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Comment by SUPERSLEDZ | Hacker News Reader

Still looking for viable replacement:

* Joplin had some issues I've checked year ago.

* Apple notes while I have iPhone there's no Windows app.

* OneNote is just trully horrendous app.

* Obsidian just can't convince myself. I'm forcing myself to use it work, while it works, it's not something I enjoy doing.

* Notion is odd, everything is a block and sometimes formatting is just meh...

* Google keep is just simple note and that's it(unless something has changed).

Any worthy apps to look at besides those?

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What kind of notes do you take?

I've used OneNote for like 12 years now I think and I love it. It's where my school notes are and every note I've taken in my career since then. My personal diaries and life notes. Everything is in it.

I've been looking at Obsidian as well because I like the idea of self hosting but aside from that I've never seen a reason to leave.

So back to my question, what kind of notes do you take?

It's general notes. Some of them are TODOs, sometimes screenshots with notes, few with basic tables.

Nothing extraordinary.

I absolutely hate Onenote due to how it looks and forcing you to place a note on your note page to make a note :D

To be honest, it's the best feature of Onenote is that you can arrange everything on the page (at least on desktop - win/mac) any way you want. Yes, note is kinda a note in a note, when the latter is a page.

I can understand some people like it, I however don't - not my thing :)

The note in note thing took some getting used to in the beginning. I didn't like it either.

I don't just type notes, though. I do LOTS of handwriting as well, and LOTS of diagramming. In that context the floating text/note boxes are really, really useful. I'll have a single note with a diagram in it and several explanations floating around. Or I'll have a vertically scrolling note alternating between text, pictures, and diagrams. The way I use OneNote has made the note in a note thing really useful.

But every now and then when I'm just typing some quick info out it gets in my way. I just have all the context of it being a useful feature to make me tolerate it.

I can highly recommend logseq [0]. It's become something like my external brain, writes markdown files I sync between devices (mac, ipad, phone, linux (although no linux arm last time I checked)) via git (auto commits to a repo). It's superb.

0: https://logseq.com/

I am a big fan, I also just discovered emacs Org mode, and was delighted to find out that logseq supports this format as well.

https://logseq.com/

+1 on this as long as you're not importing a decades worth of existing notes. It scales really poorly when your graph is huge.

What were the issues you found on Joplin that stopped you? I use it and it does what it does, which is saving/sorting/tagging notes you want to keep forever and a year. The UX is not the best, but functional. Which is my biggest gripe with it.

the generated filenames

I use Joplin daily and it's great for me. I have it set up with encrypted sync to fastmail storage via WebDAV and since I got that working I've had zero issues across the 3-4 devices I use it on.

> * Notion is odd, everything is a block and sometimes formatting is just meh...

I really like Notion as a way to create little mini-databases of things. Businesses in my new city I just moved to that I want to visit later, what I thought about different teas, vendors for my hobbies, etc.

It makes me extremely nervous to keep all that info there. It feels like vendor lock in. My recent struggle to get everything out of Evernote in a semi-usable format, much less into another app was eye opening.

So I've been looking for some similar sort of Notebook + Freeform DB replacement.

I followed a similar path until I discovered Heptabase. Focused on speed like Obsidian, but the solo dev pushes out new features at an insane pace. They do this by focusing, so you won’t see a laundry list of features, and it’s pay only but well worth the money.

Finding your note taking app is like finding sobriety. Some apps work for some people but any given app is unlikely to be “the one”. My strategy was to just keep trying them until one sticks, because I know note taking is crucial for my success.

I use bear.app and love the simplicity but is versatile enough to all my uses cases. It only runs on Apple platforms, so maybe a deal breaker. It seems similar to Obsidian, so maybe another deal breaker. It syncs via CloudKit and for what it's worth, the devs have shared that they are working on a web app version that would presumably use CloudKit Web Services.

also (IMO) - - exportable/importable to/from markdown in case that's ever needed - much faster than evernote ever was

It's what Evernote was supposed to be. They've got some richer formatting open issues - but that's coming in V2.

DEVONthink is very fast and powerful, a native App for Mac and iOS, no subscription, but rather expensive. Syncing is not perfect, you can use Dropbox or iCloud, but search is very powerful. https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink

I love, love LOVE TickTick. It is a note-taking and todo list app and everything is so frictionless like I've never seen before. Also supports markdown notes. I'm only concerned that it looks like a Chinese Todoist clone. The about page doesn't is suspiciously elusive.

Would you mind sharing url? Hard to find with all the urls coming from TikTok. :D

My guess is they are referring to TickTick: https://ticktick.com/

Yes exactly, my bad, I meant TickTick!

Notesnook (https://notesnook.com/) - it's open source, has its own importer making it super easy to migrate, is fully cross platform, and doesn't force you to learn-and-relearn anything. It's note taking - just perfect-er.

I feel you, I tried all of the apps you mention and then some more. I am currently using Obsidian since it uses a simple, well-defined open format, but I am not enjoying a lot... Also it seems like the iPhone mobile app needs 30 seconds to sync every time I open it, regardless if there are updated files or not...

I use Simplenote to solve the problem of sharing quick notes between Apple Notes and Windows.

My core data storage app is still OneNote, though. I moved there when Evernote started getting buggy, and it is a perfectly fine replacement. I don't understand the hate for it.

How did you move your notes from Evernote to OneNote?

It's been many years, so I forget the details, but I seem to recall the OneNote was able to import files that were exported in Evernote's standard export format.

Microsoft offered a website/tool that allowed importing from Evernote but they shut it down a while ago.

For the people who like self-hosting web apps and a minimal wiki-like interface, I wrote Silicon: https://github.com/cu/silicon

What issues did Joplin have for you? It’s been the best notes app I’ve used.

Ulysses is great but similar to Obsidian (and I like Obsidian better personally).

> Any worthy apps to look at besides those?

Bookstack if you dont mind the lack of clients

NotePlan is my favorite

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