Lowercase – A simple way to take and share notes | Hacker News Reader

Lowercase – A simple way to take and share notes

lowercase.app

222 pointssiegers178 comments

Low-key I have been looking for something like Obsidian-but-freeish to try since a while - I think this is exactly what I searched for. Going to give it a go during the weekend definitely.

On a different note, what's the long term sustainability plan? Relying on donations rarely works... I guess it's not very expensive to host text, but still, its cost is not 0. "Unlimited free forever" is either not free, doesn't last forever, or not unlimited. (Usually the 2nd one)

Also, do you do any (automatic) content filtering? It is very easy to abuse pastebin services

(co-founder)

Thanks for the comment and very valid points. When we initially started building we had subscription plans and more of a general revenue model. Over time we transitioned to the donation-based approach. We are open to revisiting the former if there is interest (and feedback) in the existing functionality or newer updates. I definitely understand the concern of "free forever" and open to input.

Need to look at the site more in general to see if it's for me, but just a note - https://www.lowercase.app/pricing/ still references the subscription model.

I would charge for syncing like obsidian does. You can set up your own syncing, but you can also pay to not have to do that and let you handle it. Especially syncing projects that multiple people have access to can be a pain. If you have a decent solution for it you should charge for it.

Thank you for the feedback! This route is definitely something for us to consider.

Given your model, consider publishing a time-to-live metric: if you get no further donations, this is how long the service will last.

Then people who care about 1 month, 1 year, or 10 years can decide accordingly.

And also describe the processes for extracting data, etc.

Finally, talk about your motivations. You raise the issue by pricing at $0 without addressing the concerns that raises, in a era when "free" means the user is the product and when LLM's are a giant content vacuum that copies without attribution.

This great feedback - thank you. I like the idea of the TTL. That's interesting if we continue on the current route. Similar to the "open start up" concept and publishing available runway, etc.

An addition could be a "bounty program" - let donors choose what features to "boost" (prioritize development on). That gives donors a tangible benefit and a feeling of community / ownership, as they can help guide the project in multiple ways.

> Low-key I have been looking for something like Obsidian-but-freeish to try since a while

Have you tried LogSeq? I think there are a couple other FOSS similar notes apps

There's also a Visual Studio Code extension ecosystem worth exploring that do similar functions (Dendron, Foam, etc)

Silverbullet.md is another pretty good one which allows a lot of customization. I was able to recreate my (admittedly very basic) Obsidian workflow fairly quickly.

SilverBullet looks very good, it reminds me of Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) Now if only some one combined SilverBullet with Hugo we could have a live view/edit in Hugo =) Thanks for the link.

+1 Logseq is great. I use it with Syncthing across my devices.

Have you found syncthing to cause any noticeable drain your battery? Also, does it handle merge conflicts well?

I haven't noticed a significant battery drain. I charge my one year old phone once a day. Merge conflicts aren't too bad, although I don't encounter them often. When there's a conflict there is a file for each version and it's easy enough to resolve.

> something like Obsidian-but-freeish

I'm confused. Obsidian itself is free. You can choose to pay for their sync service if you need it, but there are alternatives for that that don't cost extra.

I'm guessing free as in speech, not free as in beer. Obsidian is not open source [0]

[0] https://obsidian.rocks/why-isnt-obsidian-open-source/

Obsidian is only free for personal use.

If you take notes for work or for a side project that makes money you have to pay.

I don't mind paying because it's worth it.

You can’t use Obsidian for anything that makes money without buying an Enterprise license

When I last looked it was free for businesses of 1 person, no Enterprise licence required. But you would still have to pay for sync if needed.

Thanks for mentioning it. You're right and it still is, but it's not obvious because the pricing summary doesn't say clearly that 1 person businesses are exempt.

> Free for personal use. We don't charge based on features or usage. Only pay if you use Obsidian commercially.

But the FAQ does:

> What is considered commercial use?*

> Commercial use means using Obsidian for revenue-generating or work-related activities within a for‑profit organization that has two or more employees. Government departments and agencies are considered commercial use, unless registered as a non-profit organization. For all other purposes, you're welcome to use Obsidian for free. Learn more.

("Learn more" leads to subtle differences from the FAQ, eg. organisations with 2 or more people rather than employees, and "work-related activities that generate revenue", but the gist is the same)

The sign up process is not very fluid to me. First off, I don't really like password signups in general, but on Android I was able to get auto generated password for the password field but was stuck because the Google password manager didn't recognize the other field as a password confirmation. So I couldn't copy between them and going to a different app to write a long password and going back and copy paste just seemed like too much work.

Esp since I had to write my email already and also pick a username.. why do I need a username for a note taking app?

How about simplifying the on boarding into just email+click link? Maybe also picking a password after you are in?

Thanks for the feedback. One reason for the username is for cleaner profiles when publishing - https://learn.lowercase.app/publishing/documents.html#adding...

Could ask for a username the first time they publish. Low friction

I had the exact same thoughts.

This is why I’m implementing email links in my chrome extension. No sign ups, just email and local storage once you’ve clicked the email link

I'm pretty deep into Obsidian-space right now but I'm loving all these newfangled knowledge apps that push things a heck of a lot further than we had previously with bloat like evernote et al.

Amazing work! Thank you for sharing here.

A while ago, I made something exactly like this called writedown: https://writedown.app

It is a free and open source, simple and easy to use Notion alternative.

I had to leave it midway (it's ready to use and stable though) because my other projects needed attention but I'll get back to it someday :)

Thank you! And cool app too! We had a similar experience in that we built the majority of this ~4 years ago. And it's been stable since.

Interesting quirk I noticed when accessing your site:

1. The site was shown in a light-theme version and the sun icon on the upper-right corner. 2. When clicked on the sun, it changed to a moon icon but nothing else changed, the light theme was still on. 3. When clicked again, the moon changed to the sun but this time the dark-theme was engaged. The only issue is that the dark theme is displayed but the sun icon appears. 4. When the sun icon is clicked, the light theme is engaged and the icon changes to the moon.

For some reason it feels counterintuitive. Just sharing for reference but great site!

Thanks for the feedback! writedown has been in beta for almost a year and we weren't working on it for the last 8 months, so I apologize for any unpolished features.

We're actually in the process of changing the whole landing page and updating the app, so hopefully it will be stable enough soon :)

co-founder here: Just a little context on the "why" from the site -

> We created lowercase as a side project to make it easier for folks to quickly share content without the pressure of having the perfect blog post. Sometimes you just want to share thoughts without worrying about styling and hosting. Ideas aren't always structured. And sometimes simple and easy is what you need.

> A note-taking app that is simple, fun to use, snappy, and easy on the eyes. There is no one perfect note-taking tool. Everyone has their preferences. But we feel that we've landed on something nice.

> We built lowercase in our spare time as a passion project. No funding.

> We decided from the very beginning that we'd never collect or share any user data. We don't even use website analytics. The intent of lowercase is to stay lean and serve a purpose - make it easier to share thoughts in sometimes ever-evolving documents.

> We decided from the very beginning that we'd never collect or share any user data.

Then why not use OAuth?

Wasn't necessary since we weren't intending to share information with another service and felt that the 3rd party requirement could be limiting.

This answer doesn't make sense to me. If anything oauth far better proves you won't be sharing information with other services (you're not collecting logins and accounts). It's more limiting to ask users to sign up to the app.

Meaning that we'd be limiting users that don't use the provider(s) that we'd support. At that time, we felt that username/password was the lowest friction at the time. We're happy to re-eval if needed though!

Please leave username-password authentication. I never use oauth and absolutely hate it.

exactly, I also hate websites that rely on oauth alone.

Then use both regular sign-up and OAuth? People that just want to try the service don't have patience for email verification.

FYI, I can't delete my account:

Request URL: https://www.lowercase.app/api/accounts/tbeseda/

Request Method: DELETE

Status Code: 404 Not Found

(co-founder) Sry about that - if you want to email lowercasehq@gmail.com I can remove and confirm for you.

Not a huge deal! I just wanted to let you know the API is broken/missing. I'm pretty settled on my note-taking set up for now, so I didn't plan to keep the account.

Congrats! Looks refreshing! I'm currently (or just recently started) with Craft and your app looks like all the things I need without all the additional stuff Craft has.

However, I would like my notes-app to be offline-first (with additional sync). Do you have any plans to support that ever?

Thanks! So we actually started with offline first originally (a standalone desktop app) and then rebuilt for the web. We had plans to revisit based on interest, etc. so it's good to get the feedback here and use that to shape the direction.

I think the sharing features are the most interesting part to me.

Google Keep has extremely fast load times and an Android optimized UI, plus home screen widgets and Wear OS, so it would be hard to replace that for personal notetaking.

But very quick sharing and collaboration is still not quite a solved problem.

Nice product! I might have missed mentions of it, but is it real-time editing? Does it supports multi users?

A warning that might spoil a bit your adventure on the long run: Your published pages will be exploited somehow. SEO backlink abuse, phishing, etc. Offering free public hosting is what people with ill intent are looking for, and you can be sure that at some point they'll look at your solution

Thank you!

It is real-time editing! We leverage web-sockets to sync across multiple logged-in sessions. But as of today it does not support multiple users collaborating on the same document.

(co-founder here)

Thank you! It is realtime across devices/instances for the active user. Currently it doesn't support collaborative editing but it's always been on the back of our minds if there is enough interest. Aside from just doc syncing for multi-users, we'd need to make some changes in the doc structure/presentation to provide a clean UX around that (without making the UI to complex). That said, it's not off of the table :)

re: public pages. Thank you and definitely top of mind for us to monitor.

This seems amazing, except for the fact that it's not open source and can't be self-hosted.

That, to me at least, is the most important part of a note-taking app.

This is something that we've discussed quite a bit and not completely off the table.

self-hosting would be what's important for me as well; mostly because I don't trust my data / notes being hosted by someone else. I currently use Logseq without syncing.

It’s annoying when people pester developers to open source their hard work, and not at least give a justification as to why they should do it

How do you suppose they protect their IP and what they’ve built from someone just stealing the code?

They aren't pestering the developers; they made a comment on HN about what, to them, is an essential feature of a note-taking app. The developers may never see it.

I happen to agree with them. The single most important aspect of a note-taking app is that I must own my notes. That means that I must be able to take them elsewhere if I want. Including, in fact, especially, if the company hosting them goes out of business or simply chooses to discontinue the app (looking at you, Google).

If I can take the plain text but lose the formatting or the cross-linking, that isn't good enough (hello Google Keep export).

But if lowercase can find enough customers who don't feel this way, all power to them.

What note-taking app are you using currently, if any? I've been using Silverbullet [1] for a while now and love it due to it's usage of plain-text markdown files in a normal directory structure to actually store the notes. Yet, it supports many other features such as query language and to a certain extent, federation with other SilverBullet instances. The only major downside for me is that whilst it's usable on mobile, it feels cramped.

[0]: https://silverbullet.md

Open-sourcing the code allows some level of assurance that your data is not being used for profit and that if the hosted version goes away, it can still be used as a self-hosted service.

In addition, it can allow the devs to accept contributions, making their job maintaining the program easier.

some feedback:

as a first time visitor, the pricing page is really confusing. if its free why is there a stripe faq immediately below? i am still confused whether this product is free or paid without signing up. the pricing page requires some rework imo

https://www.lowercase.app/pricing/ looks pretty clear to me. You can optionally subscribe to support the project, but otherwise it's free.

I think having pricing linked like that is an immediate turn-off to potential users. Personally the second I see a pricing link in a nav bar I assume, without even clicking, that it's a paid service. Renaming the link to "Donate", or something similar might make more sense.

Reading the rest of the pricing page gives me the clear impression that it wasn't free initially and then changed it to free recently and the rest of the text on that page wasn't updated. If I am making donations why do I need to be reassured that I can have a refund if I don't like it?

I really like this. I currently use Craft, but while Craft started out simply, it expanded to some more "power" features. People host their entire websites on it, although it requires workarounds to do that. And the guardrails/limitations end up making things you build kind of the same.

I love the simplicity of Lowercase. The price is good too. I will be giving it a test rise here and there, because I do send a lot of communications that I enjoy mocking up with very basic formatting.

I'd love to the Publishing toggle taken out of the settings panel or whatever.

(cofounder)

Thanks and glad to hear! Our main goal was to _not_ try to make it "everything" and while still making it enjoyable to use. We'd appreciate any feedback once you do some testing.

Send over to lowercasehq@gmail.com or ping us on X @lowercase_app.

Congratulations, looks like a cool app, I'm hoping I'll eventually catch up with being feature rich like yours. I've only just started, being hacking on it for a month now but am looking to do something pretty similar. I think we've had a few ideas the same - and amrescratching the same itch. Your 4 years ahead though :-) :-) https://edit-this.page/help is my humble work in progress.

Best of luck to you all!

co-founder here: feel free to ask any questions!

What are the advantages of this over, say, Obsidian?

Lowercase really shines when you want to take notes free-form and then be able to share those notes out into the world. You can easily make a note public & even cooler than that you can turn a lowercase note into a presentation with just a few clicks.

Here's an old example I pulled up -> https://www.lowercase.app/@matt/p/1f6c83d5-2869-4024-a687-fc...

In my editor I was able to just group parts of my note into logical slide sections and then publish.

Edit: you can move through the slide show with your left and right arrows.

Can I export or host the data myself?

For work sensitive notes I can’t/won’t use an untrusted sync mechanism.

Totally a fair use-case and request!

Right now we don't have support for a local storage mechanism or self-hosting. We are extremely keen on privacy and are very open to working towards either of those two options.

Yeah, I couldn't imagine hosting my Most Important Notes on a freebie service whose provenance I don't entirely know.

Notes are self host for me.

Who is the target audience?

Folks with technical experience but not necessarily web devs. When you want more out of Google Docs, Notes, etc. but don't want to invest the time in building it yourself. Or, that's not your skillset.

- Syntax highlighting - "one off" Public pages - Slide presentations - embedding task lists with dates

Also, was a pandemic project...so ppl were just using tech and sharing in different ways than they had been.

Two questions:

1. Doesn't seem like there's support for latex-style math? (Or, at least couldn't find it in the documentation and putting an equation between $$ doesn't seem to work). Is this planned?

2. Is there a way to export your notes?

other co-founder here:

1. Currently there isn't support, but not opposed if there is a need. 2. Also, there isn't a way to export (or self host) as of now.

Just some background - We originally built this out as a standalone desktop app (~4 years ago) and then re-worked it for the web around the same time. We were planning to eventually rewrite the desktop app for just that reason - to have the offline syncing and cleaner export UX.

If this had TeX I'd be interested immediately. There's no great way at the moment to mathematical notes, it's a big pain point.

Obsidian has LaTeX support out of the box. And there are some awesome plugins to make it even better, check out https://github.com/artisticat1/obsidian-latex-suite.

I didn't like Obsidian's TeX support very much. Primarily because it is very difficult to get macros working (especially across files). There are some plugins that try to do it but when I tried they didn't work very well. And anyway the features I'm interested in are sharing, collaborative editing, and having a good way to present things that are typed up.

Also my points. I would like one of these apps to actually show some love for technical (math) people.

So far, I find Obsidian to be the best for us.

I actually run an app that does support mathematical documentation. I initially created it for mathematical publishing but didnt see enough interest so marketed instead as a generic document publishing app.

Would love to get your take on it - https://relentless.so

whenever i see a free to use cloud service like this i think either 1:

- they won't be able to afford to run it much longer and it'll shut down with apologies about being a hobby project that got out of hand

- they start charging more for it than i'd like to spend once i become reliant on it

don't see any links to any source code... so doesn't seem to be something i can host myself... i typically try to avoid investing in services that i don't have some kind of guarantee with either way (that i'm paying to keep it running, or that i can fork it or host it myself when the hobbyist gets bored)

why should i invest the time in using your product?

REQUEST: Please add an option for a monospace/code font. I see that <pre><code>...</code></pre> works very well (good monospace block style), but I have to inspect and edit the source.

With this, we could be able to use it for code!

THANKS!

Thank you for the suggestion!

This looks really nice, but if you put information into a closed-source unmonetized side project, you better hope you never need to get it back out

Nit Pick feedback: it should read: “the right _number_ of features”, not “_amount_ of features”. Other than that, love the look of the site :)

Non native speaker here, can you detail why the later is incorrect?

I'm guessing that "amount" is not quantized ("number" is). Let me be absolutely clear that most native speakers will not notice the distinction (even pedants like me missed this one).

You'll also see people being pedantic about "less" versus "fewer," e.g. complaining about the "12 items or less" line being improper usage since items are quantized and therefore it should be "12 items or fewer."

Yes, less vs fewer always catches my ear. If you can count it, it's 'fewer', if not, it's 'less'.

It's probably mostly idiomatic. For native English-speakers it is more natural to use "number" when talking about things that are counted units that would be represented by integers (like marbles, or children, or features). "Amount" would be more appropriate when talking about something that you measure and represent with a floating point number (like butter, or gasoline/petrol, or risk). But an English-speaker will understand what you mean if you say "amount of features" instead of "number of features."

And since we're being picky, it should be "the latter is correct", not "the later is correct."

"Number" is correct when referring to countable items (like "features"), while "amount" is correct for non-countable things (like "water" or "time").

Sorry, sibling responses still aren’t quite answering this correctly.

Number is for countable distinct things, and amount is for a quantity of a single thing. (Often a substance)

So a number of sticks, a number of socks, a number of people. A number of eggs.

An amount of flour, sugar, water, money, time.

A number of minutes equals an amount of time.

> A number of minutes equals an amount of time

This is short and succinct and sums it up pretty well

Counterpoint:

I know grammatically it isn't the most correct, but I don't see anything non-idiomatic about "amount of features".

Reason: "Just the right amount" is a set, idiomatic expression. "Just the right amount of ___" is just extending the expression. IMO extending idiomatic expressions exempts it from a lot of the formal word-pairing conventions in English.

But I'm no linguist.

I think amount of is usually used for 'continuous' (I'm not sure on the word) substances like flour, water, or salt, rather than multiples of discreet objects.

I can also have:

Just the right amount of cats Just the right amount of internet points Just the right amount of chutzpah

Implying chutzpah is a discrete variable, and chutzpah is never discreet

Depending on the flavour of the linguist, they could say "as long as the correct meaning is conveyed, go wild" :)

Few years back after countless hours of deciding which note taking apps that suits me, I just settled with Obsidian (I briefly used Dendron before that). I realised that I am not that power user of thing like this. Similar with what kind of indexing/management systems. I just fuck it no analysis paralysis, just do with whatever work for now.

Why would I use this, instead of Obsidian (say)?

For once, Obsidian publish is quite expensive.

Obsidian publishing costs USD 8 per month. A Starbucks latte in SF costs USD 5.88.

I don’t use Obsidian Publish, and I don’t need it. I use the Obsidian app for free, and I don’t need the Sync feature as it works fine with iCloud.

If at some point I need the publish feature, I consider the price that is less than two lattes per month a good deal given the zero cost of the app that I used for a long time.

that’s certainly a valid reasoning. someone else may well have an equally valid reason for choosing a different path.

It isn't your only option:

https://github.com/oleeskild/obsidian-digital-garden

https://github.com/jackyzha0/quartz

https://github.com/jonstodle/obsius-obsidian-plugin

https://github.com/yoursamlan/pubsidian

https://github.com/ppeetteerrs/obsidian-zola

Obsidian Sync costs money to sync your files between devices. Obsidian Publish also costs money on top of that to publish your notes.

Obsidian has a community plugin called "Remotely Save" that lets you sync your vault via Webdav, S3 (compatible), Dropbox, or OneDrive. It works on all my devices and synchronises my data just fine. You could also use something like Syncthing or any other third party solution that syncs your Yaml directories.

Obsidian runs on local Markdown files so there are many free options you can use for syncing and publishing notes.

I’ve been using icloud to store my vault and have found it to be great to sync with laptop, phone, and tablet (obviously they’re Apple devices as iCloud isn’t supported on anything else).

It’s been really solid. When I used an android phone I had a lot more difficulty. While syncthing is reliable on android and macbook, iphone and ipad don’t work nearly as well.

There's iCloud for Windows. https://support.apple.com/en-us/103232

It amazes me that every few weeks a new note taking app is featured on HN.

What am I missing? For years I’ve taken notes in the Apple Notes.app on my tablet and phone and laptop and it just works.

Why would I want to switch to a paid app? Or why would I want to run a bash script that puts stuff on GitHub?

I think that the reason is more psychological than anything. People who deal with information become unsettled psychologically because they are doing something that is very unnatural, and so new note taking apps is a meaningless gesture that makes them feel that they are under control. Of course, that's not the entire explanation but it does explain partially the proliferation of note-taking apps beyond the basic ones.

Apple notes not supporting/formatting code snippets is the big blocker for me

> Free to use. No strings attached.

Unlimited notes with online syncing? For free? I refuse to believe that. What's the catch? As the old saying goes: If it's free, you're the product.

I just use trello. I have columns for songs, movies, roadtrip ideas, coding ideas, you name it.

Everything looks the same everywhere, desktop, phone, tablet.

It must be fun looking at their backend regarding events on your account: "This song just got promoted to a movie!"

that's because I prefer to have it all in one board. I use colored tags to mark things as "done" and , eventually, archive them later during a cleanup

Why are you not charging money?

What is the user exit strategy? Can I export all notes? In which formats?

no export is available at the moment, but we are considering adding that in. What formats would you want to be able to export to?

markdown

It would be nice to have a zero trust model for something like this.

Dark mode please

making all the landing page text lowercase to fully commit to the brand name is my suggestion

"If you want publish them" should probably be "If you want to publish them"

thank you!

vi. email. git

How does email play into this?

I went through a bunch of note-taking apps before I settled on a git directory that's auto-synced once an hour. This bash script is all it takes.

      cd ~/notes

      if [[ ''$(git status --porcelain) ]]; then
       git stash save
       git pull --rebase
       git stash pop || true
       git add .
       git -c "user.name=Phil Kulak" -c "user.email=nope@kulak.us" commit -m "''$(date)"
       git push origin main
      else
       git pull
      fi

honestly love the simplicity of this

Ah yes, the classic HN Dropbox response :) On a more serious note, I'm not into note-taking apps as much as your average HN'er, but there's probably a business here. If anything, Obsidian has at least been wildly successful these past few years (my dad loves it).

And sensible merge conflict resolution vs normal cloud saves.

Yeah, every year or so I get a merge conflict, and then the whole things stops syncing and it takes me a week to notice before I go in and resolve it. It's not perfect, but I can't be assed to fix something that happens once a year. :/

Maybe you can beep the motherboard if it happens. Would only take a few hours to notice then :)

> it takes me a week to notice before I go in and resolve it

Perhaps the `|| true` on the `git stash pop` could have a bit more handling :)

I'm doing the same with ZimWiki, except for running the sync script as a custom tool in the UI.

What about mobile? Or don't you take notes there?

For me, this is always the gap that feels missing. - I want to take and view notes on various devices: mobile, personal computer, work computer, randomly logged in ad-hoc machine. - I want notes to not require me to be online all the time while writing (I work a lot on plans, or in remote locations without reliable internet) - I want notes to make reasonable assumptions about syncing, biasing on the side of avoiding data loss over the appearance of magically "just working" - I want to be able to search across all notes at the same time as any device's file system.

Simplenote used to solve this. Then, recently, they started to become less reliable at the same time as having a very large subscription price increase. Apple Notes is now okay, but awkward to log in or sync with a non-Apple device. I tried having a bunch of .txt files synced via Dropbox, but while the Dropbox mobile app will let you view offline files, it won't let you edit them unless online.

is iCloud.com really that bad?

it used to be; pretty decent now

Bear is the app you need.

It’s paid, your notes are in a database (easily exportable as .txt), but I’ve used it for years and years and it’s one of those rare apps that ‘just works’.

And it’s something like $25 a year. Utterly reasonable.

All subscriptions are unreasonable.

My gym membership seems pretty reasonable, as do my Netflix subscription, and HBR subscription.

It's reasonable to charge a subscription for anything that requires someone else to keep a computer running.

One of my needs is to be able to access this from a web client, in case I'm on someone else's machine, or Windows/Linux. Seems like that isn't supported yet, but coming? https://community.bear.app/t/bear-2-0-web-client/8358/13

I'm building a note-taking app, so I hope you don't mind, but I was wondering if you might describe how you "search" your notes while using a device's file system search? For desktop, I might use a tool like grep to do that, but that's pretty developer-y, so if you're doing something more user-friendly, that's interesting to me. What is more interesting to me, though, is what you're using on mobile to do this? I've never, personally, used my mobile's file system search to discover text in notes. But I'm on Android, so there's not really only one 'file system' with a search interface.

My thought here is it that the app is going to be saving simple text files either plaintext or richtext (markdown/html), so it should be able to provide this for you, but I haven't even considered that as a feature so I would want to test it to see if there were any rough edges to polish. Any suggestions you have would be appreciated!

What I really mean is that I can use Spotlight on macOS, or Explorer on Windows. Since a lot of notetaking systems are cloud-based, I need to specifically open the notetaking app to search them. I can't search everything at once.

Oh, awesome! Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, that makes sense. I hate Window's file explorer search, but I still end up using it if I'm just looking for a filename, so I definitely understand that as the de-facto standard on that platform. I'm not as familiar with MacOS in general, and especially not spotlight, but it does appear to be a lot more useful.

But yeah, I think storing the files in the device's file system should address this concern. I appreciate you circling back to fill me in, though!

I use Logseq which writes to markdown files, and then sync/diff against a Logseq folder in iCloud. It generally works. I can write changes on my phone using the app, and it’ll pull it back to my computer once the phone goes online. If there’s pending changes on both sides, rare given Logseq’s daily file structure, I have it prompt on my computer to fix.

The dual folder structure helps identify the collisions and manage them appropriately, versus whatever handling iCloud would do.

It’s probably still awkward on a non-Apple device as I’m sure iCloud web access is not great, but it works.

I went through the same process a few years ago. Your requirements are very similar to mine. Amplenote is what I settled on. Cross platform, quick UI, and very good in no-network and (even more commonly) poor-network conditions. Even the web app uses local storage and works offline.

I made a comment about zettel notes on the parent, have a look. It fixes some of the problems you talk about. Not sure if theres an apple version.

Android is why I use Google Keep. There's lots of features I wish it has, but ultimately the important one for me is that I can take a note any time with no delay or waiting for apps to load

Clibu Notes is a note-taking and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) app that works on desktop, tablet, and smartphone. Local first, fast with first class editing, backlinks etc. Simple, effective note taking, always accessible everywhere. See Clibu.com

I set up PolyGit on my phone. So I can take new notes by pulling, editing, and the pushing. It's a pain, not gonna lie. But I don't take notes away from any of my computers that often. Mostly I'm in a work meeting, reading an email, something like that, so it doesn't come up too often.

All it would take to be awesome would be to find a mobile git app that required fewer button presses, so I'm hopeful.

I use the Markor app from F-Droid. The notes are plain text or markdown files in a folder that is synced to my desktops using Syncthing. It felt incredibly liberating once I got this setup working.

Ive been using zettel notes, on fdroid. It can handle the git syncing. Keys are managed in app as well which i have mixed feeling about but overall its been great for moving from obsidian to a completly self managed system.

Given their workflow, I assume they are either not using mobile, or are using something like Termux.

I do the same thing as pkulak. For mobile, I made a little readonly app that lets me view notes from any web browser. It's Python using Hyperdiv.io, because I wanted to play with Hyperdiv. For updating notes from Mobile while I'm out and about, i just use Signal's Note To Self and then will make changes when I'm back to a real keyboard.

Updates are triggered from the git repo push, so as long as I remember to sync before I run off(or wait for it to auto-sync)

Any git client for your mobile would also let you view your notes. Maybe even edit, depending on the git client.

Why the two single quotes before the subshells?

Oh, that's my bad. I copied this from my Nix config and that's how you escape.

https://git.sr.ht/~pkulak/nix/tree/main/item/home/default.ni...

But what do you use to actually take the notes? After trying a bunch of apps I settled on VS Code with a custom Profile that has all the settings, extensions and UI states that I need for taking markdown notes.

I realised that I already spend at minimum 8-10 hours a day in VS Code, why learn another app with all the different quirks, UI and key bindings...

I'm on a similar path (VSCodium + FOAM plugin, and then using MkDocs & Roam-links plugin to export as HTML). Can you share some of the VSCode plugins / settings / color schemes / etc which have been working well for you?

Neovim

Often I need to consult notes on my phone, is there an app to comfortably browse and search notes in phone?

Preferably offline with syncing.

Today I use Joplin but it has custom file format.

I like markor

and git synchronization with MGit on Android

To this, it works well to add inotifywait to detect when files are saved. You can pipe the save detections to a loop that git-commits only that one file, providing a more granular history with very little cost.

> if [[ ''$(git status --porcelain) ]]; then

> ... "''$(date)"

What is the purpose of the '' syntax?

Sorry. Nix. And it’s too late to edit.

Thx, just wondering if that was an arcane bash idiom. Very tricky to get anything useful from the web about ''.

Bash and Perl, where any number of punctuation marks in a row could plausibly mean something

I've been running this for about 15 years now:

  ddiederi@ddiederi-mac notes % while [ 1 ]
  do
  git add -A .
  git commit -am wip;git push;git pull
  sleep 6
  done

Same here. After going through different formats (Zim, Markdown, org-mode) I settled on org-mode and haven't looked back. I think that other note-taking systems only exist because whoever wrote them hasn't tried org-mode.

I also use vdirsyncer with DavX to sync my phone's calendar and contacts to my notes directory, so that is backed up as well - all in the same syncing script.

  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  cp -a ~/.vdirsyncer/calendars/ ~/Notes/pim/
  cp -a ~/.vdirsyncer/contacts/ ~/Notes/pim/
  git add \*
  git commit -am "$(hostname)"
  git pull
  git push
  echo ''
  git status

Please charge something. In order to trust my notes somewhere, I need it to be in someone's best interest to keep my data and not grow bored or overburdened by costs.

I desperately want a simple, cross-platform, online or offline, fast note taking app. Evernote was this maybe 10 years ago before the bloat. I beg them every feedback opportunity to get Team features, chat, AI, and never ending upgrades out of my face. When I open the app it is because I either have a quick thought to capture or I need to retrieve one. That is the worst time for a distraction.

Please charge a profitable amount and take my money.

Have you tried Obsidian? It's a very bare-bones note taking app with a great plugin ecosystem. It has been my go-to for quite sometime now.

I also really like obsidian. I've got sync setup via Github but they also have a paid sync solution too.

NotePlan is also a good alternative if you don't want to setup plugins and your own syncing system, but it has no free options.

I left obsidian a while ago, because it didn't load instantly on Android, it had a notable startup time.

Have they changed that?

(cofounder here)

Thanks for the feedback! We have some ideas, and to be honest, the feedback here has been great to firm up some of our assumptions.

I'd like to follow up on this if you're interested. Feel free to email (lowercasehq@gmail.com).

Sooo expensive, thank you sooo much!

This comment is a little confusing unless you click through -- the pricing page says that it's free to use with no strings attached.

https://www.lowercase.app/pricing/

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