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Comment by robotrout | Hacker News Reader

I would love an opensource replacement for Evernote. But it must allow me to clip images into it. Life is not always just text, and most of the programs that people claim they use to replace Evernote are text only.

Evernote also allows me to embed PDFs (or any file really), which is nice, but as a minimum spec, I insist on the ability to drop in images.

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Joplin looks promising. Can even import from Evernote. I'm going to give it a try.

https://joplin.cozic.net/

(Joplin's dev here) Can confirm that Joplin can embed images - you can copy and paste an image directly by pressing Ctrl+V in a note, or attach them. It's also possible to attach any other file, PDF, etc. and open it in an external viewer on mobile or desktop.

Evernote import is also supported and as far as I can tell works well for many users. If you find any glitch or issue though, feedback is welcome.

The app is still under development with, at the moment, a focus on bug fixing and improving the desktop and mobile usability.

This looks great, I'm going to try it out. Thanks for building it.

Joplin is the only alternative to evernote that has a webclipper. Happily made the switch. Thank you very much.

I'm actually disappointed you cant attach arbitrary files in Google Keep.

You can in Onenote, with the bonus of not giving Google even more of your data. The online client seems to work really well, although I prefer the native one.

I used to use Evernote and had too many failed updates and corrupted databases leaving me out of wifi in the big world without my notes. Sure they'd resync once I went back online, but I keep essential things in there.

But you can't sort your pages...

Have you tried cherrytree[0]? It can do images and rich text. I like the minimal nature when needed and the functionality for more robust content.

[0]https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/#features

It has an incredibly impressive feature set for an open source application, but it seems to me too much effort has gone into bells and whistles at the expense of the basic functionality.

The thing that killed it for me is that unlike every other text editor in the world, you can't apply formatting to text until after you've typed it.

I use Turtl for this sort of thing: https://turtlapp.com/

How long have you been using Turtl? I don't remember why I stopped using it, but I only used it for a few weeks the last time I tried it.

I'm trying Joplin now, but maybe I'll give Turtl another shot too..

Hi, creator of Turtl here. I'm hearing good things about Joplin/Omni, so I'm going to spend some quality time with those apps to try to learn from the things that they are doing well.

Also, we have a new version coming out very soon, v0.7.0, that will have significant UI/performance/stability improvements. I think it's worth checking out (although obviously I'm biased).

You really have to do something about your website. You get nearly no info nor simple stuff like screenshots. Is there a way to help you out in that regard?

Good idea! I'm planning a revamp once v0.7.0 launches in the next week or so.

The website is open-source/jekyll: https://github.com/turtl/www, and if you have ideas we can collaborate here: https://github.com/turtl/tracker/issues/165

Wow, never heard of it, looks great!

I've seen this thread[1], any updates or plans on entering F-Droid?

Also, what is the minimum Android version supported?

[1] https://www.f-droid.org/forums/topic/turtl/

Glad you asked, just started working on this: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/issues/412.

The minimum supported Android version is 6.0/Marshmellow (sdk v23). This is mainly due to the Keystore version we use for the "Remember me" feature.

That's great, thanks for your work!

Turtl requires a server to sync, right? I don't remember that turning me off initially, but after using Joplin - I really wish more apps would make use of regular plain-text file syncing.

Have you thought about having Turtl sync to a local directory, or using something like nextcloud/dropbox? I don't know much about the backend of Turtl, so I'm not sure how reliant it really is on the server process..

I'll look for the 0.7.0 release and check it out, thanks!

Yes, I've thought about that. And it's an attractive idea, however one thing that sets Turtl apart from other note apps is that it's both encrypted and enables sharing. Other apps do one or the other, not both, and in order to truly support both you can't use something like Dropbox or Nextcloud unless you want to be handing people keys out-of-band and doing a lot of manual work.

Turtl's main goal is to make security easy. If you have to setup Dropbox or Nextcloud to get syncing working, then it didn't attain that goal, I believe.

Also, by providing a service on top of the server, I can eventually make some money from this thing I've spent years building =]. I hope you like v0.7.0 when it launches!

I definitely forgot about the sharing aspect of Turtl, thanks for that reminder! I also understand your point of being able to provide a service, and I hope that it is successful for you when premium launches! If you haven't already, you should also consider looking into setting up Patreon as an option for donating towards the development of Turtl.

I re-downloaded 0.6.x for now to give it another try. One of the things I remember not being completely happy with was the web clipper. Has that changed at all with 0.7.0, or do you plan on improving it in the near-future?

There are a few other issues/questions I have, but I'll troll through the issue tracker first before bothering you too much :P

Evernote had such a feature- Skitch was their program which integrated screenshots and allowed for marking them up, indexing the text inside the image, and filing them alongside or within my other notes. But they killed it and I'm not sure why. It still works but is buggy and unsupported now.

Standard Notes supports secure file attachment now and is open source. Meets all of my note taking needs: https://standardnotes.org/

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