It was time to ditch Evernote YEARS ago. Obsidian is basically the best alternative.
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
At 8$/month for sync between devices I hope it has some qualities..
I've been using obsidian-livesync for a couple months now. Works great cross-platform since it runs directly out of my Vault and doesn't cost $8/mo. Mine is running on fly.io right now but I may eventually move it to my own machine. https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync/
I can't help feeling like Obsidian really missed the mark on their pricing here for hobbyist & home users. I can't justify paying substantially more than something like iCloud or Google Drive storage when I'm using Obsidian to just sync some text and a few documentation images. Something like $1-2/mo would have been an instant buy for me, but at $8 it was worth my time to investigate other ways of syncing.
Don’t tell them that. I’ve been saying the same thing for ages and I get slammed by their community for it.
I don’t get it. Imas you say it’s really missed the mark on pricing. I’d gladly pay for a sync option. But 8€\month? Eff offfff. I have like 500MB of data. I know that’s not everyone’s case but. Is there not some tier? Cripes
It's completely local if you want, and you absolutely don't need to pay money for syncing. The entire app is absolutely free and fully functional. If you want free syncing you can either use iCloud, or else the RemotelySave plugin with something like Syncthing or Duplicati.
Obsidian is a godsend. The sheer number of plugins gives you basically anything you could want.
It not being open-source is pretty much my only complaint lol
I love Joplin, https://joplinapp.org/
Open source, encryption, features rich, sync across devices, what's not to like?
I’ve switched to Joplin which I sync with my Nextcloud server.
OneNote is also good, if you’re already in the Microsoft ecosystem.
If you're in the MS ecosystem then OneDrive supports application syncing as a thing and so does Joplin including on its mobile clients. It's basically free seemless cloud syncing once you set it up.
You're also giving all of your data over to Microsoft, including to be scanned and fed into their AI models.
That's a trade-off that many won't mind making, but everyone should informed of before making their decision.
Well Joplin support encryption. I sync with Dropbox and have it all encrypted.
I boost Joplin on here every chance I get, so please allow me to do so again now! I run it with my own sync server and a small userbase of about 6 people on a cheap VPS. I could not be happier; between the webclipper, sharing, encryption, embedding of pdfs, photos, even mp4s, ease of selfhosting, it’s an amazing project! It’s been (knock on wood) rock solid!
Sounds like it is a bit advanced and technical for me...all I want is something I can make a list on android and my partner can edit it on iOS. Can it do that?
Yeah, it can do that. There are Android and iOS apps (as well as desktop). It has list creation in one click. General notes are technically formatted in markdown behind the scenes, and some users like to write the notes directly in markdown, but Joplin's default view is a "rich text editor" mode which hides all that stuff away and uses familiar word processor type controls.
Depending on your chosen cloud host (you can pick any you like) it can sometimes be a little fiddly to do the initial setup, but I think the default "Joplin Cloud" option is pretty straightforward.
I use Joplin, and can heartily recommend it, although there are plenty of alternative options out there too.
Lots of mentions for Obsidian. I'll throw in my favorite for the past few years that's similar: Logseq! Check it out!
They list Notion, but IMO Obsidian is the better path. Lack of offline access to data is a big risk to using Notion, and what made me switch to Obsidian after being bit by internet access issues keeping me from being able to use my notes during a critical meeting. Hard no for Notion ever since.
I use Obsidian for a mind map but Notion for project/life management.
I really love Obsidian. It is a perfect fit for my needs. I just hope they don't do the creeping subscription bullshit like Evernote did. The $96 a year is reasonable for those who need it (I don't need it).
Crossing my fingers that the usual greed doesn't give them brain rot. I probably should have gone with Joplin, but I'm too invested in Obsidian at this point (and very happy with it). I guess if they do go over to the Dark Side, I could freeze it at the last good release for a while then switch.
I was pretty happy with EverNote until it started to feel like they were ransoming my content against sudden price hikes and enshittifying reductions in basic function Fk those guys
Simplenote is also great and cross platform.
Who is still using Evernote in 2023? Everyone I know is using either Notion or Google Keep.
Standard Notes is fantastic, assuming that:
- you don’t need to collaborate in real-time with your notes (you can share them after the fact and there is a way to give multiple accounts edit access to the same note, but it looked complicated and I haven’t explored it)
- you primarily use a keyboard - mobile counts, even if you’re using speech to text or Scribble on iPad - rather than wanting a canvas to draw on.
- you’re not trying to upload documents and annotate them
StandardNotes has the following going for it:
- it’s FOSS
- it’s easily self-hostable
- it’s also offered as SaaS, and if you use that your notes are e2ee
- if you self-host you can still use the official mobile apps (but those are open source, too)
- it has a web app, mobile apps, desktop apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux
- there is a variety of editor plugins created by the community that can be used even if you use the free SaaS offering - check out https://github.com/jonhadfield/awesome-standard-notes for a list.
I’ve been using StandardNotes for a few years at this point (as a paid user on their 5 year plan, which no longer exists as far as I know) and have also developed an editor plugin for it.
StandardNotes (I compared it to SimpleNote when I tested it months ago):
- Doesn't support markdown without $ - simplenote does
- Doesn't support checkboxes without $ - simplenote does
- Doesn't even allow rich text without paying
- $119/year subscription
- Simplenote syncs faster
It calls itself FOSS but really, most of the important functionality is paid-only.
FOSS doesn’t mean free as in beer. Even so, you can get support for all of the things you mentioned, and more, for free. You can find the link from my comment above by searching for “Awesome Standard Notes,” but since you mentioned editors specifically, this will take you directly where you want to go: https://github.com/jonhadfield/awesome-standard-notes#editors
Edit to add: you can enable a community created editor (other than the ones that are included in the paid subscription) by going to Preferences > Plugins > scroll all the way to the bottom > and then, in the text box under “Install Custom Plugin,” paste the url (like https://mortalhappiness.github.io/sn-tui.editor/ext.json for the Tui Markdown Editor), then click Install, review the extension info, and then click Install again. You can follow these same steps to install a different theme, too.
There are several Markdown compatible editors in that list, so you’re free to choose the one that works best for you.
The Append Editor supports multiple types of Markdown, including Github Flavored Markdown, as well as LATEX. You can get an inline check mark by prepending a line with - [ ]
, but when you press enter it doesn’t make the next line a checkmark, nor can you click a checkmark to check/uncheck it, so it’s not a good choice if checklists are your main use-case. Some better options:
Tui Markdown Editor requires you to manually start a checklist the same way, but then a new line in either markdown or wysiwyg mode will also have a checkmark. You can also check/uncheck in wysiwyg mode with a click.
The Rich Markdown Editor is also good for checklists. It only offers a wysiwyg experience where you type in the same view as the final one (rather than having a split view), but there’s no top menu. You can still type the normal Markdown characters with exceptions when it’s something that requires multiple characters. In that case, type /
on a new line to get a list of options, then type a couple characters and choose the best option. For example, I can’t just type - [ ]
and get a checklist because it escapes the characters so that I get a list that would render the [ ]. But I can type /
and then type “checklist” or “todo” (really just 2 characters of either of those words) and choose that option to start an in-line checklist. And if I hit enter, the next line defaults to being another checklist item. You can also click the checkmark to check or uncheck it.
For a dedicated task list, Scratch also works well. It’s not Markdown behind the scenes, though (but it is still readable plain text). You can start a checklist by clicking the checkmark icon in the top menu. Like the Rich Markdown Editor, a new line will create a new checklist item and you can click the checkmark to check/uncheck it.
You also might check out the “Advanced Checklist.” It’s in the “Official Extensions” link but I just tested and was able to install it on a free account. (Note that you can also self-host the “paid” editors other than the Super editor and use them for free, though that does require a bit of extra work.)
There are other editors on that page and also other community written editors in general out there. The Marp Editor lets you create presentation slides. The Mermaid Editor lets you create diagrams. Heck there’s even a Music Editor (for tablature, not for directly generating audio). There are a couple sketch / whiteboard apps. I’m not saying it has everything you could ever dream of, but there’s a lot and it’s easy to extend for anyone with front end web development experience.
Regarding your point about Simplenote syncing faster: I assume this is because Standard Notes is end to end encrypted, but Simplenote is not (Unfortunately generally e2ee adds additional overhead to syncing operations as the server cannot optimize nearly as much). There may be more to it than that, though. I’ve looked at Standard Notes’s code a bit but haven’t looked at the server code for Simplenote - as far as I can tell, Simperium, the backend it uses, is not open source. (The frontend is, though.)
That said, I’ve never noticed Standard Notes taking particularly long to sync. I don’t have thousands of notes but I do have several hundred (pretty close to a thousand). Were you seeing bad performance with Standard Notes or just worse (but still fine) performance? And if the latter, can you share some more details?
For me, not being end to end encrypted is a dealbreaker for my private notes (unless I’m self-hosting the app, that is). I’m not comfortable with someone at the hosting company just being able to access my notes. But that’s not important to everyone, and if it’s not important to you and if Simplenote otherwise does everything you want, then by all means use it - it’s a great choice.
I'm giving Obsidian a try and I'm liking it, but I still use freebie Notion for a lot of work things.
I do ~6-12 month contracts, and have found that publishing notion pages is a really easy way to share stuff quickly with the team and keep it live-update-able by all parties. That feature suits some fast-paced environment needs.
I never really used evernote tho. I think i first tried it years ago before they allowed dark mode, so it automatically failed.
This dumbass article is about 8 years too late. I ditched it back when they cancelled all free accounts and deleted everyone data who didn’t pay. Fuck Evernote
Ummm... I'm pretty sure I pay zero and just logged in yesterday after like a year.
Don't go to Notability. They went full asshole at the top of this last semester. Changed the entire interface as people were starting their first week of class. They nuked features that made note taking for class nice. They clearly don't respect their users and will most likely do the same thing again.
I think I'm a bit of a dinosaur, but I've been making all of my notes in Zim for over 10 years. It's not much to look at but I find the hierarchical wiki structure easy to navigate, and most of the functionality (todo lists, equations, version control integration, etc) is implemented by simple plugins.
in my opinion, a lot of these programs are too complicated - I tried Joplin for a while but I ended up spending more time organising my notes than I did making them.
What happened to Evermote? 😂 I used it so much when u was in uni, so sad
They also started annoying the users on every load with "deals" to buy their paid version. And they do that shitty thing where they switch the intuitive nature of the yes and no buttons.
I use the marksman
language server with my neovim configuration. It makes a navigable wiki-ish system ^.^, especially when you set it up with completion.wiki.style = "file-path-stem"
in the .marksman.toml
( see: here for what that does.
This, plus syncthing or git, works for syncing ^.^
I always felt that Evernote was a confusing mess line OneNote I would try to use it every couple years thinking it would different only to give up a little later and go back to Notepad++
Wait what? One is a note taking app. The other is a text editor...
Did I miss the implied /s?
Standardnotes and Notesnook also good as well and they provide web app
What most note taking apps ignore is OneNote's strong drawing tablet capabilities, but Obsidian is here to save the day with the Excalidraw plugin. In total it is not as user friendly as OneNote, but the data portability cannot be weighted in gold.
I haven't looked into the alternatives much, but I've been using AnyType because of the decentralized sync.
This is why you don't buy in to subscriptions for every little thing.