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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

What a coincidence, was just looking for a replacement of Simplenote!

With hundreds of note taking apps coming and going, is there any single performant cross-platform non-Electron app with great conflict resolution for simple notes? Just to be more useful than an overpowered code editor + a file cloud?

Checked just 2 of these conditions here (native Windows and macOS and some iOS startup benchmarks) and there is literally not a single app!!! (to be fair, not every app is likely tested, but even without those it's 6 apps)

https://noteapps.info/features?group=performance

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Obsidian is great and highly performant, even though it's using Electron. Electron is a huge advantage, faster development and the option to customise it easily with plugins.

Obsidian just launched Obsidian CLI too, if that helps. And sync.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47197267

It's not highly performant, its startup time is a multiple of that of native apps. Nothing is easy about plugins, APIs you expose/maintain define that, not Electron, and those can be good/bad in any system. Electron gives easier access to UI styling, but then again, real "easily" comes from the structure/stability of your UI, otherwise your plugins would break all the time. Also, same as with APIs - e.g, Joplin is Electron, but you can only style on a desktop. Then, of course, there are plenty of Electron apps that you can't style at all and that don't support plugins.

I'm happy for devs' "faster development", but as a user I care about "faster use", which Electron blocks outright

Startup time in Obsidian could be better (we're working on it!), but performance is more than startup time. It's making interactions fast throughout the entire app. Obsidian is only three developers but we spend a lot of time shaving off milliseconds everywhere we can. Keystrokes, scrolling, querying, navigating large vaults, opening and parsing large Markdown files, etc.

In 2025 we made reduced startup time on mobile under 0.5s (used to be several seconds), made search nearly instantaneous and released Bases to make complex queries equally fast (much faster than Dataview and other pre-existing solutions).

I wrote a bunch more on this topic here:

https://x.com/kepano/status/2004008730720194759

Thank you for this work! I had tried Obsidian every year or so and the performance switching/opening notes drove me crazy in the past. I like it to feel instant and I'm more sensitive to UI performance than others. Just tried again, and it passes the threshold for me!

I use Ticktick for my Markdown notes and todos. I can add tasks from my lockscreen. I have a single view of notes and tasks. Costs me 5 biriyanis per year, yes its localized pricing.

Been meaning to switch to an open source app out of principle, one which can handle rich notes too.

I should measure my expenses in biriyanis more.

I don't think even Simplenote was native on Windows (despite what noteapps.info says), there is no simplenote-windows repo and all signs point to simplenote-electron

yeah, unfortunately it was yet another Electron wrapper on Windows, though mobile/Mac (where it's more important) was native.

The website's idea is great, but unfortunately it's not comprehensive/reliable, otherwise finding an alternative would be much easier.

You could probably vibe code the perfect one for yourself at this point.

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