Hey y’all. I’ve been testing a bunch of Note taking solutions and nothing seems to check off what I want and need.
I want a simple interface (both for list view and note editor/view), preferably similar to Google Keep, but a regular list is fine as well.
Key features:
A. being able to drag and drop re-order checkbox lists.
e.g.
- [ ] item 1
- [ ] item 2
- [x] item 4
- [x] item 3
I’d like to be able to just drag and drop the above to sort things correctly.
B. E2EE at rest.
C. CTRL+F inside the note view/edit!!
Honestly, the only functionality I truly want is A. But most of the solutions I found are either proprietary or can’t do it.
Self hosted options I’ve tried:
- Joplin (can’t do A; UX is not great)
- Standard notes (A + C is gated by their self hosted premium subscription; I don’t mind paying for my apps, but the prices are ridiculous)
- Silverbullet.md (can’t do A)
- Quillpad (very similar to Google Keep and can do A, but has terrible file syncing, not E2EE)
Notesnook looks almost as insane as Standard Notes to self host (mimicing AWS stack locally is nuts). Has anyone tried Notesnook yet? I don’t want to spend another afternoon setting something heavy up only to find that the feature I want is gated by a heavy $.
Any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
EDIT: Woops! I am looking to use the notes app on both Android and Web/Desktop Linux. Preferably an open source solution.
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Not for everyone, but I use a self-hosted single user email server for this. All the formatting your client permits, clients for every platform, attachments, organization into folders, synced automatically everywhere, etc. No spam filtering, MARC, DKIM, and the like because you only ever email yourself and you don’t permit external senders. I love it.
Obsidian and good ol’ paper and pen. (or epaper). The paper I use is on bullet jpurnal style.
Hi quaff!
The app I use for this purpose is called Notally, on android. It supports reordering the checkboxes, but it doesn’t do find in page or sync to web (although it can do backup /restore – I sync the folder with nextcloud and I can access the text files)
That said if you try it, you might love how simple it is and use it for something!
I self-host Notesnook and found it easy to set up. Been using it as my main note-taking app for years now and I’m really happy with it.
Are you able to drag & drop to reorder checkbox list items in notes? 🙏
Triliumnext can do everything you want. Its pretty damn powerful
Whoa. This actually works pretty close. Although, I am not seeing the ability to drag and drop re-order list items. Which is the big feature I want and need.
I am seeing in their github issues that CKEditor doesn’t support it. Thanks for the suggestion though!
Others have mentioned Syncthing as a sync solution. I’d like to add a couple points:
Syncthing can work fine even for solutions that are intended to use their own sync, provided it’s a single-user setup. You’re not likely to make simultaneous changes on 2 devices, so collisions are unlikely.
Also for using Syncthing, I recommend Syncthing-Fork for Android - it moves sync conditions into the folder/job rather than global. Very useful when you have jobs you want always syncing, and jobs you want to only sync on wifi and power.
If using iOS there’s an ST client called Möbius Sync ($5), developed by a company the financially supports Syncthing.
For Windows, get SyncTrayzor - it makes running and managing ST easier.
What I want is being able to hand draw something quickly in my notes, what’s the app that has text and drawings?
I use Logseq with ToDoList plugin to handle task list. Logseq is similar to obsidian but open-source. And to syncronize notes among devices, I use syncthing. No need to selfhost.
Emacs and org-mode.
Lots of features, but not simple and a big learning curve is you don’t already is emacs.
I don’t think that there’s a way for it to do drag and drop, either, although it’s emacs, so who knows?
I use Tasks.org with caldav (Radicale) on android and thunderbird on pc, would that work?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.tasks
I see tasks.org supports etesync, which encrypts data. I have never used it though
I also recommand Task.org app to sync tasks with CalDAV and I use raw Markdown files with WebDAV, both using the DAVx5 app for synchronization. For editing Markdown, I prefer minimalist apps that suit my needs. Right now, I find SimpleMarkdown (with disabled telemetry) to be the best choice.
Not sure of your specific needs, but I feel that self hosting (i.e. setting up a proper server) is unnecessary. Just pick a local first program and use it with syncthing.
The usual trio (which may be overkill) are Obsidian (admittedly not open source), Trillium, and logseq.
Have you considered Kanban apps? All of them should support A+C. I’ve used Wekan and Kanboard. Hope this helps your searching!
Every now and then this question comes up. It’s a timeless software engineering conundrum. Kind of like how med students might start to think they have all kinds of diseases and conditions because they’re learning all these symptoms.
Software engineers, especially new ones, tend to be heavily biased toward applying technical solutions to non-technical problems. Most never actually grow out of this.
I’ll advise what I advise every time someone approaches me or one of my peer groups with this very question:
Get yourself a notebook and a pen.
I’m dead serious, not trolling, and not some kind of technophobe zealot.
When it comes down to it, if you let go of what you think you need in a to-do list app, you’ll find that what you actually need is much simpler.
Notebooks are e2e encrypted. Self hosted. Offline. As ephemeral as you like. Indexable for search. Versatile. Take a picture of a page if you really want to. OCR it if you need to.
Pen and paper.
I carry a phone, I’m not carrying a notebook and pen.
I did that 40 years ago.
Plus that list doesn’t show up on my laptop or my desktop, other places I’m working.
It’s not sortable by date/time, priority or project.
That’s terrible advice, and doesn’t even meet the basic requirements of the question.
I hear ya. I don’t carry a notebook with me, and don’t like to fill my pockets. So I appreciate the low tech suggestion, but will have to pass on this!
I spent several years looking for the perfect selfhosted solution to this, but ultimately I realized an offline solution was just going to be better. So I started using Obsidian which is as simple or complex as you want with no paywall.
Some of the self hosted solutions I’ve tried were:
I settled on obsidian really quickly as well. And now sync thing + tailscale + obsidian means I am done experimenting and things just work.
Unless you’re using syncthing on Android which is a nightmare
Works fine for me.
What issues are you having?
Some hiccups for me but nothing egregious.
You can also get obsidian to sync using the guide here: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/s/GegPIcBjFg. It’s really good.
I use notesnook but I don’t self host, just the app locally. It has an option to insert a task list into the note, and that has drag and drop reordering. It also encrypts at rest, and has text search. Hope that helps your decision.
Thanks! I had tested Notesnook with the official server. It worked the way I want. but it seems their self host server doesn’t have that feature. Not obviously tho. Which is really weird, since I’m using the same client app (where I assumed this functionality would live).
That’s a very specific and interesting exclusion, weird. Well sorry dude, best of luck finding something that works.
