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Comment by JamesAdir | Hacker News Reader

If you compare word processors to note taking apps of today which I think are very equivalent to the same use you'll find more than 55 tools. Word processors belong to an era where the computer replaced the typewriter and it's not needed any more these days. You can find commercial, free or open source note taking apps that are local or cloud based and offer a huge variety of features.

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"If you compare word processors to note taking apps of today which I think are very equivalent to the same use"

Are they really equivalent though? A word processor - with multi-page documents, pagination, rich formatting and layout, footnotes, headers, footers, ToC (table of contents) and so much more - seems a magnitude greater than simply a note-taking app.

I can understand why many developers might tackle a simple note app (or a simple blog generator, or static site generator). But a word processor feels like a much more complex beast.

All of that complexity has been replaced by sync (e.g., collaborative editing as one example of). Sync is the problem of our era and it branches out in many directions (e.g., infinitely restorable, branching, searchable history).

In general commercial note-taking apps are not at all simple; they have similar features to those you named. Also consider that automatic syncing across devices (at least, if not also across platforms) is practically a sine qua non, which is complex it its own right.

I do wonder whether note-taking apps will condense over time too though, as our phones continue to become bigger extensions of our intellectual activity.

You could likely more than 55 open source text editors too. I could name at least 15 offhand, I think.

That's a good comparison also to the word processors of the 80's.

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