Evernote came close to it for me before they mess their UI. Native Notes on iOS and on Mac is pretty straightforward but misses search features and is.. ugly. Ending up with several .txt files a little like OP organized in folders is also nice as it should survived most of potential future changes in term of everything and allows you to whichever editor but seems inefficient.
With so many definitions of what a “note” is even supposed to be, it’s no surprise that we haven’t settled on a single way to create and edit them.
Oops, just checked, mine has a backlight, and the ReMarkable is even more Closed than my MobiScribe, fail.
> the ReMarkable is even more Closed than my MobiScribe, fail.
The ReMarkable is comparatively very hackable and open, see for example https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable/. It doesn't have a backlight though, that's true.
Are you certain about this? I was told that remarkable is open source. But I have not verified this myself. But I see tools like https://github.com/torwag/remarkableflash which suggest it is possible to recompile what software remarkable has published and then flash it on to the system. Please double check either way.
Overall, ReMarkable 1 and 2 are pretty awesome. It's a cool tool to take ton of notes without having to worry about loosing anything. Just wish their search feature was OCR. This is truly missing.
Do you ever share notes you make with it or are they purely for your own reference?
i find the search feature works well, except i have had an occasion where it stopped looking further back in time for some reason. that was actually pretty frustrating to discover.
why is it ugly? i think it looks good from the minimalist perspective. the one thing that would make me happier is if i could run it vim or have a subset of vim keybindings
I've been experimenting with FSnotes[0] lately and find it be be the closest an app has come to the simplicity of nvALT
It was such an eye opener for me. Others had organized notes, but I had no idea how they did that.
I don't think this is 100% of the reason computers don't have a universal note taking system, but it is definitely a part of it.
Sadly, they really don't do a good job explaining the program, but it hearkens back to the early days of hypertext theory.
We've had pens and paper since ancient times, and people are still inventing new ways of organizing their notebooks.
I think "the way" might never come.
I don't mind the new iOS app so much UI wise, though its performance has gone to the dogs (recent issue for example was me trying to write a note in an underground car park with no signal - and it just would not load the note composer at all!)
The Windows app at least has dark mode now, though it's stuck in a weird hybrid of "classic Windows UI" versus "modern UI"
What about paper? Haha. Non standard notebook sizes. Post it, tear out, sewn-bound, spiral, 3x5, 4x6, single sided, double sided, pencil, fountain pen, roller ball, blue ink, black ink, colored pens, highlighter...
Back in the day a prof. Of mine blew my mind with the question—why do we need specialized software at all? Why not create generic app-components? Pen, compass, paper/document first? Just like real life?
My Sony DPT-RP1 gets somewhat close to that idea.
Only problem is that I don't have a Windows computer anymore so I can't use Notepad++ anymore and I haven't seen anything come close to it on Macos.