I see comments like this from time to time and can’t help but wonder if they’re serious or just satire at this point. People have mobile devices. People have windows and Mac (and Linux!) devices. People want seamless sync and sharing, simple formatting, for it to work across platforms, and for it to be exportable into some portable format.

Sure, you can spend a lot of time forcing notepad and word into some sad version of a real app. Or you can pony up $5-10 a month, save your time for something valuable, and actually have a note taking app that’ll serve you well.

For some people, notepad.exe is sufficient, but not for everyone. I’m a professional researcher and writer. My notes are much more than “the software equivalent of grabbing a scrap of paper.” They’re an essential information management and organization tool without which I couldn’t do my job.

I think for this app, the purpose is a convenient and secure writing space that's available across devices. I've been a Standard Notes customer for several years now, and I went with it because I was looking for a secure solution for my journaling. I wanted a secure place to write my deepest thoughts at home and on the go, and also a way to quickly and easily access, edit, and review those thoughts across all of my devices. That's a tall order.

This conflict of desires lead me to the age old trade-off of security versus convenience. If I want security / privacy, I should use only local text editing tools and keep everything on an encrypted volume, preferably on an airgapped machine. If I want pure convenience, I should use any of the million great cloud-based note and document options that are available on any device. If I want to fall anywhere between those extremes on the spectrum, I'll need to decide the most convenient option I can bear that provides the most security. And for me, I landed on Standard Notes when exploring this question for myself.

It's a lightweight and easy text editing program that is encrypted and secure anytime my writing leaves my sphere of control. It allows for search of my notes, filtering by title and date created/modified, and it has great sync between all of my devices to the point that I can pick it up any device and write a thought as it comes and not worry about sync conflicts if multiple instances of my note are open across devices. There are easy options to automate encrypted local backups and even daily cloud-based ones if you're a paying customer. I can export everything to plain text quite easily - which is my preferred format - so I'm in no way dependent on their continuing to exist.

If you want to read/write notes seamlessly across all of your devices and you also want to stay private and secure, your options grow limited right away. Standard Notes is the best compromise of these competing interests that I've found so far for my own situation. So even though I have the ability to use other tools as you've described - and many of them are better writing tools than Standard Notes - I still choose to pay SN as a customer.

> I don't mean to be snarky, but what's the purpose of apps like this?

1. Note organization via tags with a searchable database 2. Secure off-site backup 3. Device-to-device syncing

I'm sure there are more. I wish it wasn't written in Electron, but it wouldn't exist otherwise.

As a web application: https://app.standardnotes.org/

> Meanwhile, if this program's servers go down tomorrow, tough luck.

It is open source, you can run the server yourself: https://github.com/standardnotes/syncing-server

I was thinking the same thing, but instead of notepad, emacs with org-mode. Keeping files in sync is a separate problem that your note taking app should not have to solve, there's already many good solutions out there.

This comment is absurd and contradictory, if the software is supposed to be the equivalent of "grabbing a scrap of paper and scratching something down" then at bare minimum it needs to support images since you can draw pictures on a piece of paper. Do notepad or notepad++ support images?

You are forgetting that a huge category of people need all their notes in one place, organized and separate from everything else. Sure you can do this with Notepad and manage everything in folders etc. but that takes significant effort. Effort that many people don't want to put in. That is why most note apps, even something like Notion, exist. To simplify the organising process. You aren't paying for the editing experience but everything else.

Of course, for very simple note taking you don't need this but it again comes back to my original point that by using a dedicated app, everything, including the rough 1 minute notes, are in one easy-to-find place.

I myself take a lot of txt notes but easily lose them as well. Fortunately for me, they aren't important and I rarely need to access them again but it's always nice if I have them all in once place so I can go over them and see what I wrote/did.

Disclaimer: I am a developer of a note-taking application called Notesnook[1]. Some might say it is a (hopefully better) alternative to Standard Notes.

[1] https://notesnook.com/