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Apple Notes user and fan here. Being able to drag and drop images to a note and annotating it is super useful to me. Also, being able to pickup writing or sketching on the iPad or iPhone works superb. Being part of the walled-garden and all.

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.

There’s been a rise in notes apps inspired by Bear’s style but without a subscription, and I’ve tried a few, coming away with UpNote.app as the winner. It’s beautiful, multi-platform (Mac, iOS, Windows, Android), and has a super-responsive dev who’s already implemented a few of my suggestions. Bear development seems glacial compared to UpNote. I’m extremely happy with it! http://www.getupnote.com

It looks interesting. Ticks (almost) all my boxes of needs. Even has a 129 Kr lifetime purchase option which sounds very good.

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?

While I don't despise subscriptions, I do despise subscriptions priced disproportionately (IMO) to the value and my usage frequency.

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).

Time for me to shine!

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)

I am curious how many people at least tried Git/GitHub in their note keeping journey to keep their notes safe and secure and accessible.

I use nb (https://github.com/xwmx/nb) and sync to gitlab. The best part of nb, is that you can bookmark a url, and nb will keep a copy of the page with the bookmarked url. So if the page disappears later, you still have a copy with your notes.

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.

I've been using git as my storage and sync location for a couple of years now. Use it with Obsidian on my Mac, Working Copy is pulling and pushing the repo on my iOS device. At some point I also used the Gollum Wiki to have it available on the web as well.

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.

I have small daemons for linux and mac that automatically push / pull from a git repository and sync my notes.

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.

I use Notable[1] and SparkleShare[2] to automatically sync notes with git. [1] https://notable.app [2] https://www.sparkleshare.org

I used to - but never remembered to commit and/or push. When I changed jobs (and therefore computers) I did a bulk commit and push at that point.

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.

Joplin is one I highly recommend: https://joplinapp.org/ Cross platform, open source, and offers encryption.

+1 for Joplin. My workflow using it, if anyone's interested: https://mrkaran.dev/posts/how-i-take-notes/

Thanks for posting this. I have somehow completely missed joplin.

Joplin doesn't appear to support syncing via iCloud though.

I'm just hoping that Bear 2.0 (or whatever the big next version they've been working on for a long time is called) doesn't undo Bear. While Bear isn't perfect and there are a few features that are sorely missing (searching within a note on mobile being probably tops for me), it is overall very very good. It is elegant, syncs seamlessly, feels like the native app that it is, and has just been a staple for me for years.

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.

+1 for Notes, but I use Notes as like my scratch/dumping area and then move things into Notion.

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.

I can't help myself when it comes to trying new notepads/notetaking tools, so obviously I just signed up for Notion, but:

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.

Haha let me rattle on about my own note-taking setup (or indeed my own Startup) [1]... but no I won't.

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...

Congratulations on your hard work building an app that you care about.

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).

I use Nextcloud and markdown files to take notes, it lets me search and sync to my hearts desire. Nextcloud is chronically underrated.

Exactly, I need to take lots of notes and beyond search and sync, I need it conveniently everywhere with me on all devices.

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.

Yeah ubiquity of Keep makes it very sticky. Getting iCloud notes on a PC is a real pain and requires you have your phone most times (Apple browser logins seem to have much shorter persistence)

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 syncing, syncthing has changed the way I think about that problem that is no problem anymore.

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.

The one thing I need that Apple’s notes doesn’t have, but thankfully bear does, is the ability to link to a note from outside the app. I like to be able to drop links to my notes in other documents of mine, and Apple notes makes this nearly impossible.

I agree about minimalism being key, but I would add one thing beyond search and sync, which is a way to restore context when I've been away from a project for a while. Tags or a notebook structure works for that. Search for the tag or notebook for a project, click on it, and there are my notes, with the most recently touched notes at the top, helping me reorient myself and pick up where I left off.

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 considering getting an iPhone just for notes. I had an old iphone, the iOS version didn't allow the sharing of notes feature. I thought I could just log into the iCloud website and edit my notes, however you are unable to view or edit shared notes from the website. It's very confusing.

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.

I'm using Roam and quite happy, though I'm growing kind of frustrated that it's pretty much impossible to get anything in there quickly on an iPhone other than opening Roam in Safari, waiting for the spinner to finish, then paste, and an iOS Shortcuts workflow on their site that's broken.

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.

Bear, notes etc use undocumented databases as their source of truth, which seriously limits you and locks you in.

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.

After Evernote went Electron and stripped the context-feature, DevonThink won me over. I use it for its flexibility in indexing, file-like-organization, OCR, encryption and flexible synchronization. Also the devs are very respondant and I like not having to pay for a subscription.

I tried to use DT for years, and eventually just decided it was Not For Me.

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?

Evernote was very sticky for me since 2009, but started quickly looking for alternatives once the new app was Electron-based. I tried Bear a few years ago but didn't like it. Also tried Obsidian and a few others but they were too finicky for me. Finally tried DevonThink but it was overkill for my purpose, formatting was weird and different with all the note type variations, and their pricing model killed it for me (max two devices).

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.

Evernote's great web clipper, great search, and text recognition in images is what has kept me as a subscriber for many years now. Their recent client changes are really not to my liking so I think I'm finally going to move on.

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.

I think org mode is frankly over-rated but having said that I use it myself for two things: a daily work-log and some tabular timekeeping. Really? the mechanics of the indent model are pretty crap.

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)

I really like Agenda app. Similar to Bear notes with two advantages- connecting notes to calendar entries is smart, it means you are organized with no effort, and create reminders in line in your notes.

Another option for mixing notes and calendar entries is https://noteplan.co/

I'm using Agenda app and I find search and browsing to be rather difficult compared to Bear. Perhaps the 1-to-1 connection to calendar events makes it worth it - that's what made me switch.

I followed the same trajectory as you from Notes to Bear, but have ended up on Craft. It might do too much for you, but I’ve honestly never used an app that is both so featureful and some beautiful.

My god, I haven't seen Craft before and... I haven't been so hyped about a software in a while. It's the perfect sweet-spot between Bear and Notion. Seriously... thank you!

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 had déjà vu when I read this comment, as I think I tweeted almost word for word your first paragraph when I discovered Craft.

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.

Just looked at it and it is promising. One question: the price is free but there seems to be in app purchases but I haven't found what they are despite actively looking for them.

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.

https://www.craft.do/pricing lays out the pricing structure

Craft is like a macOS-native Notion, right? My notes are stored serverside?

It gets a lot of comparisons to Notion, but I don’t think that’s really accurate. It feels much more focused on writing and note taking for me than Notion - it doesn’t do all the fancy page types, etc. But yes, it is Mac native.

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.

I think craft can store your notes on-device? Not sure. The one big difference between it and Notion is the databases — craft doesn’t have them. If not for that, I’d switch to craft in a heartbeat

I've used everything from Evernote to Emacs (primarily for text manipulation and org-mode project/task tracking), Bear to Apple Notes, Workflowy to OmniOutliner, etc. I had been keeping a lot in Apple Notes but then I must have synced incorrectly somehow because text I had written on my desktop disappeared after I wrote text in the same note on my phone, and I couldn't find a way to get it back. I've been using Obsidian (offline) and I really enjoy it.

Best note taking I’ve done is just rubber-ducking to myself in a (public) slack channel solely for that purpose. Never worry about hierarchies, and easily link back to past messages. For a dedicated app and methodology, I find https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ mimics that style.

Does Bear now support tables? I tried it and liked it, but the lack of tables was a deal-breaker (and replies to my questions make it clear that it wasn't a priority)

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)

Table support is in their current beta version.

Ah, so the new version will not be the simple minimal app they are now I guess.

I'm 85% sure I read somewhere on their subreddit that they will keep Panda as it is now for people who prefer it that simple.

If you like Notes, but want something you can get a workflow together on, I recommend NotePlan. Hits all your buttons, and I’m a fan, in no small part that it doesn’t close things into a proprietary ecosystem or storage mechanism.

I think the fact that the topic of note taking comes up so frequently may suggest that it's still a problem to which there is not a very satisfactory solution.

i find org roam to be really excellent