I wanted to try Bear after reading your comment. But, I don’t need yet another subscription software. If it was a one time paid app, I would have thought of it, but subscription just kills it for me. It boggles my mind why I should pay subscription for a note-taking app. Just let me pay for the current set of features and let me use it as is however long I want. If I want to upgrade, I’ll choose to pay then. :-( may be I am getting old.
I frequently use my Linux workstation and access my Apple Notes via the web interface for iCloud. Do you know if there is a web interface for upnote? for all those Linux users?
Bear is priced appropriately. Can't wait for the new version (some anticipate 2030, but I'm optimistic based on the new Panda editor beta).
I use 2 giant plain-text files.
One for notes. The other for to-dos.
I use git to sync to a private git repo using my own app https://github.com/tanin47/git-notes (work with Mac, windows, Linux)
My priority is that I want my notes to live forever. Using GitHub seems to achieve that purpose. (I used many notes app before which I threw away when moving to a new app)
It's all stored as markdown, so you can go in and edit the page. nb also syncs automatically every time a note is edited.
Images, pdfs, docs, etc. can all be dumped into nb.
On mobile, I use gitjournal, and point it to the same gitlab repository, so the same notes are synced on mobile.
The notational-fzf vim plugin (https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim) is excellent for searching notes and just works if you point it to your .nb root directory.
The next best thing is notable (https://notable.app/), which provides a much better interface, but doesn't do the download url thing. Gitjournal and notational-fzf also work with notable.
It's just important to have automated triggers to push and pull things to avoid conflicts. That's possible with Shortcuts on iOS and there's a git-plugin for Obsidian as well.
Its a 10 LOC bash script on each OS, it allows me to keep all my notes in markdown format, and use whatever markdown editor I want.
It allows me to sync any kind of content, not only notes, but also images, jupyter notebooks, whatever I want.
As a MD editor i tend to use Typora, but I might use VS Code, emacs, etc. depending on what i am doing.
I use about ~3 machines in total for work and personal time, and this works seamlessly across all of them. It allows me to keep my work notes separate from my personal notes, and e.g. keep them in our work's git servers.
Using text files for notes is meh. I've just been pointed at Bear app, and using tags to manage grouping specific notes has been really nice.
A lot of the newer hotness like Craft, Notion, Obsidian, etc. have a bazillion features but are anything but lean, fast, targeted apps that I want in a notes solution. The Bear folks get tons of pressure to feature it up. While they do need to evolve it (the appearance of stagnation isn't great for an annual subscription app), I hope they keep Bear Bear.
I make an Inbox note in both to just dump stuff and then move it around. In my Notion I have a "Knowledge Garden" page which is like this hyper linked super wiki page of all my knowledge and as you dig in to the links it gets deeper. (e.g. a toggle for "computers" with bunch of paragraphs talking about [Cloud] and [AWS (Cloud > AWS)] and etc. links)
I should probably just use Obsidian or Roam but things working well on Mobile is important to me and the Notes and Notion apps work exceptionally.
To be honest: if Notes would just let me make non-share links to use to navigate between notes (without all the hacks you can do) I wouldn't really need Notion.
My own setup is pen & paper first, and then into emacs orgmode. The trouble with this is that, well, it's not GREAT on mobile. The bonus with this is that it's the only tool I've yet seen that can give me a corpus of notes that can ALSO contain intermingled complex TODO items.
It seems super dumb that OneNote doesn't do this. You CAN mark something as a ToDo in OneNote, but it's just decoration; it has no semantic meaning. If OneNote had the ability to show a "ToDos" tab that was generated automatically based on the todo-tags in the notebook, it would be a much more powerful tool.
I mean, there are reasons to avoid it (MSFT, proprietary files), but it's a really powerful and well-distributed tool. Lots of folks in corporate jobs probably can't get access to arbitrary things, but OneNote is part of Office.
Instead I'd like to share a little what I've learnt from building a note-taking startup for the past three years with my co-founder – it's easily the hardest thing we've both done.
Much of what you've said is concurrent with the majority of our users. Ubiquity and having your knowledge accessible at any time, on all of your devices is super important – but also the most challenging to create. Build a web app, then all of your users want a faster native desktop app. Build a desktop app, and then users want a fluid accessible web experience... Developing this as a team of two is very difficult; but then hearing how some users use your app every day for a year and can't live without it is hugely rewarding [2]
Note-taking is very personal and so everyone has different expectations on what they'd like. There are so many apps for different personalities and workflows – there's never 'one solution fits all'. Even though Notion has kinda done this, very successfully, one could argue that it is a 'Jack of all trades, master of none' app. That's why it's super important that every note-taking / productivity app has an API, so users can easily build the workflow with the apps that work best for them.
[1]: https://supernotes.app [2]: https://supernotes.app/blog/posts/engineer-rock-climber-note...
As a user, we are all trained to be vigilant about locking ourselves into services/companies because of circumstances. In this IT landscape, users are not just limited to Windows or Mac or iPhone. The base set of expectations have gone up, particularly when there are passable alternatives that are farther than the incumbent in features.
For a note-taking app,
MacOS App Windows App iPhone App Android App web interface (for all others including Linux users)
ought to cover it. I realise how much of work that is. But, that is the playing field when competing against apps that do different subset of the above list.
Staying away from resource hungry electron app will make me happily pay for it (just my opinion).
That's why I use Google Keep --- which is pretty terrible... except it's free, it's everywhere there's a browser, there's an app for it on every phone/tablet, and it works offline when I sometimes don't have internet connection.
Works ok since I write notes in plain text, with some markdown notation (but without actual Markdown support in Keep).
In the past, I've used Notational Velocity and other fancy things, but I find plain text is best. And now I need sync on all devices, so went with Keep.
I use iA writer a lot, but would be happy with any iOS text editor, as I like keeping notes in plain text, and then iCloud Drive does my sync natively. On Mac I use TextEdit or vim.
WRT note taking, nothing beats a bunch of markdown files that are kept in sync with syncthing. Depending on the OS, I use different tools to edit the markdown files. It doesn't matter which app you use with almost plain text files.
It adds a bit of friction for note-taking, the need to appropriately tag or locate the note, but I find that doesn't hold me back. If I don't assign a new note in a notebook, it goes into my default, where it sticks out and will quickly get reclassified.
I'm currently using iA Writer on Android. Notes are automaticaly saved as markdown to a Dropbox folder which I can open on my other devices fairly easily.
But other than that, it's the first notes app that really clicks for me. It's very fast (they do lots of things in the local browser, I think), plus I've never been able to work with categories or folders, everytime I try I quickly end up with such a lot of categories that they're not really useful anymore, and I find myself wasting time and energy figuring out the best category for a particular item, and then I still don't find it again. With Roam I don't have to do any of that, as it's just a graph, I just dump things in my Daily Notes, add a bunch of hashtags, and it'll show up on all the hashtag pages and in search. It can do a lot more that I haven't looked into yet (some kind of graph search I think?), but that alone is a total game changer for me.
I use org-mode with standard unix search solutions, such as the interactive ugrep. On mobile, I use WorkingCopy (a git frontend), or my web front end (https://notes.lilf.ir/), both of which offer search. I can also use emacs via SSH, but I haven’t done that.
Org-mode is, in the end, just a better markdown with a lot of elisp extensions available. You don’t need to know everything about it to start using it. Worst case scenario, write your intended text in some format pandoc understands (e.g., markdown, html), and see how it is converted to org-mode. The IRC channel #org-mode and https://org-roam.discourse.group/ are also helpful.
It got so file-like that I realized I could get almost everything I liked about how it cataloged, say, PDFs by just putting the PDFs in a folder and using regular file system search. Plus the lack of mobile was a problem at the time. Have they fixed that?
I basically needed something with great search, easy formatting, and inline image support. And I found it with Ulysses. I thought it was only for people writing long-form works, but it works fantastically for my use case. It ended up being the thing that replaced Evernote for me after 12 years.
It's kind of a bummer for me. I kind of wish about five years ago they would have tapered off all new feature development and switched 100% into maintenance mode with a headcount of less than 40 people.
It is possible to move from org to Markdown and then do better for pdf, eg via pandoc or some other emacs mode. I've used that in the past, because Markdown mode was even more confusing to me as a non-native emacs user.
That vi never got an org mode before the great uplift to vim says a lot to me. Emacs had more modes than there are things in heaven, Horatio. (than are dreamt of in your philosophy of editors)
At first I was a little concerned when I saw Notions "block concept" and it doesn't feel as snappy as Bear because of that, but the way you can start a new related document super easily from each block is just really good. The Search is amazing, changes are insta-synced between devices (like... live as you type) spending a little time on cards makes your doc look pretty good (if you care) and the share-options are all I ever wanted.
I also like the separation of "daily notes" and your regular documents. With Bear the sidebar always feels a little messy (despite pinning), but if daily docs are moved to a separate area that is ordered by time, it cleans up the "stage" for my more important, long-enduring notes.
I just spent about an hour testing the waters with Craft, but this is love at first sight so far!
I’m something of an unpaid evangelist for it - it’s pretty close to life changing software for me, as it’s completely changed how I think and write. Glad you love it!
They have an extremely active Slack community that’s well-staffed, and their extremely responsive to feature requests. Their pace of development over the first year of their launch is incredible.
Anyone knows what they are? It makes a ton of difference if it is a mandatory monthly plan that kicks in after I migrated everything, or skins or optional collaboration features etc.
The default storage location is their web service, but you do have the option of storing all files locally. You do lose some collaboration features if you do that.
So I'm using VS Code with the Journal plugin, Markdown notes, and ripgrep for searching. Works fine for me. For more fancy stuff I use DevonThink.
(And I too have never got into org mode, despite several tries)
There's a lot of things people tend to want from note-taking setups: easy entry, navigation and organization, wiki-like linkages, export to various formats, encryption. What I've found actually matters for my day-to-day and gets me to actually take lots of notes, though, is just (1) search and (2) sync --- I need my notes mirrored onto my phone.
For several years I just use Apple's Notes.app. It's honestly pretty great; it's frustratingly good, in fact, because it doesn't feel much better to use than does TextEdit. Both search and sync work fine. I don't have to think about what I'm writing or how it fits into the scheme of things because I'm guaranteed to be able to find things with search. I can drag screenshots of lecture videos in and write short sentences about them.
I had Bear.app for awhile and was initially skeptical of it, but it has now replaced Notes.app for me; it's a better writing environment, it has sticky notes (pinned to the top of the note list) which turn out to be really valuable, does native Markdown, and search and sync work reliably on my laptop and phone.
So, Notes and Bear.app are my two recommendations.
I'm interested to see if anybody comes up with something macOS-supported that outdoes Bear.
I'm an Emacs person, I've written a couple thousand lines of elisp, and I have never, ever been able to get into org mode.