Ask HN: Why are there no good note taking apps

I've never seen any really great notetaking app, other than Obsidian.

I don't know why the open source community can't match it yet, but it probably will eventually.

I suspect it's because notetaking is essentially 100% UI and features, There are not many new algorithms involved, and but you need a good markdown edit component.

Also, cross platform is hard, until Flutter game along most of the ways to do it right involved tons of duplicated effort.

Isn't Obsidian open source tho?

Most/all of the extensions are. Obsidian itself is very much closed.

It's almost like AgentDVR, one of those things everyone thinks is open but isn't.

Maybe because the quality is so high, with so few obnoxious craps added on, that nobody can believe it's proprietary in todays industry.

Possibly because these apps are mostly unnecessary? I just open a new terminal tab, and use vim. If I might need to share the note with someone, open an email draft in gmail.

For me the most important feature of note taking apps is auto-sync. I want to be able to take a note on my phone and then immediately access that note without any fuss from a computer.

You can do this if you take your notes in a gmail draft. Don't even send the email. Just keep it as a draft.

I just use sync-thing for this, it just works flawlessly.

Try NotePlan (only Mac and iOS).

- Markdown based and runs on plain-text files.

- I'm the creator and use it every day, all the time.

- Has real folders (you will see them in Finder/Files)

- Hashtags and Mentions

- [[References]]

- Share notes by publishing them (send a link, revokable) or exporting them as RTF or PDF (send a file).

- No Web Editor yet

Link: https://noteplan.co

Very interesting! Is there a web, Android or Linux version planned?

+1 for NotePlan. I use it extensively every day for 2 years and I can't go back. I'm just frustrated to lack advanced features or simple tables available on notions. However, as it's markdown based, it's kind of logically limited by it. I guess it's hard to have both no lock in AND having crazy dynamic advanced tables.

The logical answer seems to be that the feature set you are looking for is not important to most people.

If, as you say, making the app is not hard and you think these features will be popular, then there is a great opportunity for you to make the app yourself.

fair point, currently im not good enough though

Not with that attitude

Then why are you starting discussions at HN?

> Offer a Web Editor with proper account and user management

> Let me share notes online. Let me generate a Link that i can send others ...

> Also i dont care about a fancy looking UI that uses 8GB of RAM and takes 10 Seconds to load, just make it work.

Well, this is pretty much Google Docs or any Open Source clone like Nextcloud or LibreOffice Online I guess. It's surely possible though to write something like that with a very lean UI.

I think many Web developers go by default for something more complex though because it's not necessarily more effort. And well, there are already a bizillion similar apps.

> Also i dont care about a fancy looking UI that uses 8GB of RAM and takes 10 Seconds to load, just make it work.

But this one might be relatively close to what you're looking for: https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web (At least if you self-host, the web server of org-web.org doesn't seem very fast :))

thanks i will check it out that looks interesting

(1) Sometimes good notetaking apps get ruined over time. I was a fan of Microsoft's OneNote for a while until they stopped saving notes in a well-documented XML format and kept all the data in the cloud. Microsoft also worked hard to kill OneNote by shoving it up every orifice of the Windows 8 user: print something? the default it is to save the printout to one note? Look for an application on the taskbar? Microsoft shoved three icons for OneNote onto the taskbar?

Microsoft never seems to learn that this behavior is perceived as harassment and that if they push a product too hard, even a great product, people are going to be angry that OneNote is opening when they wanted to print something to the printer, all they are going to think is OneNote is crap and they want nothing to do with it.

(2) Personalized full-text search is a tough problem, since Google came out nobody has been satisfied with the results they get from other full-text search products.

I can really agree on the first point but know too little about the second one. It is indeed a problem but i think in most cases keywords or tags should be enough to implement. Im not sure but even full text search should not take that long for plaintext/md notes.

It's not a problem in terms of speed or CPU consumption, it's a problem in terms of relevance. It's when the relevant document you are looking for is result #34 or when the relevant document doesn't appear at all.

People will say "just use Lucene, bro" but often Lucene's search ranking is awful. (I used to laugh at "just use Solr, bro" because Solr's search scales about as well as Bitcoin when you add more shards.)

As for tags that depends on people putting accurate tags on. People hate to hear it, but tags need to have an ontology behind them to be really effective. For instance there is an anime imageboard that has tags like "purple hair", "green eyes" and these are close to useless for an image that has two people in it.

fair point i agree with that thanks for explaining

I use two note taking apps, Obsidian and Nebo, each for their own use case.

Obsidian has everything your needs are, you can setup syncthing to sync your notes across multiple devices. Everything is a .md file and organized using folders and it has great plugin support. Though ability to publish from inside the app is locked behind a subscription. You can always use pandoc to just convert the md files, there probably are some plugins that try to do that. Also i love how lightweight it is.

Second is Nebo, Nebo is for handwritten notes usecase. This isn't something many people really have a usecase for, But Nebo has AWESOME handwriting -> searchable text conversion, specially for Math! And publishing things is as a easy as clicking publish. And it has google drive/drop integration for sync (I'd rather use syncthing but the android app doesn't expose the stored files).

It's in a very MVP-state, but I created stick, "shareable Git-powered notebooks". It meets some (but not all) of your criteria. It is FOSS (MIT).

Features:

- Notebooks are standard git repositories containing .md files.

- Notebooks may be used privately, shared with one or more users privately, or shared publicly.

- Notes may be customized to improve usability, such as rendering a to-do list with automatic de-duplication and sorting.

Repository: https://code.rocketnine.space/tslocum/stick

Demo (read-only except checkboxes): https://stick.rocketnine.space/#login/c89f5381659ad34bd84967...

Note-taking app [1] founder here. This is a question I hear almost every day, and there's a good reason for that. Note-taking is personal. Everyone wants a note-taking app with just the right features for their personal workflow – whether it's open source, end-to-end encrypted, has handwriting support etc. That's also one of the reasons why the note-taking app and personal knowledge management app market is so saturated – there are so many different ways you can create an app.

Unfortunately, one of the most commonly asked combinations of such features, especially here on Hacker News, is an open-source note-taking app which is end-to-end encrypted but also offers all the great benefits of having a multi-account web editor with shareable notes. Oh and don't forget, it can't use Electron, but it has to be native across all platforms. In theory this sounds amazing – all the performance, privacy and security, with the benefits sharing. And with it being open source you can have the peace of mind that the product will be around for many years to come.

Imagine creating your own note-taking app. In practice it's almost impossible for any new startup to build an app like this that's so feature complete from the get-go. For it to become revenue-generating and a sustainable business so you can work on it full-time, most products will focus on *one* of the features mentioned above and do it really well. For us, we initially focused on markdown, cross-platform, portability and instant sharing of your notes with others.

I don't think there will ever be a one-size-fits-all app for note-taking and knowledge management – just like there isn't one in reality – everyone likes to use different methods to write whether it's a notebook, bullet journal, notecard or scrap of paper. Focus on finding a product that you like the founders and community behind and that meets a couple of your most important requirements; then you can support them and offer feedback to help them to build an amazing app.

[1] https://supernotes.app

I use Quiver.app (macOS only). Here’s the original post about it on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11009996

Are you still using it / is it working fine? Around a year ago I switched to obsidian after using quiver for a few years, as it seemed development was stopped and no new bugfixes were coming in.

I am still using it. I was shocked to see an update come in a while ago because I noticed the same thing.

It could use improvements but it is surprisingly stable and bug free. I get the impression the developer treats it as passive income/side project.

obsidian is a nice one, simple, focused...

- it saves in md files, and could sync to repo or other ways.

- good number of nice plugins

- the md file makes things easier, e.g. could write terminal cli with bash script to add/edit notes in terminal ...

True but i havent found a way to do the publishing part nicely yet

Publish it how? It's mostly markdown, you should be able to use something like Pandoc to convert it to anything else.

Edit : even simpler, you could just put them on dropbox in a shared folder. It's markdown so it's human readable as pure text apart from the images (and you said you don't care about graphs)

I liked the idea that other users can edit it or that the markdown is rendered within the browser. CodiMD and Hedgedoc support that. They even support Co-Editing notes which is over the top for my needs. I just like the idea that i can rightclick a note in my notebook and publish it. They lack privacy and protection features though like password input or generating a new URL or proper user accounts. It would be nice if i could just send a special link and for the duration of X or until i revoke it friends can look at the rendered markdown with their browser. See https://demo.hedgedoc.org/features?both

Also Data Control is something i desire so i prefer self hosted.

I like Obsidian a lot, but recently switched to Org Mode since it is a more robust markup language. It has a steep learning curve though.

I use Markor Editor plus Syncthing. Markor is open-sourced and has a plethora of features, as you can read on their github page[1]; among these features, it includes file encryption.

Syncthing is really easy to set up and works like a charm. If you want accounts and user management, Markor also works with NextCloud.

[1] https://github.com/gsantner/markor

This list of requirements is long, specific, and narrow enough that it's really unlikely that what you're looking for exists, and if that did exist, it'd probably be extremely niche. At the end of the day, you'll probably have to build your own thing and be the sole maintainer or settle for an application that is not exactly what you want.

I use Obsidian both on mobile and desktop. It is all markdown. I sync my notes to a private github repo.

I think this would fit your requirements.

thats a good idea. How do you deal with publishing specific notes?

Specific notes are their own MD files. I use Working Copy on my phone to push a commit, and use Git Desktop on my computer.

I use vim + goyo + github(for private repos) + vim-you-autocorrect it delivers great performance with reading everywhere versioning, tags (I use [] to add tags) and I use ag and great to search.

I think it is very challenging to get this good on an app, and I try to use other apps with no success multiple times. Vim wins year after year

It's not a note taking app, but it's a really good product: https://cryptpad.fr/ (you can share with who you wants, it's encrypted, it have folders, etc.)

thats looking really promising, thank you very mutch

> I feel like most of those note taking app creators dont even use their own product

I think you have it backwards. They likely made the product to fit their own needs, and aren't going out of their way to understand and solve other user's needs.

Do you really think so? A lot of those github projects seem rather big.

People sometimes make big things for their own use, while imagining them to be for other people's use, where other people are similar to themselves.

That can sum up Unix and everything that sprang from it, come to think of it.

Perhaps people use it despite its flaws, because it's the biggest and/or there's no other open-source option.

Extremely few people in the real world want markdown or plaintext notes. Text editors are better for almost all users.

Google docs and drive accomplish everything you want I believe except for markdown.

Yes the only thing they dont accomplish is the lack of privacy / not being able to self host. Besides that youre probably right

hackmd.io is an excellent markdown editor with github integration, sharing, and all of the features I have ever needed. Highly recommend for those looking.

its the paid version of the open source hackmd right? the self hosted one has no book mode afak

Try UpNote.

Link: https://getupnote.com/

NotePlan

https://noteplan.co/