what I like about the notes app is that it can use imap to store notes. So they’re in-sync without iCloud and accessible from any imap client.

The app itself is a bit annoying though with forced auto-spelling and a clunky feeling. Would love to find another app that relies on imap, but haven’t found any (admit to not looking too much)

What do you mean by forced auto-spelling? You can turn that on and off in the Edit menu just like in any other macos text field.

hehe I guess I missed it? Thank you. never spent long enough on the app to tweak the settings, even though I think I tried to look up the preferences and couldn’t find it there

Nothing to do with this app. That’s an OS-wide preference available in EVERY app.

Unless it’s an Electron turd, in which case YMMV regarding system services and interface conventions. :p

I’ve written myself a terminal based note taking app that uses IMAP and MIME/Maildir as a storage backend: https://github.com/knazarov/notes.sh

What do you mean by IMAP? Isn’t it a mail sync thing? Or can you use it some other way?

IMAP is basically a file access protocol (think FTP), but the "files" are emails. You don't have to just pull from an INBOX and save emails in Sent (that's done over IMAP, not SMTP), you can read/create/modify anything anywhere, so some apps save notes to IMAP for some reason (to replace "self-emails" I guess).

IMAP is read/write and holds the mail on the server (unlike POP).

If you go into your internet accounts settings and tick "notes". Notes will surface it and stores notes in folders on the mail server. (Not all of notes functionality is available in the notes stored in those folders.)

That's a big proviso in parenthesis. I would go as far as saying that most functionality is not available, unfortunately.

Apple’s visual voicemail on the iPhone also syncs using IMAP hosted by your carrier.

So does the Notes app, at least for Google accounts.

You didn’t bring up a lot of apps that are similar. Is it because open source is a requirement? Not sure because you bring up obviously non open source app issues.

For a quick look at quite a few apps would be all the Zettelkasten notes apps. Taio is recently out for iOS and Mac too.

I also don’t look at any of the options you listed. There’s still a handful of apps left over.

long time google keep user.

i am seriously considering migrating my hundreds of notes and recipes to notes.app because i have been having a bad feeling about keep.

you are saying the grass isn't greener on that side either? what's bad about notes.app besides lock-in and export?

I’ve been using the native Apple notes for years now. At first it was convenience, but at some point I thought about it and decided there was no reason to switch. It has shockingly reliable sync (for Apple), and the right number of formatting options for me. I wish it could syntax-highlight code blocks, but that’s not a universal use case.

Export is fine if you’re only moving a single note—it just strips formatting and shares it as plain text. Similarly, I don’t know if there’s a bulk import option. If you have a text file, you might need to copy-paste it into notes.

There’s an app called Exporter on the MAS that will export all your notes as markdown (with images in a side folder) just FYI. I believe it’s free.

It doesn’t work for large images due to some library limitation so any scans and photos taken within notes might not export correctly

If you enjoy using the Notes app, it should be fine.

I don’t like it because I find it clunky and restrictive. However I wouldn’t tell someone to not try it if it seems fine to them.

My experience with Notes is positive.

What I especially like is the simplicity overall and good sync between mac/iphone/ipad.

And that it works great offline.

I don't like the search either. It's a global style search, which means you can't constrain the search on a specific folder.

So if you have 1000s of notes in different folders, you're made to look through tons of irrelevant matches in different folders.

It's also somewhat clunky in syncing sometimes.

I am in same boat (long time keep user) h. How do you plan to migrate from google keep

If you want to export your Keep notes (and almost all of the metadata and media) into Markdown format, I helped write keep-exporter, a tool to accomplish just that.

It downloads the text content of the notes and the majority of media (some of the annotation stuff doesn't work quite right). So assuming another app supports markdown import, this would work.

https://github.com/ndbeals/keep-exporter/

(note, the version in PyPI is behind and I don't have access to update it, so pull from the repository instead)

It uses gkeepapi (https://github.com/kiwiz/gkeepapi), but it looks like there's an official API now (https://developers.google.com/keep/api), so maybe Keep isn't going away anytime soon.