Hacker News Reader

> Notion covers most of the bases but its an electron app and its SLOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW if you have a lot of notes in it. Takes 30 seconds for the mobile app to open and be useful for instance. Thats a dealbreaker for me. I need to be able to get a piece of knowledge on the go fast. If you can't give me what I want in less than a few seconds you go in the bin.

So true. I've used Evernote for years and recently started using Notion. Notion works much better for organizing and structuring stuff, but when it comes down to jotting down a quick note, I istinctively open Evernote. Just recently I've realized it's because of the speed, both on desktop and (even worse) on mobile, Notion just takes too long to start up.

Just now while writing this comment I tried to open both of them on my Windows laptop: Evernote took ~1s, Notion ~5s between launching and loading the content.

Same. Love the ideas happening in Notion, but until I can go from idea to having it in my phone in less time than it takes for me to find a pen and paper, I'll stick with other tools.

I was an early EN user from way back in the day when the UI metaphor was basically an infinite roll of paper.

I abandoned EN around the time everyone else did for a Dropbox synced folder full of markdown files. I use Sublime Text as my client on the desktop.

For my particular use case (I never really used the advanced EN features) it's worked well. I never really created notes on mobile, but I can read them using the Dropbox app.

I am curious how do you handle search? Is that even a use case for you?

You can simply use ripgrep to search. Either from a terminal, or from an editor it is integrated with.

I favor the same approach. In my case, I use org-mode instead of markdown as it offers a few niceties when editing from Emacs. But irrespective of that, IMHO plain text overrules any other choice as it is future-proof and can be composed with your favorite tools. For example, a VCS like Git.

I have many files in a flat zettelkasten-like structure [1]. That means, essentially, having one file per concept and using links to chain them.

[1] https://qr.ae/TW8ieU

> You can simply use ripgrep to search

That assumes that the text in your notes uses the vocabulary you'd expect, and isn't misspelled. Neither of those are guaranteed if your notes are snippets of other documents (a common EN use-case) rather than text you wrote yourself. Especially not guaranteed if the snippets are images where their textual representation is the output of an OCR algorithm.

Is there something like ripgrep for fuzzy search?

You can pipe ripgrep into fzf for fuzzy searching. It works like a dream.

Sublime's file search is super fast. Works great for me.

My folder tree is fairly flat and folder/file-naming is self-explanatory, so when I have to use the dropbox client on mobile, finding stuff isn't too bad.

Every time I find a new Evernote competitor, I try it out. I keep thinking that it must be easy to top Evernote, which I have various complaints about.

I'm always back to Evernote within a week.

Notion and Joplin were my most recent attempts.

I was never an evernote power user, but I find Notion to be much more intuitive and preferable with two exceptions: Evernote's inline audio tool is really excellent. Being able to capture snippets lightning fast inline is crucial to my workflow as a musician. And Notion is slow on startup. Hopefully they become profitable enough to decide a native mac client is worthwhile.

In general, Notion has the same feel to me that Slack did when it first came out: Just the right balance of cutesy, thoughtful detail in the UX, but in a way that doesn't feel superfluous because the underlying abstractions are also very well considered.

Choosing the emoji icons for pages, being able to /page to make a new linked page inline, @referencing pages, the interchangeable table and calendar views... none of it is particularly novel, but they're the best I've ever used at making it feel effortless to compose.

Could you please describe what you missed when you tried Notion and Joplin?

My issue with Notion is just picky little things that make it not fun to use. It looks great, is intuitive to me, and seems pretty powerful, so I want to like it. But, I hate having to be emailed a log-in code. Everytime it happens I think "oh yeah, this is why I never use Notion". I don't like that the desktop and mobile apps are just wrappers for the webview. As a user I feel like I have no control over anything. At least with Evernote and OneNote, I can literally see my database on my computer. With Notion, I am always aware that this is data on somebody else's servers. I've also had subpages completely disappear if I move their parent note, and I gave up on support and just accepted the loss.

Joplin looks good. I am going to give it a shot.

I use Joplin every day for work, and review notes on the commute home from phone. Love being able to write in Markdown, fully encrypted across all devices, full hierarchical structure plus tags support. The UI is "basic", but so are my needs. And if it goes away, I have an up-to-the-minute backup organized by those same folders and markdown files. Several new releases since I started using it 6 months ago.

The lack of tags support on mobile and the proprietary storage format is what drove me away from OneNote.

What was the reason from switching back from notion?

Not the original poster but it takes ages to open, and I have maybe 3-4 notes in there. It's especially bad on android.

Also the offline support isn't great which is a dealbreaker in the subway where internet goes in and out.

I use EN every day also. The search is not good, but I haven't found anything better, I have a lot of notes in different notebooks and it works ok for me in terms of speed and usability across mobile and desktop. I'm glad they didn't become some bloated app that tries to upsell you with useless new features all the time but worry they might not survive. I had a major problem with sync 3 years ago where I lost an important document, ever since then I write important things outside EN and store a copy in it

yeah, search is really bad. Not sure if it's still possible, but a few years ago when trying to find something I knew I captured, I just wrote my own SQL against the local DB - found what I was looking for pretty quickly.

Why is the search not good(my experience too) ? is there some technical reason ?

Hi! I am the co-founder of FYI and author of the blog post. We are not an Evernote competitor. In fact we integrate with it and many other document apps.

This is a very strange content to post on your product's blog. What marketing advantage are you seeing from your blog, which seems to only contain this takedown article of a quasi-competitor alongside mostly clickbait posts ("These 10 tips will change your life!").

Strange content indeed. I thought it was interesting but totally inappropriate for a company’s blogging platform. Seems like a cheap shot way to drive traffic to their site.

Oh I see. You’re self-identifying “problems” that your product can solve.

no need to be on a quest to bring others down, he's building a company while you sit on your arse trying to take entrepreneurs down

I really liked Google Keep before I started concerning myself with privacy and boycotted all Google products. It struck the perfect balance between organization and the ability to easily jot things down; one thing I never liked about EN was that every note had to go in a notebook and had to have a title. That would always give me a mental block when I just wanted to write disorganized thoughts and then organize them later. I'm also a huge advocate of tags-over-categories.

That's super sketchy about the author.

I'm still using google keep and I am concerned about privacy, looking for a an alternative that's neither of those programs.

So far I've been trying to use Gitlab with a bunch of text files. That works, sort of, for more long form notes, but not quite captures the UI.

I'm looking harder and harder on TODO.txt (I didn't know it was open-source). http://todotxt.org/

Currently I'm on Apple's notes app. There are lots of things I don't like about it - rich text formatting needs to die - but it gets the job done and has "jot-ability". I've thought about writing my own dead-simple notes app but just never had the time. Plaintext, dropbox backup, simple substring search, maybe tags, maybe markdown.

I'm a happy Org Mode user, but it lacks a complete, reliable and easy to use mobile interface. It is and probably will always be a desktop-centric application.

Orgzly is pretty good on android

I wish I had an android to try it. The options for ios iOS are not good enough for me.

But even so, I hear it is limited in functionality.

Orgzly is a good interface, but the syncability is lacking.

really? Been working fine for me apart from the occasional sync conflict. I just make sure to sync before I make any changes on the phone, and then sync again.

To be fair, no notes service is worth paying for—they all have ridiculous cost for providing a commodity service.

Depends on your use case. If you are just storing text string, simple notes, using it as a scratchpad or maybe a todo list, then yeah, it's hard to justify pricing.

But some note services are the backbone of some people's workflow. I personally require one and if Evernote shutdown, it will create massive disruption to my life.

thats the thing: a NOTES service is useless. EN is not just a notes service. In fact thats probably its least useful feature. EN is a knowledge database. Its a place to stick stuff you might want to use later. As I've said before, its too bad that no one that works at EN understands this.

> EN is a knowledge database.

Isn't that just a fancy way of searching notes? Seems like full text search and/or a wiki linking interface is most of that functionality.

It's a hard problem; I don't mean to demean the work of the people on the product. But notes apps have been more or less the same for 30-40 years now barring features like OCR that I'd never use: the main difference is that you pay to sync them somewhere.

I didn't read it as demeaning. I would respectfully like to posit that perhaps you haven't fully thought through what makes EN and its ilk different.

Yes a full text search and wiki linking interface would get a fairly large chunk of the essential functionality done. But there are MASSIVE gaps there. For one, a wiki is a web interface. Those are slow and suck on mobile. I've yet to see one that doesn't. Attaching media is painful. Theres no web clipper support. You'll have to roll your own infrastructure including backups. Capturing anything outside of a traditional desktop context is going to suuuuuck. Capturing TEXT is a fairly trivial problem. So much of what I capture in a given day is much more than that. I regularly scan documents and use EN to manage a paperless office for instance. You can do that with a wiki I suppose but it's more friction than is worthwhile IMO.

If you practice GTD like me, you need a trusted repository for capturing your thoughts, items, todos, etc. It should be fast and easy and available everywhere. Thats The value prop that EN brings to the table. No matter what it is you want to capture and store, no matter what platform, they have a way to quickly and easily do it. You can even email notes right into it (they give you a special email address) which I use for things like tech newsletters and stuff. So while you are right that notes apps have been around, its the little things that really make the difference here.

OneNote can do hierarchy just fine. It's partly why I use the thing instead of Evernote: The OneNote hierarchy is in folders, not tags:

https://i.imgur.com/X0qbxg3.png

OneNote's Android app is still a bit iffy of an experience for surfacing notes and reading content (the scrolling can be a bit jittery sideways, and there's no separate edit/read modes), something where Evernote's steady scrolling has it beat. ON Android is amazing for capture, though, but I don't imagine Evernote falling behind much on that count.

Good to know. For some reason I just kind of hate the UI. Thats my primary reason for not using it. MS apps just look like garbage to me. Personal taste thing tho.

OneNote is the only thing I've seen that pretty closely matches EN in features. Its missing the email to inbox feature that EN has (unless they've added that since I last checked).

Being an electron app isn't necessarily the reason why it's slow.

I use Trilium, a different note taking electron app, and it handles a massive amount of notes with ease