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 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.
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.
- 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
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.
> 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 :))
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.
Obsidian has everything your needs are, you can setup syncthing to sync your notes across multiple devices. Everything is a .md file and organized using folders and it has great plugin support. Though ability to publish from inside the app is locked behind a subscription. You can always use pandoc to just convert the md files, there probably are some plugins that try to do that. Also i love how lightweight it is.
Second is Nebo, Nebo is for handwritten notes usecase. This isn't something many people really have a usecase for, But Nebo has AWESOME handwriting -> searchable text conversion, specially for Math! And publishing things is as a easy as clicking publish. And it has google drive/drop integration for sync (I'd rather use syncthing but the android app doesn't expose the stored files).
Features:
- Notebooks are standard git repositories containing .md files.
- Notebooks may be used privately, shared with one or more users privately, or shared publicly.
- Notes may be customized to improve usability, such as rendering a to-do list with automatic de-duplication and sorting.
Repository: https://code.rocketnine.space/tslocum/stick
Demo (read-only except checkboxes): https://stick.rocketnine.space/#login/c89f5381659ad34bd84967...
Unfortunately, one of the most commonly asked combinations of such features, especially here on Hacker News, is an open-source note-taking app which is end-to-end encrypted but also offers all the great benefits of having a multi-account web editor with shareable notes. Oh and don't forget, it can't use Electron, but it has to be native across all platforms. In theory this sounds amazing – all the performance, privacy and security, with the benefits sharing. And with it being open source you can have the peace of mind that the product will be around for many years to come.
Imagine creating your own note-taking app. In practice it's almost impossible for any new startup to build an app like this that's so feature complete from the get-go. For it to become revenue-generating and a sustainable business so you can work on it full-time, most products will focus on *one* of the features mentioned above and do it really well. For us, we initially focused on markdown, cross-platform, portability and instant sharing of your notes with others.
I don't think there will ever be a one-size-fits-all app for note-taking and knowledge management – just like there isn't one in reality – everyone likes to use different methods to write whether it's a notebook, bullet journal, notecard or scrap of paper. Focus on finding a product that you like the founders and community behind and that meets a couple of your most important requirements; then you can support them and offer feedback to help them to build an amazing app.
- 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 ...
Syncthing is really easy to set up and works like a charm. If you want accounts and user management, Markor also works with NextCloud.
I think this would fit your requirements.
I think it is very challenging to get this good on an app, and I try to use other apps with no success multiple times. Vim wins year after year
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.
Google docs and drive accomplish everything you want I believe except for markdown.
Link: https://getupnote.com/