Show HN: NotesHub: cross-platform, Markdown-based note-taking app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: NotesHub: cross-platform, Markdown-based note-taking app

about.noteshub.app

147 pointsalex-titarenko111 comments

Thank you for your comments, just some context:

- The app is available for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Apple Vision Pro, and the Web.

- The Web version is implemented as a Progressive Web Application that is very responsive, local first, offline first, can be installed, and is entirely free to use.

- Native (hybrid) versions do not require subscription fees and have small one-time payment.

- You can store your notes in Git using any Git provider such as GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. However, it has the best built-in integration with GitHub. Self-hosted scenarios like Gitea are also supported. In addition to Git, you can store your notes in a file system and iCloud Drive on Apple Devices.

- It has a rich Markdown syntax support with added extensions like Mermaid, ABC music notation, callouts, etc.

In addition to regular Markdown notes, you can create Kanban boards for easy task management (under the hood, it is still stored in Markdown). If that is not enough, you can create whiteboards based on Excalidraw and embed them back into your notes.

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Nice product and website. Your homepage uses a lot of passive voice. Personally I think changing it to active voice makes the product sound more appealing.

"your notes will always be" -> "your notes are always" "content will be synced" -> "content is synced"

"note will be periodically synced" -> "notes are periodically synced" "You can use it for managing personal tasks..." -> "Manage your personal tasks..."

"You can choose between light and dark" -> "Choose between light and dark"

Nitpick: that's not what "active voice" means.

The active voice equivalent of "content will be synced" would be "NotesHub will sync your content".

Dropping passive voice helps most writing, but

> "content will be synced" -> "content is synced"

FYI that's still passive voice.

To quickly determine passive vs. active voice, you can add the phrase, “by zombies” to the end of the sentence.

If it’s clear the zombies are doing the action (subject), then the content is passive voice. Otherwise, if the zombies are an adverbial phrase, the sentence is in active voice.

Passive voice: “Content is synced by zombies”

Active voice: “NotesHub syncs the content by zombies”

"Thanks" for making me spit my coffee, that's hilarious but awesome; I will be using it in the future. :-D

Glad you liked it :)

When I started grad school and was learning how to write effectively, I struggled with passive/active voice differentiation… until I learned the zombies tip. It’s so absurd that you can’t forget it, and it’s simple enough to differentiate the two in a split second!

Amazing. Active vs passive confuses so many folks.

Great three part series on that topic and others:

https://jasonzweig.com/on-writing-better-part-1/

Oh I like the web version! I just hooked up the web app to my _public_ blog repo, and started editing the markdown files. Hit save and it automatically performs a git commit on my behalf. Perfect. Next time I'm working on the files locally, all I need is a git pull and I am good to go. I like it.

Although I didnt quite like that it asked for a permission to pretty much _everything_ in Githuhb - public and private repos, deploykeys?!, everything. I wish that were customisable. It was okay for me because I dont keep any non public code in Github, but others might have..

The FAQ has the following instructions for more fine-grained access control:

> To accomplish this scenario select generic Git notebook provider (instead of GitHub) and for the password field put fine-grained personal access token which can be generated to have access only to certain repositories.

I tried this and doesn't seem to work; though unclear what permissions I should be granting it, so possibly that is the issue.

You need only "Contents" Read and write permissions. Make sure when you generate fine-grained personal access tokens on the following page: https://github.com/settings/personal-access-tokens/new you select your desired repo (because it defaults to public repos and that will not work).

Unfortunately, GitHub does not provide that granularity for developers. That is way you have an alternative option as general Git provider where you can use fine-grained access token.

A) Wow this is just incredibly impressive for a solo dev - well done! The feature list just keeps going and going, by the time I got to kanban boards I was in disbelief. I was incredibly dubious based on the title that any “Show HN” could rival Obsidian, but i think I stand corrected!

I sadly use my own hand-rolled markdown system way too often to really switch, but I’ll definitely have to check this out for an on-the-go replacement for Google Keep.

B) “offline first” is a great feature, but I’m curious why you didn’t go with the terms hear more often, “local first”? Just wanted something more accessible to laypeople?

C) “offline first” seems hard to match up with “progressive web app” — not from any sort of user perspective (sounds ideal, even!), just in terms of technical implementation. Am I correct in assuming that the iOS and android versions are PWAs, and that they still durably store files on device? If so, how hard was that?

D) “all major platforms: iOS/macOS/Android/Windows” made me shed a brief tear. It’s ~~infrastructure~~ Linux Week, time to add a platform!!

Best of luck and thanks for sharing your work. I look forward to meeting you on top of the world one day ;)

It seems the creator has been a senior SWE at Microsoft for 7 years now.

It genuinely astounds me that as a solo dev he can make such a featureful app yet Microsoft the company has been failing hard in this realm for the last decade.

Also it makes you wonder how many UI-design teams, product owners, and middle managers are entirely obsolete next to a single competent SWE with a bit of talent for UI/UX.

It's not that surprising, it's just different priorities. If a company would prioritize "Let's build a featureful note-taking app", they'll also get it done. But there's usually a lot of different priorities that are higher than building yet another app for the platform.

OneNote is a pretty decent note taking app.

Although I agree with your observation wholeheartedly, it should be obvious that shipping something at Microsoft is way more involved than shipping a hobby project. Just security and privacy compliance is half the work.

That Microsoft is just not good at building consumer-facing software in general is hard to deny though.

> It genuinely astounds me that as a solo dev he can make such a featureful app

It's a very generic webstack-app, build on 3rd-party-components. It's quite easy doing something on this level these days for an experienced developer.

> yet Microsoft the company has been failing hard in this realm for the last decade.

Did they? They are a company, so they have a different aim than a solo dev doing some hobby-project, or whatever this is. But quality-wise, their other apps build on webstack are not worse than this. It's more that they are old, with old apps, and they seem to have some internal struggles finding their way. Which is probably why they went back and forth with OneNote, and why it sucks so hard at certain parts.

People seem interested in this. But I still wonder what is the advantage over Obsidian.

Pay once pricing?

A really interesting feature would be the ability to post to your own host --- the publishing aspect is the one thing which has me seriously contemplating Obsidian, but I'm so deep into gitbook and github I haven't been able to justify a cost-benefit calculation.

NotesHub is one-time payment of $4 and Obsidian is $50/yr

What does the $50 get you with Obsidian? I don’t pay, and I’m able to access my notes from my desktop and mobile apps.

Obsidian is free for individual use. The $50/yr is a commercial license. They also have a $4/month sync product (sync across devices with e2e encryption), but you can use icloud, google drive, etc too.

Without having tried both side by side, pricing is an advantage.

obsidian is free

Only for personal use - if you use it in connection with a business (even if it's taking meeting notes), you require a commercial license.

Not for professional use, which includes work related notes. NotesHubs free tier allows for that.

In Obsidian , you can even sync to github or dropbox with community plugins . so price wise it is free Also Obsidian has much better search (using community plugin) which is lacking in noteshub

Obsidian's git sync has many issues, at least, this is what I hear from my customers who used both products. Search in NotesHub is also robust, please read here: https://about.noteshub.app/blog/archive/2024/7/noteshub-34

The plugin ecosystem is amazing.

I wrote a plugin called Relay that makes obsidian multiplayer with live collaboration (using CRDTs), and there are a few others in the space too.

Obsidian sync is also great for e2e encrypted sync for your own devices if you don't want to rely on third parties like GitHub.

+1 on the third party search. Quick Switcher plugin lets you bring up a hotkeyed modal to search across all note titles/headings/subheadings/tags all in a single fast search interface.

https://github.com/tadashi-aikawa/obsidian-another-quick-swi...

The app being the in store for mac and ios, I stopped using obsidian when they removed the app from the mac store and only allowed it for ios.

I need the sandbox, for bussiness is a no brainer, allow some apps from the store, give the right permissions, done and for me personally, I don't use anything that doesn't come from the store, even if I can download the app freely from the project page, a few bucks for the sandbox and peace of mind is worth it to me.

I donated to Obsidian because I liked the project in general, I dislike the way they distribute the app in all platforms outside of ios, ex, snap with --classic rendering the attempt to sandbox it useless.

Edit ---

Reading some comments, it's pretty obvious that a lot of people even install third party plugins, on an app that is about taking personal notes, it's refreshing to see how much people care about cybersecurity and their personal, business notes.

less decision fatigue

Fantastic app, good, clean design, and a very useful use-case. I can see myself using it.

However, a few questions:

1. Can I self-host it? If so, how? 2. Can I connect to a "private" Github repo? (I dont want my personal notes publicly viewable, unless I choose so) 3. What's the pricing model? Wasn't entirely clear.

Thanks!!

You can't self-host it. Yes, you can connect to "private" GitHub repo. Pricing model is one time payment for native apps and free web app.

Can you provide more detail on connecting to a "private" GitHub repo?

The FAQ says "To accomplish this scenario select generic Git notebook provider (instead of GitHub) and for the password field put fine-grained personal access token which can be generated to have access only to certain repositories."

I created a PAT with EVERY permission within a selected repo, to the fullest-extent allowed by the fine-grained PAT, but still see "An unhandled error occured, please try again" when setting it up within NotesHub.

I didn't go that far (every permission) but had the same experience.

I have grown to love markdown in the past year. It is just expressive enough without being burdensomely complex. I appreciate the ability to switch between WYSIWYG and plain text editing modes to achieve precision. In contrast to pure-WYSIWYG editors like Google Docs, the formatting can’t get totally hosed in markdown because you can always dip under the hood and fix stuff.

I just wish every rich text editor had accessible markdown…

Microsoft Word having a Markdown mode would be _huge_.

If I were still using it regularly I'd put one together using WordBASIC/VBAscript.

Can you share a bit about the tech behind this? Are the desktop apps electron apps or something else?

Thx!

that's always my first thought. Do I need 64GB of RAM to run this note app? :)

Try checking the memory usage of Apple notes, if you use it. I was shocked how high it was.

Windows version is Electon-based, but not really hungry for resources. MacOS is not Electron-based.

Thank you for crafting and sharing this. Have been looking for a modern MacDown[0] replacement, and this fit the bill nicely. Especially appreciate the reasonable, one-time cost and support for local storage.

The "Key Features" section mentions "Export notes to PDF"; please consider adding an "Export notes to HTML" option. Custom theme support for the preview pane via CSS would be helpful too.

[0] https://macdown.uranusjr.com

I like the look of this a lot, and the support for music notation is a nice touch.

It also sounds like NotesHub might have better out-of-the-box syncing options than Obsidian. Personally, I sync obsidian to a Gitea hosted on a VPS and it works great but that's understandably well beyond what a casual user is going to be willing to do.

The big limitation I'm seeing over competitive alternatives (such as obsidian, logseq, or joplin) is the lack of plug-in support. A robust and passionate community can help flesh out features that otherwise might never be realized particularly with a small dev team.

In fact I was just curious so I did a quick search in the Community Plugin section in Obsidian and there's already a plugin to render ABC notation.

https://github.com/abcjs-music/obsidian-plugin-abcjs

I have been an Evernote, then Notion and now a Jopplin user. A feature I used a lot in these apps is the browser extension that allows me to quickly bookmark a web page into a note. Would you consider such a feature?

I am on a Macbook where I'm not signed in with an Apple ID (let alone my own), can I buy the app for my private devices and install it somehow on my work Macbook?

If you copy the app over to your work Macbook it should ask you to authenticate to the App Store when you try to launch it so that it can validate your license. IIRC this doesn't cause it to save that login to the app store but just does a one-off authentication for that app.

YMMV, but this is my recollection.

I'm a big fan of iA Writer - it basically does everything I need. The best part is its clean interface - just a white screen and cursor.

Markdown based with HTML templates to allow for different appearance when converted to PDF. It also has cross references to other files, so that long documents can be broken down into separate files.

It doesn't have all the features that NotesHub has - hats off to that and I hope NotesHub becomes a success.

I will definitely check this out. I love that syncing can be self-hosted, that it supports LaTeX for math, and even music notation. The one additional thing I would love in a text-based note-taking app is some kind of mind-mapping software. I still have an old copy of Mindnode on my Mac, and there are times where it is the perfect solution. I am a little disappointed that the Linux story is weak.

NotesHub has support of Mermaid diagrams that has mind-mapping. Or you can use Whiteboarding functionality to mimic mind-maps.

This is a really nice product. The web version reminds me of Prose [^1], which introduced the concept of writing in a GitHub repo online since 2013.

For those asking about the advantages of NotesHub over Obsidian, this app offers a web version—a feature I have long wished Obsidian would provide.

[1]: https://github.com/prose/prose

Looks great, just wish it had end-to-end-encryption.

I made a quite similar app with some other features that are a personal must-have which this one lacks.

Looks nice, but what advantage it has over Obsidian or Zettlr? Maybe Obsidian is more expensive but Zettlr is free and also FOSS.

Useful product. Are you planning to add integration with self-hosted Gitlab?

There are a few typos on the site you might want to review: https://triplechecker.com/s/259685/about.noteshub.app?v=rLAc...

Thank you for types reporting, fixed all of them. Regarding self-hosted Gitlab, you can already use it with generic Git notebook provider.

This app is great and seems for me like a better OneNote. One thing I hope get developed a bit more is the drawing feature, having more pen types, being able to zoom in and have the stroke width scale accordingly, as well as a few more stroke types. Really well done!

This is cool. A question for others, what's a solution that I can use if I want to also link images ? I understand a free solution like this will not work for it.

It looks like the keyboard shortcut Cmd-L conflicts with Arc browser in the web app.

Looks great otherwise!

Are there plans for plugins and so forth ala obsidian? For instance, it would be great to have a daily/monthly/quarterly/yearly note and what not.

This might be an unpopular take, but I'm tired of all these Markdown text editors. It almost feels like a cop-out at this point. Ever since text editors started supporting Markdown, we've gotten away from all of these great rich-text editors. Apple Notes is an example of a notetaking application "done right", albeit with fewer features. It's enjoyable to use and offers good UI for attaching files. It certainly is not without its flaws, however. Obsidian gets really close. I bet the devs could go all the way.

I want something WYSIWYG-like, without dealing with the underlying mechanisms... give me rich-text on the front and save the file in Markdown behind the scenes. I hardly care, as long as there is a robust export option built-in.

</end rant>

Bear with "hide Markdown" checked pretty much gets you there, if only on Apple devices.

Markdown vs. Rich Text to me is less about the editing experience and more about do you want your files aligned to a file system or not. The options are either:

- rich text editor with files that only make sense to a single application. - rich text editor with no files but (hopefully) some way to export them to (hopefully) compatible formats. - text files in a folder than can be read / edited by almost anything, with the editing experience tied to your application of choice.

Does Bear let me set where I want the files stored?

I can understand that. There're so many Markdown editors, choice paralysis easily kicks in.

Markdown ist basically a must have for me though, because I know most applications will be outlived by my notes, and I want to be able to move on to a different editor. To try a new one, or even use multiple at the same time (say, on my phone and on my computer), it's unacceptable for me if I have to export and import all my notes first and risking diverging branches.

In general I think taking notes is a very personal thing many people do every day and they're looking for an app fitting their exact workflow. That's why there are so many options. I was considering writing my own one several times already, although it's probably not worth the time.

The one thing that annoys me is that Markdown is not highly standardized. Seems like every implementation is its own dialect and feature support varies quite a bit.

Yeah that's what happens when you come up with a "standard" and then forget about it for two decades.

> because I know most applications will be outlived by my notes

A robust export option is what we're all looking for here.

> taking notes is a very personal thing

I agree with that.

Joplin supports editing in WYSIWYG with formatting tools and saving markdown on the backend, or swapping to the markdown editor whenever you want to edit that way.

You might want to give Notesnook [0] a try.

[0]: https://notesnook.com/

Apple Notes is the greatest note taking app of all time.

I literally don't need anything else.

For folks who buy into the Apple eco-system perhaps --- I'd consider it if it were possible to view/edit notes made in it on my MacBook using a Wacom One screen on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ --- bonus would be if they could get Amazon to put it on the Kindle Scribe.

Apple notes has been lagging and crashing a lot. So annoying since it is my most used app.

Obsidian's WYSIWYG editor is excellent and amazingly featureful. I use it for hours every day, only ever in "edit" mode w/ "live preview", just a couple plugins enabled, and it's by far the best interface to markdown I've encountered.

I agree, which is why I use it. But there are a few quirks that rely on on reading mode.

> It's enjoyable to use and offers good UI for attaching files

Oh, wow! I didn't know it handled files this well. It'll even play video. What's keeping you from using Notes all the time? The lack of export options? What sort of export options are you looking for?

Cross-platform support, sadly.

I keep my todos in markdown checklist boxes. I generate a dayplan with chatgpt and I ask for output in markdown. Just copy and paste it. I now use typora.. but I'll check out your app later.

what is the license? Always free? One day might cost you?

The web version is free, native versions have small one-time fee.

Hey, awesome, clean Material design!

Are notes held on disk unencrypted?

Just out of curiosity is this a Flutter app and if so how did you find the experience of using it to develop a cross platform app?

It's not a Flutter app. It's a React-based app.

Wish I could convert my obsidian data over to check it all out. Also themes. Having themes makes it enjoyable to make notes.

It seems like you re-use the code from the web app to create the hybrid mobile apps.

Which tool / framework do you use to achieve this?

I don't rely on any external framework like Capacitor to make hybrid apps, all of the bridging between web and native part is done by myself.

This looks good, but in order for me to try this it would need vi support and a Linux install option.

A closed source note-taking app is also a questionable decision regardless. The app looks impressive in terms of features, which is actually a con because you may not be able to find an alternative when the time comes and you can no longer use it for any reason.

tbf; all data stored in markdown theoretically solves that.

I currently use Foam on VSCode for notetakng / personal project management. But 2/3rds of my actual typing tends to be inside NeoVim following the foam format (vscode vs vim on the day is determined more by what i'm working on that day vs anything else). I'm constantly on the lookout for a better* system; but haven't found one yet as sometimes I want a UI; but Grep and quick jots inside the terminal is just very useful.

I think you might be in the top 0.03% of people who use note taking apps!

ha, NGL my thought exactly. Maybe ship also as a VSCode extension?

The website leans hard on "fully cross-platform" for a program that clearly isn't.

If you are talking about Linux, you can use the Web version, which is Progressive Web Application, works offline and can be installed.

Do you have a self-hosting version?

Any plan to have one?

I don't get why iOS doesn't have filesystem notebooks on the comparison table.

The fact that iOS doesn't really have a real filesystem you can use, would be my guess.

As someone who regularly uses vim inside iOS to edit files from another application and syncs the whole lot via SyncThing, I beg to differ.

From a filesystem perspective, it's no different from jails or container mount points.

As someone who left iOS for Android because of that, I was pleasantly surprised - when I went back - to find that iOS now has a Files app for managing files on the device and also network shares.

iOS has definitely improved in that area and definitely now has a filesystem.

It has iCloud Drive instead, which is the closest equivalent to a filesystem on iOS

So you can't use other file providers? That tech is really stable now, I've been using it for years to edit a git repo inside Working Copy or files inside other apps using yet another set of apps (Textastic, iA Writer, even vim inside a-Shell). You should really consider reviewing that viewpoint.

What does native (hybrid) mean?

That's when the native Android or iOS app is basically a webview displaying the web app (either served locally or from the website)

That's not really native in my book.

That's why it's called hybrid I guess

I dont think this app supports LFS. Is that something thats in the works?

Is the source code available anywhere, by chance? I’m curious how it was built.

It's not open sourced. You can look at Settings -> Third-party Licenses to see what libraries are in use.

Anyone got a good tutorial on switching from Evernote?

Thanks ! Wonderful alternative to gitjournal.

Anotha one

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