Programmer Humor

Sort of...I'm still testing various apps. The big draw for me to Keep was mobile and web apps. I will often sit at a computer to input even short ToDo because phone swipe keyboards and me do not get along. There is no shortage of Keep clones, but a bunch are missing sync function entirely or require Nextcloud, which is way too much app for my hardware and I'm not standing up an instance just to sync some notes. Here's a not very formal rundown of what I've so far:

• Joplin - seems like a solid app and you can easily selfhost the server. But the android app is awful. That and the fact it stores Markdown files in a sqlite db had me look elsewhere

• Quillpad - a fork of Quillnote. Looks identical to Keep. Only syncs with Nextcloud and has some quirks. The big one was creating a To Do list with checkboxes from the Notes app in NC displays correctly in Quillpad, but you cannot interact with them at all. So strange.

• Zoho Notebook - Zoho as a company is likely the closest you'll get for a straight up Google replacement. But their privacy policy has some concerning statements regarding sharing data with "market partners". It was enough for me to keep looking.

• Carnet - only syncs with Nextcloud and for some reason the Android app is stupid slow.

• Memos - more of a microblogging app. Similar format to Twitter but you can keep it all private and publish nothing. This one has no official app, in favor of a well done progressive web app. Also stores .md in a db file. Incredibly easy to self host. I keep wanting to love this one, but the single column view (think Twitter threads) as opposed to Keeps grid...i don't know. I still have it up on my server since it takes almost nothing to run and I keep playing with it.

The two contenders for me right now have some amazing promise and nice features already, but it's whats on their roadmaps that has intrigued me more:

• Acreom - not FOSS yet and the mobile app can only sync with their cloud. No E2EE...yet. On desktop it's great. You can use it without an account and like Obsidian, it stores it in flat .md. The To Do/Task function has some natural language processing that can recognize date/time for due dates like "Deploy patches Wednesday at 4am" would recognize Wednesday as Sept 20th since that's the next closest date and the time at 4am. I think once they open source it and at least allow local only storage on a phone, it'll be killer. I'd love to use Syncthing to just keep my pile of notes up to date between multiple devices. Not possible on mobile yet. This one is geared more towards developers to track projects, even offers a Jira tie in (gross).

• Notesnook - somewhat recently open source. Has great apps for all OSes as well as a web app. And what is really nice is that the UI is consistent across platforms. They have a paid tier that's a bit spendy for my liking, but they are working on a self hosting option that will be free of course. The dev did tell me they're toying with the idea of a charge for commercial self hosters, but definitely not for individuals. This one isn't in plain .md due to their selling point, which is encrypted everything.