[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why are there no good note taking apps
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Ask HN: Why are there no good note taking apps
Why are there no good note taking apps on github or elsewhere that
you can self host? Its really not that hard but almost all of them
miss some crucial points. I tried CodiMD, HedgeDoc, Jooplin,
Standard Notes, Trillium and a few others. - Use Markdown or
plaintext for notes. This way they are easy to edit and display in
almost everything. Don't render anything automatically for me if i
don't want to (Trillium im looking at you FFS). - Let me use
folders (im looking at you CodiMD, Hedgedoc, ...) - who in the
world doesn't want to organize notes in any way? I don't need
graphs or LaTeX, i need folders and tags and references and ways to
organize myself. - Offer a Web Editor with proper account and user
management (CodiMD, HedgeDoc, ...) and a custom landing page if you
offer one at all. Let me setup accounts for other people and let me
choose who i want to share notes with and who can edit them - just
like nextcloud does. I dont need a Web Editor but its a really nice
feature so why not implement it in a useful way that its actually
managable? - Let me share notes online. Let me generate a Link that
i can send others. Let them either enter a password or make it
possible to revoke the link and genereate a new one or set a time
limit for sharing. Bonus points if the notes are stored encrypted
and are shared E2E with the password in the URL just like Mega did.
I wouldn't even need a Web Editor if i got this instead. (- Dont
use some over the top database structure or framework if not
<really> needed) I feel like most of those note taking app
creators dont even use their own product. Also i dont care about a
fancy looking UI that uses 8GB of RAM and takes 10 Seconds to load,
just make it work.
Author : throwmea
Score : 16 points
Date : 2022-06-06 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
| EduardMe wrote:
| Try NotePlan (only Mac and iOS).
|
| - Markdown based and runs on plain-text files.
|
| - I'm the creator and use it every day, all the time.
|
| - Has real folders (you will see them in Finder/Files)
|
| - Hashtags and Mentions
|
| - [[References]]
|
| - Share notes by publishing them (send a link, revokable) or
| exporting them as RTF or PDF (send a file).
|
| - No Web Editor yet
|
| Link: https://noteplan.co
| PifyZ wrote:
| Very interesting! Is there a web, Android or Linux version
| planned?
| bluewalt wrote:
| +1 for NotePlan. I use it extensively every day for 2 years and
| I can't go back. I'm just frustrated to lack advanced features
| or simple tables available on notions. However, as it's
| markdown based, it's kind of logically limited by it. I guess
| it's hard to have both no lock in AND having crazy dynamic
| advanced tables.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I've never seen any really great notetaking app, other than
| Obsidian.
|
| I don't know why the open source community can't match it yet,
| but it probably will eventually.
|
| I suspect it's because notetaking is essentially 100% UI and
| features, There are not many new algorithms involved, and but you
| need a good markdown edit component.
|
| Also, cross platform is hard, until Flutter game along most of
| the ways to do it right involved tons of duplicated effort.
| tmaly wrote:
| I use Obsidian both on mobile and desktop. It is all markdown. I
| sync my notes to a private github repo.
|
| I think this would fit your requirements.
| throwmea wrote:
| thats a good idea. How do you deal with publishing specific
| notes?
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| The logical answer seems to be that the feature set you are
| looking for is not important to most people.
|
| If, as you say, making the app is not hard and you think these
| features will be popular, then there is a great opportunity for
| you to make the app yourself.
| throwmea wrote:
| fair point, currently im not good enough though
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Not with that attitude
| PaulHoule wrote:
| (1) Sometimes good notetaking apps get ruined over time. I was a
| fan of Microsoft's OneNote for a while until they stopped saving
| notes in a well-documented XML format and kept all the data in
| the cloud. Microsoft also worked hard to kill OneNote by shoving
| it up every orifice of the Windows 8 user: print something? the
| default it is to save the printout to one note? Look for an
| application on the taskbar? Microsoft shoved three icons for
| OneNote onto the taskbar?
|
| Microsoft never seems to learn that this behavior is perceived as
| harassment and that if they push a product too hard, even a great
| product, people are going to be angry that OneNote is opening
| when they wanted to print something to the printer, all they are
| going to think is OneNote is crap and they want nothing to do
| with it.
|
| (2) Personalized full-text search is a tough problem, since
| Google came out nobody has been satisfied with the results they
| get from other full-text search products.
| throwmea wrote:
| I can really agree on the first point but know too little about
| the second one. It is indeed a problem but i think in most
| cases keywords or tags should be enough to implement. Im not
| sure but even full text search should not take that long for
| plaintext/md notes.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's not a problem in terms of speed or CPU consumption, it's
| a problem in terms of relevance. It's when the relevant
| document you are looking for is result #34 or when the
| relevant document doesn't appear at all.
|
| People will say "just use Lucene, bro" but often Lucene's
| search ranking is awful. (I used to laugh at "just use Solr,
| bro" because Solr's search scales about as well as Bitcoin
| when you add more shards.)
|
| As for tags that depends on people putting accurate tags on.
| People hate to hear it, but tags need to have an ontology
| behind them to be really effective. For instance there is an
| anime imageboard that has tags like "purple hair", "green
| eyes" and these are close to useless for an image that has
| two people in it.
| throwmea wrote:
| fair point i agree with that thanks for explaining
| hmrtn wrote:
| hackmd.io is an excellent markdown editor with github
| integration, sharing, and all of the features I have ever needed.
| Highly recommend for those looking.
| throwmea wrote:
| its the paid version of the open source hackmd right? the self
| hosted one has no book mode afak
| GeorgeBanica wrote:
| I use Markor Editor plus Syncthing. Markor is open-sourced and
| has a plethora of features, as you can read on their github
| page[1]; among these features, it includes file encryption.
|
| Syncthing is really easy to set up and works like a charm. If you
| want accounts and user management, Markor also works with
| NextCloud.
|
| [1] https://github.com/gsantner/markor
| nittanymount wrote:
| obsidian is a nice one, simple, focused...
|
| - it saves in md files, and could sync to repo or other ways.
|
| - good number of nice plugins
|
| - the md file makes things easier, e.g. could write terminal cli
| with bash script to add/edit notes in terminal ...
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I like Obsidian a lot, but recently switched to Org Mode since
| it is a more robust markup language. It has a steep learning
| curve though.
| throwmea wrote:
| True but i havent found a way to do the publishing part nicely
| yet
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| Publish it how? It's mostly markdown, you should be able to
| use something like Pandoc to convert it to anything else.
|
| Edit : even simpler, you could just put them on dropbox in a
| shared folder. It's markdown so it's human readable as pure
| text apart from the images (and you said you don't care about
| graphs)
| throwmea wrote:
| I liked the idea that other users can edit it or that the
| markdown is rendered within the browser. CodiMD and
| Hedgedoc support that. They even support Co-Editing notes
| which is over the top for my needs. I just like the idea
| that i can rightclick a note in my notebook and publish it.
| They lack privacy and protection features though like
| password input or generating a new URL or proper user
| accounts. It would be nice if i could just send a special
| link and for the duration of X or until i revoke it friends
| can look at the rendered markdown with their browser. See
| https://demo.hedgedoc.org/features?both
|
| Also Data Control is something i desire so i prefer self
| hosted.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > I feel like most of those note taking app creators dont even
| use their own product
|
| I think you have it backwards. They likely made the product to
| fit their own needs, and aren't going out of their way to
| understand and solve other user's needs.
| throwmea wrote:
| Do you really think so? A lot of those github projects seem
| rather big.
| kazinator wrote:
| People sometimes make big things for their own use, while
| imagining them to be for other people's use, where other
| people are similar to themselves.
|
| That can sum up Unix and everything that sprang from it, come
| to think of it.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| > Offer a Web Editor with proper account and user management
|
| > Let me share notes online. Let me generate a Link that i can
| send others ...
|
| > Also i dont care about a fancy looking UI that uses 8GB of RAM
| and takes 10 Seconds to load, just make it work.
|
| Well, this is pretty much Google Docs or any Open Source clone
| like Nextcloud or LibreOffice Online I guess. It's surely
| possible though to write something like that with a very lean UI.
|
| I think many Web developers go by default for something more
| complex though because it's not necessarily more effort. And
| well, there are already a bizillion similar apps.
|
| > Also i dont care about a fancy looking UI that uses 8GB of RAM
| and takes 10 Seconds to load, just make it work.
|
| But this one might be relatively close to what you're looking
| for: https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web (At least if you self-
| host, the web server of org-web.org doesn't seem very fast :))
| throwmea wrote:
| thanks i will check it out that looks interesting
| soared wrote:
| Extremely few people in the real world want markdown or plaintext
| notes. Text editors are better for almost all users.
|
| Google docs and drive accomplish everything you want I believe
| except for markdown.
| throwmea wrote:
| Yes the only thing they dont accomplish is the lack of privacy
| / not being able to self host. Besides that youre probably
| right
| liquid-monthly wrote:
| liquid-monthly wrote:
| NotePlan
|
| https://noteplan.co/
| PifyZ wrote:
| It's not a note taking app, but it's a really good product:
| https://cryptpad.fr/ (you can share with who you wants, it's
| encrypted, it have folders, etc.)
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(page generated 2022-06-06 23:02 UTC)