS and some iOS startup benchmarks) and there is literally not a single app!!! (to be fair, not every app is likely tested, but even without those it's 6 apps)
I'm happy for devs' "faster development", but as a user I care about "faster use", which Electron blocks outright
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47197267
The website's idea is great, but unfortunately it's not comprehensive/reliable, otherwise finding an alternative would be much easier.
Been meaning to switch to an open source app out of principle, one which can handle rich notes too.
Works well on all paltforms, desktop and mobile. The sync works also great. It also backs up to text files on your computer, so that you can back up your files with your regular backup process and you can also easily move away if you would like to one day.
So that if you want to use feature A you need a different view inside the app than if you want to use feature B. And if you use both, you constantly switch?
PS. And there is this surprise when you discover that all notes are versioned.
Markdown, cross platform and good supports for todo lists.
None of the current line up of alternatives are lightweight enough, it seems.
I still use email drafts for a lot of notes. Looking at my email draft folder the oldest one I have is from 2002 and I can still access it just fine, even on mobile.
How many of us have had ideas for little utilities and such that were never followed through on because the chances of even breaking even on them was so low? I know I have several.
For about a year I've noticed that it tends to quit on its own on my Mac. Whenever I need to look for a note I realize the app is inactive and I need to re-launch it. Then it works perfectly well, until somehow, at some point, it quits without me realizing.
It's sad that they're not fixing it, and that eventually it probably won't work with newer Mac OS and iOS versions. I should start looking for a way to migrate off of it.
- Joplin Server: supports Markdown, end-to-end encryption, and syncs across devices. The server component runs in Docker and acts as a sync target for the Joplin clients (desktop, mobile, CLI).
- Memos: lightweight, open source, designed for quick notes and personal memos. Single Docker container, SQLite by default. Closest to Simplenote in philosophy — simple and fast.
- Standard Notes: encrypted by default, has first-party apps for every platform. You can self-host the sync server, though the hosted version has a free tier too.
- Obsidian + self-hosted sync (via CouchDB or Livesync plugin): if you want local-first Markdown files with optional sync. More powerful than Simplenote but steeper learning curve.
For something closest to Simplenote's simplicity, Memos is probably the best fit. It's just a place to quickly jot things down without the overhead of Notion or Obsidian's feature set.