Hacker News Reader

Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

Big no-no to Joplin for me is that it is using some custom data format (sqlite I think). Why bother? Just give me an app that can handle nicely markdown files, syncing I can do myself e.g. (Synology, rsync) or use some file syncing service (Dropbox, OneDrive, whatever).

Zettlr does the trick for me without interfering with what I write.

View on HN

"Custom" would be the way Apple Notes or Evernote stores their data in opaque binary blobs. SQLite is standard and you can open it with plenty of third-party tools, but I see your point about plain text files being more convenient for certain tasks.

> SQLite is standard and you can open it with plenty of third-party tools

Tends not to play well with things like Dropbox or Syncthing though. Although I guess you can use litestream or something for the replication instead.

What's the issue? I guess it's just as simple as uploading the .db?

You're changing some note on device A and the same note differently on device B.

Both sync. You now have a conflict.

With text files, you at least have obvious merge strategies. With SQLite it isn't quite as easy.

I still don't mind SQLite in Joplin. It has advantages, as well.

Ah the multiple devices issue. I see...

How about doing everything server side so you are just using a thin client (read: web browser) instead?

See trilium: https://github.com/zadam/trilium

I sync Joplin via Dropbox across phone and 2 laptops. In theory a prob? But in practice rare to never bc im only one user on one device at a time. And im making small changes at a time. There was 1 minor conflict once and Joplin saw it and i quickly resolved it.

> "Custom" would be the way Apple Notes or Evernote stores their data in opaque binary blobs.

Apple Notes uses SQLite.

Since the content is basically plain-text already, read-only access to all of them at the very least shouldn't cause any problems.

I was wondering though, since my Nextcloud storage is encrypted, does the SQLite file get synced as well?

I wrote my own note-keeping system[0] and very much wanted all of the notes to just be markdown files on the disk. It turns out that there are trade-offs to this. If you want plaintext markdown files on disk AND want fancy features like file versioning, a search index, tags, etc then you need to store all of that metadata somewhere and you're down writing a half-assed implementation of a DBMS.

Now, you can certainly bite the bullet and full-ass the implementation like Dokuwiki did, but that is really quite a lot of work and effort against simply `import sqlite` and writing a couple of tutorial-level queries. And it turns out that exporting all of your documents to plaintext, if you should so choose, is a one-line command away.

[0]: https://github.com/cu/silicon

I was never able to get encrypted syncing working with Joplin. I tried every year or something for a while but it never worked. I kept looking for an Evernote alternative for years. The closest that got there is Leanote, which is a Chinese company's open source product. (https://github.com/leanote)

I finally gave up the search. Switched to unencrypted plain text md files synced with syncthing. On Linux I use Kate. It has a directory tree view and recursive search in said directories. It works great. On Android I am using Markor to point to the same shared directory. I don't think I'll ever start looking for a note taking app again. I also found I don't really take notes much. So there's that. :)

I'd never heard of LeaNote, it looks very good. Open-source, self-hosted sync server, mobile apps...

What made you not stick with it?

It really is very good. What made me not stick with it? Trying to remember. I think it was the fact that it is a little heavy and support/issues is in Chinese, which I don't speak. Later I simplified my setup and made everything local markdown files, handling sync myself.

You can actually try their hosted service for free. Though looking at it now, most of that is in Chinese too.

> Just give me an app that can handle nicely markdown files

You know what does that well? The filesystem.

I've tested pretty much all note-taking software out there. What ended up working for me is a bunch of markdown files inside folders, synced using Github.

I have search, formatting and preview thanks to VSCode, and I can access my notes on any machine that syncs with Github.

If you want to leave all your notes unencrypted on github, then sure that’s an option.

You can use something like git-crypt[0] to e2e encrypt it.

[0]: https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt

> Why bother? Just give me an app that can handle nicely markdown files

Markdown (and any other markup) really sucks for anything that is more than just plaintext with some formatting. The best markdown-app we have at the moment are those like Obsidian or Logseq, and they are very low-key compared with a proper richtext-app, like Notion or even a mature word processor.

And looking and the hard struggle of obsidian and their community-plugins, it might be really time to get a proper open richtext-format for the notes-space, to liberate us from markups and their limitations. Maybe something json-based, to bring the notebook-movement into the ring too.

I am interesting about this. storing everything in sqlite should have some apparently advantage, but other note applications discard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com