Comment by toastercat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toastercat | Hacker News Reader

Just want to come in here to say that Syncthing solved my note-taking app "problem" that I've been bothered with for years.

I want my notes as plain text files (or Markdown files to be specific), and I'd like to sync them with my phone. I'd also like to use the text editor of my choice to edit said text files. Cool, I just install Dropbox on my desktop, sync the files, and edit the files with Sublime Text. Oh but huh -- I can only edit the files on my phone using the Dropbox app, which doesn't work when I'm offline or have spotty reception.

I install Syncthing on my Windows PC (it runs the syncthing.exe on startup), install Syncthing and Editor[1] on my phone, and bam, now all my notes are synced directly to the filesystem of my Android phone and editable by any text editor I choose. As an added benefit, I still have a cloud sync on my PC, so the files are still backed up to a cloud service!

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.billthefarmer.editor/

This is basically what I'm doing except I hate plain text editing on a phone touchscreen, so I switched to .org for notes and use orgzly on my phone (which provides a much nicer interface for navigation around files and for quick data entry, imo). Would love an equivalent phone app for markdown but I don't think any exist.

how do you handle images? This is why I use obsidian since it essentially manages images and keeps track of them for you.

I don't; as I mentioned, I only keep notes as plaintext files. Although there is nothing stopping me from just dropping image files in my notes folder.

Drop the image in a known folder and use Markdown to include them in the notes

Sure but that requires a lot of extra work, Obsidian does that for me and I can reorganize the pictures and it will track them since it automatically assigns a GID to them, but in the end you still have just pictures and text files, which is quite nice.

What are you using to install syncthing on your phone?

I use similar setup, though Markor as an editor. As syncthing app I use https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthing... and it works pretty good.

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