What's everyone's note taker of choice?

neovim and orgmode

I’ve settled on a combination of Standard Notes and Joplin. With nearly three thousand notes in it SN became too slow for doing new notes, especially on Android. So it’s become my archive of older notes, when I don’t mind the load time to then search for something. It has so many notes because it was quite feasible to migrate my notes from two earlier systems (Evernote and Simplenote).

So now I use Joplin for all new things, holding less than 200 notes. Having markdown by default suits me well for writing forum posts and responses before clipping them over into a web browser.

  • Zim is excellent WYSIWYG and saves as plaintext with very simple formatting. Feels similar to evernote and is nice to access directly on the filesystem. No mobile app.
  • Qownnotes / Nextcloud Notes for markdown is excellent and easy. Text or Markdown stored in simple directory structure.
  • Joplin works well with a frustratingly non-standard variation of markdown formatting and supports e2e encryption. Works well if you just access it directly from the apps.
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I forgot about Zim. Thanks for reminding me.

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I prefer to use Simplenote it is cross-platform and is also opensource https://simplenote.com/

I liked SimpleNote but after the Nth time that the Android app just lost a note instead of saving it I bailed (and went looking for fully Open Source solutions).

@madthumbs, I have to agree.

Using Vim to take notes in Markdown has been the best for me. From there I can use Pandoc to turn the note file into a printable PDF, or I can pull it into my Hugo blog platform and turn the note into a post, or I can throw the note into my Docsify folder which gets served as my personal wiki in my homelab, or I can throw the file into my Syncthing folder that gets synced to my phone where I can use a plain text editor to view or edit the file when I’m on the go. This also means that I can take notes easily on any computer (because all even my CLI only RPi’s have vim installed).

This has become my system of choice after using great programs like Evernote and OneNote on Windows, then Tomboy and Zim Wiki on Linux. Finally, just editing plain text files with Markdown formatting has been the best solution to me to have my notes wherever I need them, or publish them with little to no additional editing.

I use Xpad for one-off notes that I want to keep visible on my desktop, but I use Joplin for serious note-taking and hosting :smiley: .

I’ve been using Zim for about a year. There’s a plugin for just about everything. It’s awesome and quick.

@Ethanol, Zim is awesome. It was my go to note taking solution for a long time, before I decided to shift to something that I could easily do from a DE or the CLI. I would give a +1 to Zim if people are looking for a GUI program that gives you a lot of flexibility with your notes and the organizing of your notes. Exporting out of Zim is also great, so you don’t ever have to feel as if your time in Zim will be wasted and you will have to throw everything away to move to something else.

I use qownotes as well with nextcloud add in integration to sync across devices. Works really well so far!

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I’m giving QOwnNotes a try as well.

You can sync it up with nextcloud notes on android/lineage os from f-droid too (I’m sure google play has it as well), which works pretty nice for me.

I have a Nextcloud server, and I’ve been using the Notes there - both in the web interface, and in Android as well - for a few years now. I’m using the latest versions. I also satisfied all the dependencies that QOwnNotes asked for, such as the QOwnNotesAPI Nextcloud app.

I’m finding QOwnNotes to be pretty dodgy. For example, It has no knowledge of which notes I’ve marked as favorites, with a star. Like the notes are presented in the same order - favorites on top - in the web and Android interfaces. But QOwnNotes has no stars, no “Favorites” feature, and the notes aren’t in order.

Or, if I attach or insert pictures to the notes in QOwnNotes, then sync to Nextcloud, do those attachments/image insertions appear on the web, or in Android? No. Again, this is inconsistent.

This lack of consistency rubs my fur, or rather feathers, the wrong way. I think should QOwnNotes should support favorites.

BTW: I have two additional ways of taking notes, depending on the type of note:

  • If it is a TODO item: just a small pad of paper IRL.

  • If the note is of a personal nature, I just use plain text files in a system of folders. It’s not put on the cloud at all, even my own privately-run Nextcloud server, with SSL all set up nicely. These text files get backed up to a MicroSD card with grsync occasionally.

Dokuwiki. Been around forever, stable and easy to use.

Hey, just a reminder that this is an open source project and you can tell the friendly dev what functions you were hoping to have implemented by either filing Github issues or asking about this on their chat for irc + Telegram + Matrix.

Repo for Qownnotes
https://github.com/pbek/qownnotesapi/issues

I encourage this because I’m sure your feedback could prove help, you might get suggestions for other ways to use the app, and it is very likely the developer does not read this forum.

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Evolution, it allows me to plan and manage the notes and tasks and it displays them in a small strip right of my email and it is sorted on date. Overdue notes are red :slight_smile:

QOwnNotes doesn’t support Nextcloud Favorites, there would be far too many API requests needed to do anything with it.

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I do use the favourites on the nextcloud app, but in qownotes seems easier to find the notes I want. I haven’t really done posting of images in notes but will keep my eye open for it. Anything I want super secure stick in bitwarden or keep offline as well.

Hi @pbek, thanks for making QownNotes!

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