/tap – Powerful and customizable note-taking system

Is cloud storage anywhere near as opinion-inducing as note taking workflows though? :) There are like a dozen new entrants each month, and so it’s probably meaningful for folks to get super clear on their core requirements. Otherwise, you’d spend all your time evaluating tools, as opposed to actually writing.

The Dropbox reply[1] was fully negative, while this one is mostly positive. It also suggested that the business wasn't viable, which this comment does not. Doesn't read like it at all, honestly.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

This has to be one of the most overdone comments on this site -- Not everything even slightly critical of a product is like the dropbox reply.

It’s a little bit clunky, but you can use GitHub.dev/<repo> on your phone. I do a lot of browsing/quick edits that way, and it works well enough. That said, I also use Working Copy for iOS to sync my notes repo, and will use that sometimes as well.

Personally, I don’t find that I do a lot of “deep writing” on my phone, as opposed to quick recall or in-the-moment scratch padding. So as long as I have a way to access my notes, make quick edits, and then sync them with my laptop (where I’ll do my primary thinking later), then I’m pretty content.

Look into gitjournal if you're storing and editing markdown from git repos: https://gitjournal.io/ It's very nice in my experience.

Looks really interesting! Thanks for sharing

I would love to introduce you to every one of the group sms monstrosities that arise every time my children join a new activity. Why do people insist on doing this?

With WhatsApp you already cover probably 90% of Latin America and Europe; Telegram would be really nice to have since it's gaining traction and it's popular among tech-savvy users.

Russia and Asia probably use other apps like WeChat, honestly no idea.

Whatsapp has a business API pretty much exactly for stuff like this.

> Noted. FWIW SMS is not a requirement to use /tap. And I would love to build more messaging integrations. email me with suggestions!

LINE messenger in Southeast Asia KakaoTalk in South Korea

Telegram not would also do the job.

SMS sucks, but it's ubiquitous. The rest of the messaging market is heavily fragmented.

Europe here too. SMS is still my main way of writing short messages to people. I refuse to use Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp and that's what most people use. I could not even use WhatsApp, my phone is not supported.

Thankfully Signal is taking off in my friend circles, but SMS is what will work best on my phone and what will wake it up. Signal works well when I'm on my computer.

SMS is also what I'm 100% sure will work when contacting someone through their mobile phone number.

I agree, I'm happy to support commercial software that allows me to buy a single release for a one time payment.

I'm a big fan of when there's a self-hosted option, then you could get around that need and keep your own data too

What piqued my interest was the little markup language they have for folders, events, tags, etc. I'm loathe to send anything over SMS, let alone anything private like a note of any kind. Those messages are sent in clear text and archived by all major carriers for years on end for later analysis and government surveillance. Solid no on the SMS features, seems kind of gimmicky anyway.

Joplin was dog shit when I used it. Basically it tries to save the file after every single character you type so if your document becomes long enough it starts using a shit load of data and crashing your phone. There was also something weird where you couldn’t scroll to the bottom of your note In a reasonable amount of time, I forgot what the reason was but overall the thing seems like typical FOSS dog shit where they’re talking about all these fancy features like nextcloud integration. if you just want to type a note, you know the most basic thing, it can’t do that, but of course the devs are working on some super advanced feature which is irrelevant because the base product doesn’t work. yes this was on android

I am building something similar browser based https://bangle.io

And not to forget LogSeq (https://logseq.com) which is often mentioned in a row with the above and somehow the new kid in town. Works with local markdown files but lives in your browser (so useful even in environment with low privileges). Allows linking and querying notes and blocks swiftly.

Syncthing solves the markdown sync issue for me flawlessly on every platform. You can always use Dropbox or any other plain old file sync service too (OneDrive, NextCloud, etc.). At the end of the day it's just a bunch of files so you can use anything--sftp, rsync, xmodem over dialup... it's just files.

Yes, it being hosted is definitely nice. It's not a big deal for people like me that know how to host software but I can see that being a huge plus for folks who can't/don't want to manage their own server.

I see you are the creator of /tap? Great! I think the multi modal goal is definitely cool and could be really useful. For tiddlywiki, I have to host my own server and only access to it is via a browser. While I have access everywhere this way, it's sometimes slow on mobile phones.

FYI, I signed up but login doesn't seem to work for me. Does nothing. I had to verify my email but got a 'oops try again' message with the verify link. Maybe has something to do with not being able to login.

I did see the parsing component, and it looks good. My worry though is that even with the parsing format being good, you're not really selling this as a parser; it doesn't seem like the text format is the most exciting part of this.

With notes in specific, because they're such an important part of my life, I'm taking a very long-term view; what still exists after 15 years? Everything else is kind of ethereal and doesn't matter because I can't really invest into building systems around something that will disappear suddenly. So I look at /tap through that lens: what parts of this still exist if tomorrow the developer either gets bough by Google or joins an Amish community?

It seems like it's only the parser? Not the SMS stuff, not the visualization or searching, not emailing, not how the ledger works, not the API. And again, it seems like a good parser, but I already have some decent parsers I use for taking notes in text format, that's a somewhat crowded space that's hard to compete in.

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I may not be the kind of customer you are trying to target, and that's fine, but I'll try to explain more clearly what I mean.

When I think back to OneNote, I built systems around something that stopped working for me, and then those systems all had to be rebuilt from scratch. It was a huge loss of time investment that outweighed any monetary investment. If I'm thinking long-term about my notes, I'm paying $7 for... basically just document storage, I can't really build around the API or the SMS or email integration, because that stuff doesn't exist in a permanent form, it's all ethereal and it all goes away if you join Google. In some ways it's even worse than that, because the focus on SMS integration means I'm likely to get heavily reliant on SMS for notetaking, which is a huge issue if I ever need to self-host anything and realize suddenly that building apps around SMS handling is very difficult. I've now kind of accidentally made my life much harder.

But I compare that situation to something like Matrix/Wallabag, apps where prices for official hosting are basically in the same neighborhood as /tap and that cost me very similar amounts of money to subscribe to:

- I'm getting a lower barrier of entry that means I can start relying on the project before I ever learn anything about hosting.

- I'm getting the chance to build infrastructure around an actively supported piece of tech, where I don't have to solve all of my own problems.

- I'm paying for short-term uptime guarantees.

- I'm paying to have to think less about security.

- I'm paying to not have to think about the horror of integrating with SMS/Email notifications

In theory, I would be paying for the same stuff in /tap, but in practice I'm not because the SMS features and integrations and stuff don't actually exist in the long-term. Everything except the parsing format is ethereal and is going to go away.

So I have a short-term uptime guarantee from /tap that's higher than my own would be, at the cost of needing to redo my entire infrastructure and needing to figure out hosting from scratch in the future. I can think less about security right now, at the cost of needing to build my own product some day where all of those security problems will come back in full-force even worse. I have a lower barrier of entry now, but later on I have to drop everything and start from scratch, and I won't be able to really do anything with my notes when that happens other than parse them until I rebuild my own solutions for stuff like repeated tasks. I can build infrastructure around an actively supported tech stack, except that tech might all vanish one day, so I can't really rely on any infrastructure that I build, or on any other service that relies on /tap.

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It's difficult to put into words, but I want to feel like I am paying for a service, not for a technology. With Matrix/Wallabag/insert-whatever, I get to temporarily not think about problems that are annoying, but I could think about them if I needed to. If something goes wrong, I could even pay another person to think about them and keep putting that problem off. And that means the service is just making my life easier, I'm just paying for people to solve problems for me and to deal with things I don't want to deal with. I'm paying for someone else to help me use a piece of technology.

In contrast, with /tap, I'm paying for access to that technology just as much as I'm paying for any service, which far from solving problems actually introduces problems in my life, because it would add new API requirements for whatever custom solution I'll need to eventually build when the company pivots or gets bought out or dies.

In a weird way, because notes are a long-term investment, the exclusivity around the tech means the value proposition for me as a user is much lower than the value proposition from more open applications, because kind of summing up everything above, a concept that encapsulates a lot of these ideas is that I'm paying for peace of mind, I'm paying to have someone take my worries away and to stress about stuff like hosting for me. And /tap's approach to peace of mind seems to be "don't worry, you can rebuild everything yourself if something goes wrong." The only way I'd get peace of mind out of that is if I paid you for hosting and then only used the REST API and only after reimplementing the entire REST API myself locally. But it's not worth $7 a month for me to do that, I want solutions that I don't have to plan around a bunch, I want solutions that don't give me anxiety when I think about the future. Parsing is a very small part of that, I'm not really worried that no one would be able to figure out how to parse a documented text format if /tap went down, I'm worried about everything else.

Again, I am probably not your ideal customer, so I think take that with a grain of salt. But my perspective is that I want a service that makes me feel more confident about the long-term, not less. I feel like if I was setting up auto-responders or integrating Tasker with my SMS app on my phone around /tap -- I don't think I'd feel confident about any of those systems, /tap seems to be encouraging me to build some very long-term fragile solutions/integrations for my notetaking setup.

I have to say this makes sense to me, and I've always known that I'm just not in the target audience for these apps, but if you'll allow me to poke some fun at your comment for a second, I'd paraphrase it as "my note-taking needs are so intricate that nobody has hit the right spot yet. I need a perfect soup of features coded and exposed to me in just the right way so that when I finally write down a note I have a mental orgasm" :)

Joking aside, I personally think it's more important to focus my attention on the substance of the note, rather than the process of taking the notes, though the two aren't in conflict with each other, except for the times when they take away from your time and mental bandwidth.

Totally! I made tap and I still use org-mode for a lot of stuff! I think we all think slightly different things when we hear "notes" It is both an artifact and also a system for capturing the artifacts. the artifact is often, but not always, just some boring text -- but the way it is captured and used can be really interesting and as varied as the artifacts themselves. _so. many. possibilities._!

My opinion is slightly different - I don’t think note taking is about the app, but rather about the process. Because of that, all of us will always be looking for something to make that process something better than we currently experience.

To me, it’s either paper, Notepad(or any simple text app), or Excel. Everything else is about the process.

But then, maybe I’ve become old and crusty and just don’t know it yet. Sigh.

I've come to think the missing piece is a system or process of helping each person experiment through different note taking styles or systems, until they find what resonates best with them, or exposing them to various systems, different ones which they may realize work best for different contexts of what they're doing - for different projects or mental contexts, etc.

I too have an idea for a "note taking" app - essentially better streamlining, automating, and extending what I currently do - but maybe the process or steps I currently take are integral to what I currently do working. Who knows. Will I ever get the chance to create the custom "note taking" app that I envision? Who knows.

For now, because of my situation with severe chronic pain and how it impacts/disrupts my executive function, I will have multiple TODO lists on q-cards, and dozens and dozens TODO lists in various notes on my laptop and phone, none of which are synchronized - most of them lost to the past and therefore inherently part of a backlog of relatively unimportant things that otherwise would surface again in my mind or life if they were important enough.

I assume most note-taking apps originated with someone figuring out what system / process resonates for them. But ultimately that system / process is optimal only for that person. I've given up on adapting an off-the-shelf app... in part because I lack the self awareness here to know what's optimal for me. It's only in the process of working it out for myself on a basic canvas (e.g. a spreadsheet, text files, pen and paper) that I'll have any idea what will work and stick. I'm many iterations into that process. I'll look to /tap for inspiration! It looks awesome, props.

> Note taking is a deeply personal process.

Yes. All the more reason not to encumber it with large dependencies, proprietary code, or fragile, transient technologies.

I switched to using git as a repository of structured notes. The schema is simple. I can pull notes to various machines, I can archive the repository, I can track changes.

"Everything should be as simple as possible and no simpler." -- attributed to a rather good physicist.

See, the thing is-- MANY times in the past I've "perked up," nearly 100% that I'll switch from the thing I started with -- and end up ALWAYS going back, forgetting how much I have to put in.

This is why I think some cynicism here might be healthy; I think software has a LOT of wasted repeated effort by developers; mostly due to a little too much "let me make a product" mentality and not enough "free/open source" mentality*

and again before the pitchforks come out, I'm emphatically not saying FOSS is always superior, but I do think this balance is presently off.

So ... what features do you often miss/would you like to see implemented?

> how many note-taking systems have S-expression formulas that support nested functions?

Obsidian, Workflowy, Roam Research, Dynalist, Quire, Asana and Org Mode, just to name a few off the top of my head.

I second TickTick. I've used tens of to-do apps and it resonated with me the most.

I wonder sometimes if note organizing isn’t a lost cause. If we could just solve note retrieval, who cares about organizing? I want to make a note when I find out something useful, and I want to retrieve that note when I need the information (or when I find out more, so I can amend the note). Organization seems orthogonal to that desire.

I know what it is, it's the idea that someone can write code once, and someone else should pay to maintain it forever using a subscription model. The craziness of this space is that people think that maintaining a tiny footprint on a server somewhere is somehow worth $10 a month boggles my mind. You can buy access to most basic file-syncing services for that much. Why isn't a note-taking app, even a very advanced one, not just a simple one-time payment? If you want to haggle about paying for new versions, sure, but most of the "services" space is full of rent-seeking people, which is probably the thing that rubs you the wrong way.

Another way of thinking about it: Most MMORPGs that charge monthly fees are around $10 a month too, does a note-taking app somehow involve as much work as maintaining the massive-infrastructure and maintenance nightmare of running a MMORPG? If not, why is the pricing so similar?