[HN Gopher] Show HN: An open source alternative to Evernote (Sel...
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Show HN: An open source alternative to Evernote (Self Hosted)
Author : vivekweb2013
Score : 203 points
Date : 2022-06-01 10:37 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| Kalanos wrote:
| Does it store images? Are you going to make a mobile app?
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| You can add the images inside markdown using existing image
| url. The image upload is not implemented yet. I've noted it &
| I'll work on this functionality
|
| Thanks for showing interest in the mobile app. I'm working on
| the android app prototype. You will see the app on play store
| soon.
| Krastan wrote:
| Why didn't you use react native? Your website is react which
| would have made it easy to copy over components.
| igtztorrero wrote:
| Nice Go code in API !!! I will use it and contribute!
| Congratulations! Long waiting for this !
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| Thanks so much. Golang is awesome. I've recently learned it.
| I'm looking forward to your contribution to codebase.
| arinlen wrote:
| I feel compelled to mention that Zotero [1] has been around for
| ages, has clients for most platforms, it's as FLOSS as it
| gets[2], and you are free to self-host if that's something you'd
| like.
|
| [1] https://www.zotero.org/
|
| [2] https://github.com/zotero
| jcuenod wrote:
| I use Zotero every day, but (1) self-hosting the server is not
| actually supported and (2) your notes are in a sqlite db.
|
| It is a great tool. I do wish I could self host, though, and I
| wish the db were just an index of md files (and maybe json for
| bibliographic details).
| Datenstrom wrote:
| Can second this I love Zotero. I only use it for research
| papers, e-books, and notes about them and I don't use it for
| personal notes or saving snipits of websites and such but I
| could see it also working well for that.
| [deleted]
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| The name needs to change.
|
| This tool commits the cardinal sin of choosing a name
| GitSomething, where Git is only incidental to the domain that the
| product is concerned with (notetaking) and which is made worse by
| being yet another project that says "Git" where what it means is
| "we're using the GitHub API".
|
| > You may not use the Marks in the following ways:
|
| ...
|
| > In any way that indicates that Git favors one distribution,
| platform, product, etc. over another except where explicitly
| indicated in writing by Conservancy.
|
| ...
|
| > In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in
| a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious",
| "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service
| without Conservancy's written permission. For the avoidance of
| doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use
| the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a
| product or service's use of Git code.
|
| http://git-scm.com/about/trademark
|
| > Let's say as an example that it does backups. We'd prefer it
| not call itself GitBackups. We don't endorse it, and it's just
| using the name to imply association that isn't there. You can
| come up with similar hypotheticals: GitMail that stores mailing
| list archives in Git, or GitWiki that uses Git as a backing
| store.
|
| https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...
|
| What's also notable is that it conflicts with what _is_
| permitted: 'Commands like "git-foo" (so you run it as "git foo")
| are generally OK. This is Git's well-known extension
| mechanism[...]' When "git-foo" exists, we've approved "Git Foo"
| as a matching project name'. This combined with the fact that Git
| itself already ships with the "git-notes" command baked right
| in...
| [deleted]
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| thanks for pointing out. I'll change the name.
| joekrill wrote:
| How do GitHub and Gitlab get away with this? Have they been
| given permission by Conservancy? Or are they in violation?
| hobbyjogger wrote:
| Essentially explained by the timing of Git adopting this
| policy (and actually having a trademark to enforce):
| https://public-
| inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...
| westurner wrote:
| IIRC GitHub, (BitBucket), and GitLab existed before this new
| (license-addendum?) Trademark policy; but may be wrong. Which
| is to say that I don't recall there having been such a
| trademark policy at the time. Isn't it actually the "Old BSD
| License" that retains the "may not spaketh the name" clause?
|
| (Bitcoin is also originally a LF project; in Git, like
| BitTorrent, and similar to BitGold only in name, for a
| reason. _Bitcoin initially lacked a Foundation to hold
| trademarks, in particular._ )
|
| The choosealicense.com table of licenses in the appendix is a
| service of GitHub, and GitLab also donates free CI build
| runner minutes for Open Source projects:
| https://choosealicense.com/appendix/#trademark-use :
|
| > _Trademark use_
|
| > _This license explicitly states that it does NOT grant
| trademark rights, even though licenses without such a
| statement probably do not grant any implicit trademark
| rights._
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| > IIRC GitHub, (BitBucket), and GitLab existed before this
| new (license-addendum?) Trademark policy
|
| Trademarks are like copyright licenses where if you haven't
| been given explicit permission, then you don't have any.
| (The difference is that you can lose your trademark if you
| don't actively police misuse, but that's beside the point.)
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| Read the cited sources. They were grandfathered in.
|
| (GitHub is a good example of why the policy exists. They
| borrowed liberally from Git's brand; conflated Git and
| github.com in the minds of tens of thousands of people, maybe
| even millions, registered a trademark for "GitHub"; and began
| going after people who do the very type of borrowing that
| GitHub themselves did. They ultimately ended up causing
| issues for the Git project when it sought a trademark, since
| the GitHub trademark already existed at that point.)
| johnflan wrote:
| I love this era of Self Hosted tools, it really has echoes of the
| fun of early computing
| dublin wrote:
| Yes it does, and as I mention above, TiddlyWiki is another
| place to look for inspiration for a tool like this. It's been
| doing this sort of thing for 20 years now, and being a web-
| first tool, it's as open and standards-based as possible, and
| can be run without any server at all if you want to run it
| locally...
| kushan2020 wrote:
| Hey it's nice to see some more open source apps in this space. I
| am working on a similar project bangle.io [1] for the past 3
| years and it shares similar ideology as yours - an open source
| note taking web app. What are you using to interface with GitHub
| ? In my app I am directly using its api though I did consider
| looking into those git libraries for web. Definitely would like
| to collaborate if you are interested.
|
| [1] https://bangle.io
| [deleted]
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| Hi Friends, I'm the author of GitNoter. I'd love to answer any
| questions you have
| yurikoif wrote:
| It looks clean and super good! Considering moving from Obsidian
| as it gets more refined.
|
| A few more features IMO would be nice: (fuzzy) search; task
| management; math formula support; or just expose API for such
| development would be great as well.
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| thanks. I've noted the feedback. I'll work on implementing
| these features.
| eole666 wrote:
| Nice project. Is there any plan to handle gitlab login/other
| kind of login as well ? For now it seems to work only with
| github.
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| Yes. The idea is to support as many git services as possible.
| Which includes GitLab, Gitea, Bitbucket and more
|
| For the initial POC I have integrated it with GitHub
| glook wrote:
| You don't have to compare this to Evernote. I really like what
| you have done so far. The preview of the MD is fantastic. Feels
| hard enough for me to find just that! I love the use of GitHub.
| I'm in!
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| Thanks so much for the kind words
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| Could you support markdown headers like these:
|
| ---
|
| date: 2021-09-14T22:51:33+02:00
|
| modified: 2021-09-29T15:40:38+02:00
|
| ---
|
| Then it would interoperate with GitJournal perfectly I think
| :).
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| Sure. I'll implement this feature
| bachmeier wrote:
| Just a few suggestions (some overlap with other comments). If
| you really want it to be an Evernote competitor, it should
| have:
|
| Image/file upload
|
| Web clipper (singlefile is great)
|
| OCR (Tesseract has done what I need, not sure how that compares
| to Evernote)
|
| Basic task management
|
| Customizable dashboard
|
| Tagging and excellent search (these are Evernote's bread and
| butter)
|
| WYSIWYG editing
|
| Templates
|
| Integrations
|
| And it would be really nice if it could do math, which would be
| an advantage over Evernote.
|
| It's possible some of this is already implemented; I only gave
| your page a short look.
| dublin wrote:
| TiddlyWiki has hit most of these capabilities for many years
| now, and is nearly unique in wrapping up all the code and
| data in a single unit that can be run in any regular browser,
| from either local storage or a remote server or storage. (It
| does need a killer web clipper, though...)
|
| TiddlyWiki really is one of the cleverest apps I've ever run
| across, but I'm not much of a JS programmer, so it's got a
| bit of a learning curve if you want to hack on it. It's
| pretty easy to use right out of the box if you don't want to
| hack on it, though, and I'm giving some thought to moving
| most of the data I've collected in OneNote to TiddlyWiki to
| escape Microsoft's clutches after I've finally disentangled
| myself from Google... One thing I love is that TiddlyWikis I
| built 20 years ago (granted, they were simpler then) are
| still perfectly usable today.
|
| My perfect data keeper might be something of a mashup between
| TiddlyWiki and a JuPyteR notebook.
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| Noted. thanks
| pantulis wrote:
| I understand that this allows you to manage collections of
| notes in Markdown format backed up to a Git repository. This is
| nice and I consider this to be useful, but I would suggest not
| to position it against Evernote but against knowledge
| management tools for teams (internal wikis, confluences of the
| world, etc)
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| yeah I agree. This is really the knowledge management tool
| lolive wrote:
| When I presented Obsidian to a friend, and he told me that
| it was just a note-taking app, I was quite shocked by [what
| I consider to be] such a lack of consideration. Because I
| really use Obsidian as my second memory [marketing
| definitely worked on me, it seems :)].
|
| Anyway... I have never used EverNote (==note taking?). And,
| as you have read, I am reaaaaally in Obsidian (==knowledge
| management?).
|
| Can any of you elaborate of the conceptual difference
| between both?
| adfm wrote:
| If you like Obsidian, check out Logseq. Both handle
| plain-text Markdown, so you can use them interchangeably.
| Logseq also handles Org-mode files, if that's your thing.
| Everything is local, but works well with cloud storage.
| There's also an iOS app. It's worth a look. (No
| affiliation)
|
| https://logseq.com/
| pantulis wrote:
| Evernote positioned itself as a "second brain", but
| turned out to become an awesome Digital Vault. You can
| throw anything at it and Evernote will happily ingest it.
| You have blazingly fast search backed by Evernote cloud
| services, and even have some note linking capabilities
| but they are rudimentary when compared to a fully fledged
| PKM like Obsidian, DEVONthink, or others. These newer PKM
| tools allow you to reflect and reason on the content you
| have and massage it in ways that surface new ideas and
| allow you to follow unexpected relationships (hence being
| a true second brain). This is much more harder to achieve
| with Evernote.
|
| Both are valid and powerful tools but the use cases are
| different, maybe just because the definition of "second
| brain" has moved since Evernote was conceptualized on the
| 2000s.
| SamBam wrote:
| Agree: Knowledge management, not EverNote at all.
|
| EverNote is _all about_ dropping random files into it
| (images, pdfs, etc). It 's where you store your bills, your
| receipts, your photos of wine labels. It also has a very
| handy web clipper extension to save web pages (whole pages,
| sections, or bookmarks).
|
| I'm sure plenty of people use it differently, but I'm also
| quite confident (from how I've seen others describe it) that
| one its primary use-cases is as a big shoebox to dump
| everything into. You then search for that stuff through
| titles, tags and OCR in photos.
|
| I use it in a fundamentally different way from Obsidian.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Do you have a docker image for self-hosting?
| gimme_treefiddy wrote:
| Definitely will give a go by deploying privately.
|
| Does it support markdown extensions, like GitHub flavored
| markdown or something.
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| yes it supports github flavoured markdown
| mkl wrote:
| Hi, does this support maths notation via MathJax or Katex?
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| Not currently, But I've noted this. I'll see if this can be
| supported
| mkl wrote:
| Cool. If you add it, please use the \\( \\) and \\[ \\]
| delimiters rather than $ $ and $$ $$. The former plays
| better with automated processing and currencies.
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| yeah sure
| joe8756438 wrote:
| Looks really cool, congrats on the launch! How would
| multiplayer notes work? Assuming everyone has access to the
| repo.
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| Thanks. Any number of users can use GitNoter simultaneously
| on any number of devices against a single repo as long as all
| of them has write access to the repository.
| mike503 wrote:
| It's kind of amusing everyone here is talking about Evernote
| being amazing for dropping attachments and everything and I use
| it simply for text/links and hate that it wants to do all that
| extra stuff. :)
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| exactly. most of the users just use it for text notes.
| redredrobot wrote:
| Are you sure about that? I tend to think that Evernote's
| differentiation is the vast feature diversity. IMO old
| software like this often continues to succeed because it can
| support the long-tail of use cases in a way that newer
| software does not.
| kevinmgranger wrote:
| For me, Evernote's killer feature is automatic OCR. (Subs that I
| can just upload a doc through my phone's camera).
|
| It looks like this doesn't have that, unfortunately.
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| Noted! I'll see if this feature can be added.
| [deleted]
| elliekelly wrote:
| I think iPhones have added this so it might not be necessary to
| have as a separate feature?
| vhanda wrote:
| I love how more and more of us are using Git to store our notes,
| though in this case it's more coupled to GitHub than Git. If
| there is already a need to self-host this, then why not just hook
| into git and make this more generic?
|
| In fact, why is a Postgres database even needed?
|
| Please note that I'm biased. I work on
| [GitJournal](https://gitjournal.io) which is similar, but only
| mobile based.
| [deleted]
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| GitJournal is nice. Just wanted to check with whats your
| opinion about this -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31580996
|
| Did you get the permission for using "Git" mark?
| [deleted]
| vhanda wrote:
| I didn't know it was required.
|
| I'll shoot them an email and ask, and start thinking of a
| different name. In the case of Gitea [0], there doesn't seem
| to have been any response.
|
| Thanks for bringing this up. Though I wonder how well can
| "Software Freedom Conservancy" claim "GitSomething" is not
| allowed when there are clearly so so many projects doing it.
| Eg - Gitolite / Gittea. Trademarks are only so good as long
| as they are enforced.
|
| [0] - https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/4175
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| I just pointed GitNoter at my GitJournal repo and it loaded
| fairly well :). I'll investigate fiddling with the settings
| (dates get dumped into GitNoter notes), would be nice to have
| them interoperate perfectly.
|
| Thanks for GitJournal!
| sandgiant wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, but almost all "alternatives to Evernote"
| lack some of the most important (to me) features like web
| clipping, OCR and related notes.
|
| The only real alternative to Evernote I've found is DEVONthink.
| KennyFromIT wrote:
| Give Joplin a try
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Joplin has a web clipper addon at least
|
| https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/readme/clipper....
|
| There's also an offline OCR plugin based on Tesseract
|
| https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/plugin-offline-ocr-extract...
| lolive wrote:
| Web clipping?
| kushan2020 wrote:
| I would suggest trying out bangle.io [1] - an opens source
| markdown web app that is completely local and will support
| GitHub based syncing.
|
| [1] https://bangle.io
| [deleted]
| lapser wrote:
| Not exactly open source, but as far as "alternatives to
| Evernote" goes, I've been told about Obsidian[0] (though I've
| not jumped in yet), which has plugins for OCR and web clipping,
| and considering the community, I'd be surprised if related
| notes aren't a thing.
|
| [0] https://obsidian.md/
| [deleted]
| mgdlbp wrote:
| These days I tend to rely on archive.org (+ archive.today) and
| a plain link rather than web clipping tools. I just find it
| more useful coming back later to have access to the full
| fidelity of a page and its context.
|
| It also feels appropriate to be publicly preserving parts of
| the web that you've found useful enough to note down. As
| someone at archive.org said, 'If you see something, save
| something.'
|
| Edit: n.b. archive.org does honour takedown requests, though
| they're rare and usually somewhat predictable. cf. gwern's
| drastic approach of archiving all the pages he's ever visited,
| https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs
| m-p-3 wrote:
| I personally save them using the SingleFile browser
| extension.
|
| https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
| kristiandupont wrote:
| This is my alternative which tries to convert a page to
| Markdown: https://github.com/deathau/markdownload
| mgdlbp wrote:
| There's also ArchiveWeb.page, which records in the same
| WARC format as archive.org
|
| https://github.com/webrecorder/archiveweb.page
| choletentent wrote:
| Interesting. But how do you keep track of archive links that
| are relevant to you?
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Hmm? I meant, instead of taking a web clipping or
| screenshot, I keep only a link to the page in question (and
| submit it to the archive if it wasn't already crawled).
| Though I'm still not happy with how I track what part of a
| page is most relevant--usually it ends up being an ad hoc
| mix of quoting and outlining. Related: Wasn't there an HN
| post about highlighting being considered harmful?
|
| I'm also undecided still on whether to always record the
| original URL or the archive URL when the original page is
| unlikely to change. Archive links contain the entire
| original URL, so there's no risk there; on the other hand,
| it tends to be clear from the date of the note which
| snapshot to retrieve, so there's not really a need. But
| dates are close to being metadata and might be lost
| somehow...
| mbreese wrote:
| I think they meant that instead of saving links to articles
| directly, they will save references to archive.org links.
| This is a protection against the host taking down the
| article for whatever reason.
| dkarl wrote:
| For me, the missing feature is usually adding a note on my
| computer and accessing it seconds later on my phone. There are
| a lot of notes that would be tedious to create on my phone
| because of their complexity, but which I use on the go.
| Examples are workout plans, shopping notes, and travel notes.
| With Evernote, I create the note on my computer, walk out the
| door, and already have access on my phone.
| rodorgas wrote:
| I love the simplicity and power of Obsidian. It also lets me
| sync desktop and iPhone for free via iCloud.
| dkarl wrote:
| How does that happen? Is it triggered by changes, or can I
| trigger it myself by flicking the page down? As long as the
| sync isn't determined by a schedule or hidden inside a
| menu, it could work for me.
| rodorgas wrote:
| As far as I know, there's no specific button or action to
| trigger iCloud sync. I haven't notice issues, but I use
| the mobile Obsidian app much less frequently. It always
| seems updated to me.
|
| This [source](https://help.noteplan.co/article/86-how-to-
| force-sync) says that opening the iCloud Drive on Finder
| will trigger sync. On the mobile Obsidian app, you can
| flicker the page down to download updated data, obviously
| it will only work if the more recent data was uploaded.
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| Thanks for pointing the web clipping. I've noted it. I can add
| this feature to GitNoter. Hopefully soon
| temp8964 wrote:
| The most important feature of Evernote for me is saving
| attachments locally so they can be modified on the client
| machine and then automatically synced. Most alternatives can
| only allow you to download the attachment and then reupload the
| attachment manually.
| [deleted]
| vandyswa wrote:
| If you _only_ want to keep textual notes--self hosted cloud style
| --then here's a minimalist web note solution. Just a few (Python)
| CGI's plus 6k HTML/CSS/JS:
|
| http://sources.vsta.org:7100/notepad/index
|
| When less is more.
| [deleted]
| baggachipz wrote:
| I created a self-hostable, automatically syncing PWA to keep
| notes and checklists (more of a Google Keep clone):
| https://tinylist.app
| beingflo wrote:
| Awesome, I love the concept! I've also been working on an
| encrypted note taking application but it doesn't have a landing
| page yet. Encryption needs to catch on more!
| [deleted]
| hohloma wrote:
| Another alternative that Im using and very happy with - Joplin
| (https://joplinapp.org/). Also provides import from Evernote
| which mostly worked in my case.
| MezzoDelCammin wrote:
| Second that. Used to be in Evernote, but eventually just
| exported the Evernote, imported to Joplin and set up their web
| clipper extension in Chrome. Joplin stores notes as basically
| markup files, so sync is pretty trivial through any file
| syncing service / app in the universe.
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| Agree, but GitNoter is self hosted webapp it does not require
| any desktop/mobile client. It can be directly accessible with
| the browser.
|
| Thanks for the feedback. I'll check if import from evernote can
| be added as a feature to GitNoter.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I was pretty disappointed when I set up a Joplin server only
| to discover there was no web UI. The desktop and mobile
| clients aren't bad, but if I can't also quickly get to the
| content via a browser, I'll never use it. It never even
| dawned on me before installing that there wouldn't be a web
| UI.
| dicknuckle wrote:
| I realize this is probably a big ask, but an import from
| Google Keep would be a huge plus. Google eventually kills off
| EVERYTHING good.
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| yes right. I'm thinking of implementing add-ons for all
| popular note taking services like google, evernote, onenote
| etc so that the notes can be imported using gitnoter.
| henearkr wrote:
| Nice idea! And Google Tasks, please.
|
| That would be a relief to finally make a link between
| Google Keep and Google Tasks, something long overdue!
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| sure :)
| [deleted]
| stavros wrote:
| I use Joplin as well. I wrote a small (fairly ad-hoc) script to
| turn a Joplin database into a Zola/Gitbook static site:
|
| https://gitlab.com/stavros/notes/
| mr-ron wrote:
| Been using simplenote for some time. Goal was to have just
| unobtrusive text notes, accessible via phone apps and browser,
| free, that allowed nesting bullet points (I write a lot of notes
| primarily using bullets)
|
| Simplenote.com has been great for all of these usecases.
| Vincenius wrote:
| Same for me - simplenote is awesome :)
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2022-06-01 23:01 UTC)