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Comment by franczesko | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, the platform lock is a deal breaker for me. After testing a lot of different note apps, I'm currently using Joplin.

It does 95% of the things I need quite right. I'm not sure, if it's only my problem, but I really struggled to find a good app for note taking, although there's a plethora of solutions out there.

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I agree perfectly. It seems there are zillions of apps (just look at this thread), but the moment I look for my requirements (markdown, good math rendering, no format lockdown, decent GUI, basic backup options) it seems that no matter how I look the only options are Obsidian and Joplin. Joplin being open source, albeit not perfect, it is my choice.

It always surprises me how many apps there and how I don't get a feeling with 95% of them.

These requirements are met by FSNotes. Or does it lack in some way you've not mentioned?

I'm finally kicking EN to the curb (my subscription renewed right before they released EN10, and I gave them a year to make it stop sucking, which they failed to do) and Joplin seems to be the one I'm hating the least, despite it being a piece of webshit in an Electron container. The fact that it actually has a plugin for dealing with conflicting changes via an actual diff interface (something EN never did in the entire decade I subscribed) kinda compensates for that.

Still gotta do a decent test drive of its sharing features, though, and see if my husband hates it less than swearing at EN10. Looks like I can only share if I'm using the Joplin Cloud, too, guess I should pay for a month soon...

By platform lock you mean OS vendor-lock (i.e. apple)? Because FS Notes stores all your notes in plain text files (which is why I use it - pointed to a Dropbox folder). Admittedly it has a weird way of naming the files (presumably so it can have the filesystem act as a more robust database that is then loaded and cached) but it's still the easiest and most "free feeling" workflow that I've been able to stick with for my workflow (what appeals to me about FSNotes is: Plain text files, Syncs with Dropbox, Fast and simple keyboard shortcuts, Works on mobile and desktop, Quick and simple to organise stuff in folders but no tags or complex structures, Very cheap)

> Admittedly it has a weird way of naming the files

You can change the file naming default to be based on note title BTW, it's in the first Preference pane window "General".

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