Any good open-source self-hosted evernote alternatives?
Hi, is there any good open source self-hosted evernote alternatives with sync and android support?
Combined w/ MobileOrg sync and the MobileOrg app, it serves all of my note-taking needs quite well.
It's much more than dumb text, too, like Evernote. Structured documents with headers, markdown-like formatting, links, fast-capture templates for stray thoughts, an Agenda system (if you want it, you don't need to use it, I do and have it sync w/ my Google Calendar), exportable to HTML and a few other formats (some people even maintain their websites using org-mode).
Keywords for marking entries and a good search system (combined with Helm it's pretty amazing).
Property drawers for entries.
It's a swiss army knife of productivity applications and I use it for note taking, documents, journaling (with automatic GPG encryption of the entry body), my agenda, quick-capture of ideas, tasks, etc... I use it for grocery lists even.
The other thing I try to call out about org-mode is that there is nothing else that is likely to be around and useful in 20 years.
For example I didn't quite like how org-drill, a spaced repetition extension for org-mode, handled flash-card grouping and drill selection at run-time so I completely customized it with my own group selection interface.
An open ecosystem of human-signal-capture apps will improve security of the future, i.e. events that have not yet happened. The past is already well monitored and recorded. See "The Adjustment Bureau" for exploration of the topic.
If apps use a mature sync protocol (e.g. WebDAV, CalDAV), they can collectively debug interoperability and cross-platform issues related to that protocol, leaving them free to innovate on UX for mass or vertical audiences. Some examples:
http://www.2doapp.com - CalDAV - iOS, Android and Mac
https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus - WebDAV - iOS and Mac
http://www.notebooksapp.com - WebDAV - iOS, Mac, Win
You then use something to sync that file tree to any of your devices. I used BTSync for a bit but found it annoying and I now use Google Drive with a GDrive syncing client on my phone so that the mobile-org Android app is always up-to-date.
It's bi-directional and they use a checksum matching scheme and some import tooling that allows you to suck in changes to those index files from other clients.
I use cintanotes portable myself... http://portableapps.com/apps/office/cintanotes-portable It is not "opensource", but it has been most useful for keeping notes, tagging, and categorising
I also use http://portableapps.com/apps/office/keepnote-portable (http://keepnote.org/) which is FOSS and also http://portableapps.com/apps/office/rednotebook_portable (http://rednotebook.sourceforge.net/) which is also FOSS.
Choose which ever you feel comfortable using.
P.S: I am also a very big fan of the portableapps format and the platform. Big shout out to John T Haller for all his hard work on this!
P.P.S: I also use the org mode at times http://orgmode.org/ :)
Or even Zim [0] which doesn't required any webserver or DB.
ownCloud has an Android client (it's not free on Google Play but you can build it from source code yourself), and Android text editors are easy to find.
settings: deployment behind a nginx, ldap login for the users.
rolling oc out was a nightmare. we tried several major releases, every time hoping things will be different.
both requirements caused a lot of trouble, we run into a lot of documented but unfixed bugs. they were often closed with the comment: ldap subsystem will be rewritten.
i thing we tested three times, each time a new major version. each time there was a new ldap system, but it was still broken.
I'd like to see something like this redone in a lower level language - it seems like PHP isn't well suited for this task.
https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=com.owncloud.and...
I've asked myself WHY do I want to host my own data. My innermost thoughts are hard to imagine being broadcast to the NSA, Chinese government, and any ambitious cracker... but what I write about I will eventually publish anyhow. And the projects I am working on will eventually be free software anyhow. AND even with my own infrastructure I know that the NSA/Chinese/Crackers could find a way in.
I gave up on giving up on the cloud. From one perspective, I think that security through obscurity (with 7 Billion folks, why does my stuff matter THAT much?) is a thing. Another thing is that if my work were discovered, what would happen? Controversy? Notoriety? As a marketer I crave those things.
I have some very patentable, valuable work sitting in Evernote, Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive, various local and hosted Owncloud/NeverNote/Laverna/LibreOffice files. My plan is to get as much as I can of it into Evernote and move on with my work rather than spending more time on this question.
Ultimately I had to ask myself this: If I am going to ask even one person to trust my service with their data, why can't others ask the same of me?
FYI, Here is what my Evernotes are about: I think that the future of computing should be based on Canonical Identity via Blockchain, 'personal fact clouds' for every identity that store state in infinispan grids (most will use hybrid clouds, but could be fully self hosted on an RPi in a fanny pack), datamic+datalog for interfacing with the data, and infinite user and machine interfaces to that data. I think that CoreOS/Ubuntu Core could be the foundation for personal grid computing, every app can be a container with on demand scaling and failover, and that data transport can be equally at home on a sneakernet, the internet of today, or the mesh network of tomorrow. I believe that data is soveign, sharing of that data should always be FINITE, all user interfaces should be stateless, and hardware should allow for users to compose their own interfaces. In this future, VR and IOT are instantly integrated, everybody owns their own data, and short of physical access data isn't shared ever ever ever unless with finite permission.
I'm using Evernote for now because it is fast and lets me work on my work. And now that y'all have my ideas to steal, do. Please. Let's build a better world together, eh?
Being open rarely closes doors.
It works very well!
You could do as I do: Syncthing on laptop <> Raspberry Pi <> phone.
Now all changes made on either the phone (OS #1, in your case) or laptop (OS #2) will be synced to the Pi (or VPS) ready to be picked up by the other device when switched on/synced. Placing a device between the two others ensures that all files are up to date.
Without it you can run into situations where you've updated a file on the laptop that is also open on the phone, accidentally saving the phone changes over the laptop changes, then saving the laptop changes back over the phone changes. Syncthing has versioning, but this setup negates the need for most rollbacks.
I use it to keep notes in simple text files with Vim and Notepad++. No need for markdown or images here, so I just use basic formatting, timestamps and hashtags to help with searching and browsing.
Including an encrypted filesystem, alongside Syncthing's encrypted syncing, can keep data that bit more secure.
All open source, all encrypted, all self-hosted. Give yourself 30 minutes to set it up, if that.
Notes:
The Pi is the Pi2, but until a recent upgrade it worked fine on the Pi1. The phone is an n900, still doing a great job 5 years on... but in need of a replacement, preferably another phone that can install arbitrary Linux software and is not walled into an 'apps' ecosystem.
The OP was interested in Android support. I don't think there's an app for Syncthing, but you could SSH to your VPS, with notes synced to your laptop? You're just missing that middle device in that case.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutomic.sy...
Yeah, I knew about the middle device thing, but it seemed like a hassle when the Android app is a bit alpha-ish.
Would love to hear any and all suggestions: personal wiki, deeply structured personal knowledge graph, UI concerns...anything! I'm not saying anything will come of it for sure, and doing it open-source wasn't my plan, but I'd be very grateful for any input.
If it's just for lightweight note taking, text apps using dropbox as a backend allow more versatility.
If I'm going to enter important information or thing I want to keep around a long time, I'll need to be able to do backups, move the data around and batch process if needed.
Regarding data management, Evernote feels more like a pretty walled garden than an efficient warehouse. Right now I feel a folder and files vased approach with a dropbox like sync service is the sweet spot, and I use a set of apps like tagspaces or simplenote on top of that to ease specific use cases like text editing, browsing or searching.
Screenshot: http://stillblondeafteralltheseyears.com/wp-content/uploads/...
Every branch of the tree should be a Evernote-style multi line note with text formatting functionality. The tree would be a file system like structure, but the Workflowy UI feels much less clunky than Google Drive/Dropbox or similar services. Workflowy supports marking nodes as completed, so a service like this could even work as task management system.
Just synced text, even if it happens to be markdown text so it's a bit prettier, is not valuable to me.
Evernote's ability to quickly drag in some pictures and throw some text in to explain them is what I want. A real notebook allows me to sketch. A digital notebook must also allow me to incorporate concepts that require pictures because they can't be easily written as text.
To improve Evernote, I would like the "notebooks" to actually be tags, so the same document could appear to reside in multiple places.
I would like it to have h1,h2,h3 header tags, so I could build documentation that had structure, rather than just manually making some text big and bold to pretend to be a header.
I would like a "table" creator or tag, so I could add table data easily.
I will never give up my embedded pictures though.
What I'd like is an Evernote with less possibilities and perhaps sections in each note. E.g.: - plain text (or up to Google docs kind of formatting) - a photo section where I can dump some pics without them showing on ridiculous full screen resolution. - a URL (which maybe shows a small screenshot of the webpage, or even loads a copy of the text)
To me it's about about storing/remembering stuff I care about in a simple and portable way.
Something wiki like that works good with snippets (e.g. show all snippets with a particular tag on one page relatively compact, not just a list of wikipages where you have to click at each one). TiddlyWiki comes closest from all I've seen so far.
Good way of inserting/attaching random files.
quick way to add stuff to tags/categories (hierarchical tags maybe?)
It only supports plaintext, which might be a deal breaker, but I've gotten used to it. I rarely find myself needing formatting, and it has some functions to get around that, like the ability to drag arbitrary URLs and files into the text box and have them turn into clickable links. If I ever need to have images in my stuff, I usually just have links like that in my text.
That might make working with the notes a bit awkward on Android, though. Honestly, I wouldn't know. I rarely edit my notes on the go. If I need to look at my notes when I'm not using my computer, I usually export a small section of my file and physically print it out.
The program's so small I just keep it and all the files it generates in my Dropbox. With that setup, I pretty much get all the benefits of Evernote I'd need without worrying about losing notes or proprietary file formats or whatever. It's kind of weird, but I would really recommend giving it a shot.
(Among other things, I wrote this entire post in it. :p )
http://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/2a1a0e/why_is_th...
I'm currently trying out Laverna (https://laverna.cc/)
It's self-hosted on Wildfly or JBoss EAP, but we're almost finished supporting Docker (ie, you'd be able to run it on OpenShift).
Disclaimer: I'm the technical lead for the project.
I have a rather shonky python script that exports the docs nightly in case google drive dies. That's good enough for me.
I know this isn't an open source solution but I couldn't find anything that worked consistently well in that area.
Imma gonna take that there word.
You should look into https://owncloud.org/ it is like open source version of dropbox which will sync more than just notes for you across multiple platforms
[Edit] OK, I look es around and Asket the mighty Google. Looks like the problem happens when updating. Good to know. Thanks for the hint.
I just started using this, so I can't say how effective it is yet. But it captures notes in NValt and syncs via Dropbox.
Additionally, having everything available on my phone is extremely useful.
A simple git repo doesn't suffice for that.
Sharing with other geeks is easy, share a repository with them. Sharing with non geeks is a different story, of course, that is not covered by this approach.
That's wonderful, now what about a picture of a business card or flier I took quickly? What about PDFs I've been sent or have found online? Not everything is generated in a text editor, and as much as I love text and default to it as much as possible, it's not always possible.
This is maybe my 3rd biggest usecase.
> Sharing with non geeks is a different story, of course, that is not covered by this approach.
Which may be my second largest use case for evernote.
I would not call a method that cannot perform more than 2/3rds of the main functions I use daily a replacement, let a lone an adequate one.