Show HN: An open source alternative to Evernote (Self Hosted)
github.com
github.com
And for that I need something that's lightweight on the screen. Just the text and none of the tools that take up extra space. Also, I'd have multiple notes (in separate windows) and have the app running all the time so that creating a new note is just a few clicks. (A global keyboard shortcut would be even better.)
Now the major shortcoming of Tomboy (besides the lack of real markdown support, though the bullet point handling is pretty much OK) is that it gets stuck at this lightweight level and there is no UI for the aforementioned organization. (Though it does create links semi-automatically, which is not bad, though I don't use it a lot.) So it seems that one can have either end of the spectrum, but most documents, at least for me, would start as lightweight notes and then some of them may turn out to be something more convoluted and for the long term. So it would be nice to have an app that covers both. (Unfortunately, copy-pasting from Tomboy doesn't work well, so the bullet point hierarchy gets lost. Also, it would be nice to have it based on markdown and plain text files, but it uses xml, IIRC.)
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31409077 [1]https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/bike/ [2]https://www.taskpaper.com
Now I have everything in Notes, synced through iCloud.
Apple Notes doesn't use any standard format, but you can export your notes. Otherwise, I'd be way into an open-source, self-hosted solution.
EverNote is all about dropping random files into it (images, pdfs, etc). It's where you store your bills, your receipts, your photos of wine labels. It also has a very handy web clipper extension to save web pages (whole pages, sections, or bookmarks).
I'm sure plenty of people use it differently, but I'm also quite confident (from how I've seen others describe it) that one its primary use-cases is as a big shoebox to dump everything into. You then search for that stuff through titles, tags and OCR in photos.
I use it in a fundamentally different way from Obsidian.
Anyway... I have never used EverNote (==note taking?). And, as you have read, I am reaaaaally in Obsidian (==knowledge management?).
Can any of you elaborate of the conceptual difference between both?
Both are valid and powerful tools but the use cases are different, maybe just because the definition of "second brain" has moved since Evernote was conceptualized on the 2000s.
Image/file upload
Web clipper (singlefile is great)
OCR (Tesseract has done what I need, not sure how that compares to Evernote)
Basic task management
Customizable dashboard
Tagging and excellent search (these are Evernote's bread and butter)
WYSIWYG editing
Templates
Integrations
And it would be really nice if it could do math, which would be an advantage over Evernote.
It's possible some of this is already implemented; I only gave your page a short look.
TiddlyWiki really is one of the cleverest apps I've ever run across, but I'm not much of a JS programmer, so it's got a bit of a learning curve if you want to hack on it. It's pretty easy to use right out of the box if you don't want to hack on it, though, and I'm giving some thought to moving most of the data I've collected in OneNote to TiddlyWiki to escape Microsoft's clutches after I've finally disentangled myself from Google... One thing I love is that TiddlyWikis I built 20 years ago (granted, they were simpler then) are still perfectly usable today.
My perfect data keeper might be something of a mashup between TiddlyWiki and a JuPyteR notebook.
I run a local CGI server and that allows me to make all kinds of customizations in the language I want (most languages support local CGI servers). The querying capabilities of TiddlyWiki make it a nice database.
A few more features IMO would be nice: (fuzzy) search; task management; math formula support; or just expose API for such development would be great as well.
Major missing feature for the average user I think would be easy image/binary upload, embedding and preview.
By leveraging Github (and Gitlab please) auth it makes this usable by enterprise which is smart I think.
Others have mentioned about Search, In case you choose to implement it then I'd suggest a special attention towards code search. I presume formatting code with markdown is a non-issue, So implementing first class code search capabilities would be real differentiator among other notes applications and could likely fill a need-gap.
For the initial POC I have integrated it with GitHub
Does it support markdown extensions, like GitHub flavored markdown or something.
---
date: 2021-09-14T22:51:33+02:00
modified: 2021-09-29T15:40:38+02:00
---
Then it would interoperate with GitJournal perfectly I think :).
But I use as private notes mainly, so can't say much on file storage side.
Multiple sync target (e.g. Dropbox, Nextcloud, OneDrive etc.) with E2EE.
But it's not polished so expect there might some strange limitations.
I started using it after Evernote with very few notes
I'd like to draw your attention to issue #59 and in the meantime I'll be posting a short Fediverse article, basically just an announcement at this point, with a much more in depth article to follow once the FOSS based git support enhancement is released.
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Thanks for showing interest in the mobile app. I'm working on the android app prototype. You will see the app on play store soon.
BTW I'm also checking if https://fyne.io/ can be used. I'll love to use golang for the app :)
It looks like this doesn’t have that, unfortunately.
> [Teh ElasticSearch Core Ingest Attachment Processor Plugin]: The ingest attachment plugin lets Elasticsearch extract file attachments in common formats (such as PPT, XLS, and PDF) by using the Apache text extraction library Tika.
> The source field must be a base64 encoded binary. If you do not want to incur the overhead of converting back and forth between base64, you can use the CBOR format instead of JSON and specify the field as a bytes array instead of a string representation. The processor will skip the base64 decoding then
Apache Tika supported formats > Images > TesseractOCR: https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html#Image_formats :
> When extracting from images, it is also possible to chain in Tesseract, via the TesseractOCRParser, to have OCR performed on the contents of the image.
/? Meilisearch "ocr" GitHub;
Looks like e.g. paperbase (agpl) also implements ocr with tesseractocr: https://docs.paperbase.app/
tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
/? https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#sea... ctrl-f "ocr"
- Search results on a timeline indicating search match occurrence frequency; ability to "zoom in" or "drill down"
- "Find more like these" that prepopulates a search query form
- "Find more like these" that mutates the query pattern and displays the count for each original and mutated query along with the results; with optional optimization
Thanks for the feedback. I'll check if import from evernote can be added as a feature to GitNoter.
That would be a relief to finally make a link between Google Keep and Google Tasks, something long overdue!
The only real alternative to Evernote I've found is DEVONthink.
It also feels appropriate to be publicly preserving parts of the web that you've found useful enough to note down. As someone at archive.org said, 'If you see something, save something.'
Edit: n.b. archive.org does honour takedown requests, though they're rare and usually somewhat predictable. cf. gwern's drastic approach of archiving all the pages he's ever visited, https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs
I'm also undecided still on whether to always record the original URL or the archive URL when the original page is unlikely to change. Archive links contain the entire original URL, so there's no risk there; on the other hand, it tends to be clear from the date of the note which snapshot to retrieve, so there's not really a need. But dates are close to being metadata and might be lost somehow...
This [source](https://help.noteplan.co/article/86-how-to-force-sync) says that opening the iCloud Drive on Finder will trigger sync. On the mobile Obsidian app, you can flicker the page down to download updated data, obviously it will only work if the more recent data was uploaded.
https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/readme/clipper....
There's also an offline OCR plugin based on Tesseract
https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/plugin-offline-ocr-extract...
It is a great tool. I do wish I could self host, though, and I wish the db were just an index of md files (and maybe json for bibliographic details).
In fact, why is a Postgres database even needed?
Please note that I'm biased. I work on [GitJournal](https://gitjournal.io) which is similar, but only mobile based.
Thanks for GitJournal!
Did you get the permission for using "Git" mark?
I'll shoot them an email and ask, and start thinking of a different name. In the case of Gitea [0], there doesn't seem to have been any response.
Thanks for bringing this up. Though I wonder how well can "Software Freedom Conservancy" claim "GitSomething" is not allowed when there are clearly so so many projects doing it. Eg - Gitolite / Gittea. Trademarks are only so good as long as they are enforced.
Simplenote.com has been great for all of these usecases.
http://sources.vsta.org:7100/notepad/index
When less is more.
This tool commits the cardinal sin of choosing a name GitSomething, where Git is only incidental to the domain that the product is concerned with (notetaking) and which is made worse by being yet another project that says "Git" where what it means is "we're using the GitHub API".
> You may not use the Marks in the following ways:
...
> In any way that indicates that Git favors one distribution, platform, product, etc. over another except where explicitly indicated in writing by Conservancy.
...
> In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy's written permission. For the avoidance of doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a product or service's use of Git code.
http://git-scm.com/about/trademark
> Let's say as an example that it does backups. We'd prefer it not call itself GitBackups. We don't endorse it, and it's just using the name to imply association that isn't there. You can come up with similar hypotheticals: GitMail that stores mailing list archives in Git, or GitWiki that uses Git as a backing store.
https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...
What's also notable is that it conflicts with what is permitted: 'Commands like "git-foo" (so you run it as "git foo") are generally OK. This is Git's well-known extension mechanism[...]' When "git-foo" exists, we've approved "Git Foo" as a matching project name'. This combined with the fact that Git itself already ships with the "git-notes" command baked right in...
(Bitcoin is also originally a LF project; in Git, like BitTorrent, and similar to BitGold only in name, for a reason. Bitcoin initially lacked a Foundation to hold trademarks, in particular.)
The choosealicense.com table of licenses in the appendix is a service of GitHub, and GitLab also donates free CI build runner minutes for Open Source projects: https://choosealicense.com/appendix/#trademark-use :
> Trademark use
> This license explicitly states that it does NOT grant trademark rights, even though licenses without such a statement probably do not grant any implicit trademark rights.
Trademarks are like copyright licenses where if you haven't been given explicit permission, then you don't have any. (The difference is that you can lose your trademark if you don't actively police misuse, but that's beside the point.)
(GitHub is a good example of why the policy exists. They borrowed liberally from Git's brand; conflated Git and github.com in the minds of tens of thousands of people, maybe even millions, registered a trademark for "GitHub"; and began going after people who do the very type of borrowing that GitHub themselves did. They ultimately ended up causing issues for the Git project when it sought a trademark, since the GitHub trademark already existed at that point.)