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Comment by sgallant | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big believer in this, but I use https://bear.app/. It supports the Markdown format and can export to .md files, but it uses SQLite under the hood, I believe.

What's amazing about this is that your thought archive is now searchable (which is fast in bear).

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https://fsnot.es - FSNotes is a native (~100% Swift) FOSS app which I believe is modelled after Bear.app.

I have been looking at it for sometime now, from a distance.

Very active development. Lots of options. But it still doesn’t seem as stable as I would like it to be.

Though sometimes it seems kinda all over. For example - it lets you set a storage and then another storage for “git” handling id you’d like to use it. Adding external folder doesn’t import the notes, it just shows a folder there. Sometimes restarting the app does the trick, or just removing or adding again.

So there’s sync option (iCloud only), there’s storage location, there’s external folder addition, then there’s git as well. I am sharing it here because many of you might like these many features.

I still believe it has huge potential and I’ll give it a more full fledged try once it has a more reliable and transparent sync option unlike what iCloud sync is (my biggest gripe with iCloud sync is it doesn’t let me choose where I want to see/keep the raw files and there’s no versioning and if there is I’m not. It fails not in silence but radio silence).

I'd never heard of fsnot.es. It looks great. I bought Ulysses ages ago on Mac because I wanted a performant, native-app markdown app that supported external folders. Unfortunately, shortly after purchasing it Ulysses went subscription only. I had no alternative, so I kept paying. However, I don't used any of the advanced features, and I'm really overpaying when I have no iPhone, don't use iCloud, and just do simple markdown. I'll check out fsnotes to see if it can replace Ulysses for me.

I have considered switching from Android to iPhone, but I don't know how I'd do notes on it. For work I can't use iCloud. I can only use my company's backup solution. Then for my personal notes I have Android and Linux (desktop), so I can't use iCloud, so I use syncthing or Google Drive. If I went to iOS, I don't know how I'd get my personal notes on Linux syncing with iOS. All the native iOS apps only support iCloud.

You won’t be able to.

See if you’d like Joplin or Simplenote. I still use Simplenote. Because even though FSNotes seems promising, it’s still not there.

but both of them store notes in a proprietary way, so if they shut down (or I just wanted to move), wouldn't it be harder to migrate off?

I use nvAlt for Simplenote on Mac where I chose to keep the file in text format in a Dropbox folder and it also sync to Simplenote server which easily makes the data available to mobile app. So Simplenote server does the sync between apps and since I keep the data in Dropbox folder the data is synced/backed up (I separately backup that folder as well) there as well.

(To be honest that works better for me than FSNotes' complicated way of doing this. I wish they had a way to do that in Mac app while still utilising invisible iCloud Sync; but without me having to specify a dozen places for storage, sync, external folder etc etc)

Joplin is FOSS. Format is not proprietary and it is easily readable and they also do a raw export https://joplinapp.org/help/#exporting

excellent. Thanks!

Do you find text files to otherwise be difficult to search?

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