I'm still looking for the note taking app that can replace Tomboy. Not because Tomboy is great (it isn't), but because it's actually a note taking app. Most apps seem to be this huge convoluted editors, with a UI resembling an IDE. Which I'm sure is pretty nice for creating a nice hierarchical structure, writing long documents and crosslinking them but, for me at least, note taking is about taking random short or ad hoc notes. Be it during a meeting or just collecting information or organizing thoughts about a specific topic but not necessarily for the long term and then using those while working in other apps (e.g. writing code, creating a blog post, etc.)
And for that I need something that's lightweight on the screen. Just the text and none of the tools that take up extra space. Also, I'd have multiple notes (in separate windows) and have the app running all the time so that creating a new note is just a few clicks. (A global keyboard shortcut would be even better.)
Now the major shortcoming of Tomboy (besides the lack of real markdown support, though the bullet point handling is pretty much OK) is that it gets stuck at this lightweight level and there is no UI for the aforementioned organization. (Though it does create links semi-automatically, which is not bad, though I don't use it a lot.) So it seems that one can have either end of the spectrum, but most documents, at least for me, would start as lightweight notes and then some of them may turn out to be something more convoluted and for the long term. So it would be nice to have an app that covers both. (Unfortunately, copy-pasting from Tomboy doesn't work well, so the bullet point hierarchy gets lost. Also, it would be nice to have it based on markdown and plain text files, but it uses xml, IIRC.)
There was a recent discussion[0] about a newly released Mac app called Bike[1] which is from an expert designing functional text-based apps[2]. Hope this applies to you.
I used Evernote for a while, and then (if I remember correctly) they changed their terms, and I said nope. Right around that time, Apple finally pulled its head out of its ass and added groups or categories to Notes, making it viable.
Now I have everything in Notes, synced through iCloud.
Apple Notes doesn't use any standard format, but you can export your notes. Otherwise, I'd be way into an open-source, self-hosted solution.
I understand that this allows you to manage collections of notes in Markdown format backed up to a Git repository. This is nice and I consider this to be useful, but I would suggest not to position it against Evernote but against knowledge management tools for teams (internal wikis, confluences of the world, etc)
EverNote is all about dropping random files into it (images, pdfs, etc). It's where you store your bills, your receipts, your photos of wine labels. It also has a very handy web clipper extension to save web pages (whole pages, sections, or bookmarks).
I'm sure plenty of people use it differently, but I'm also quite confident (from how I've seen others describe it) that one its primary use-cases is as a big shoebox to dump everything into. You then search for that stuff through titles, tags and OCR in photos.
I use it in a fundamentally different way from Obsidian.
When I presented Obsidian to a friend, and he told me that it was just a note-taking app, I was quite shocked by [what I consider to be] such a lack of consideration. Because I really use Obsidian as my second memory [marketing definitely worked on me, it seems :)].
Anyway... I have never used EverNote (==note taking?). And, as you have read, I am reaaaaally in Obsidian (==knowledge management?).
Can any of you elaborate of the conceptual difference between both?
Evernote positioned itself as a "second brain", but turned out to become an awesome Digital Vault. You can throw anything at it and Evernote will happily ingest it. You have blazingly fast search backed by Evernote cloud services, and even have some note linking capabilities but they are rudimentary when compared to a fully fledged PKM like Obsidian, DEVONthink, or others. These newer PKM tools allow you to reflect and reason on the content you have and massage it in ways that surface new ideas and allow you to follow unexpected relationships (hence being a true second brain). This is much more harder to achieve with Evernote.
Both are valid and powerful tools but the use cases are different, maybe just because the definition of "second brain" has moved since Evernote was conceptualized on the 2000s.
If you like Obsidian, check out Logseq. Both handle plain-text Markdown, so you can use them interchangeably. Logseq also handles Org-mode files, if that’s your thing. Everything is local, but works well with cloud storage. There’s also an iOS app. It’s worth a look. (No affiliation)
TiddlyWiki has hit most of these capabilities for many years now, and is nearly unique in wrapping up all the code and data in a single unit that can be run in any regular browser, from either local storage or a remote server or storage. (It does need a killer web clipper, though...)
TiddlyWiki really is one of the cleverest apps I've ever run across, but I'm not much of a JS programmer, so it's got a bit of a learning curve if you want to hack on it. It's pretty easy to use right out of the box if you don't want to hack on it, though, and I'm giving some thought to moving most of the data I've collected in OneNote to TiddlyWiki to escape Microsoft's clutches after I've finally disentangled myself from Google... One thing I love is that TiddlyWikis I built 20 years ago (granted, they were simpler then) are still perfectly usable today.
My perfect data keeper might be something of a mashup between TiddlyWiki and a JuPyteR notebook.
Another nice thing about TiddlyWiki is that you don't actually have to be a JS programmer to extend it.
I run a local CGI server and that allows me to make all kinds of customizations in the language I want (most languages support local CGI servers). The querying capabilities of TiddlyWiki make it a nice database.
It looks clean and super good! Considering moving from Obsidian as it gets more refined.
A few more features IMO would be nice: (fuzzy) search; task management; math formula support; or just expose API for such development would be great as well.
You don't have to compare this to Evernote. I really like what you have done so far. The preview of the MD is fantastic. Feels hard enough for me to find just that! I love the use of GitHub. I'm in!
Congrats. I think there's an opportunity for a markdown-based Confluence competitor. Something that can be used by non technical people. You might want to consider that use-case/positioning rather than personal note-taking.
Major missing feature for the average user I think would be easy image/binary upload, embedding and preview.
By leveraging Github (and Gitlab please) auth it makes this usable by enterprise which is smart I think.
thanks so much for the feedback. I'm working on providing the image upload functionality. Markdown preview is currently available with the preview button in the right corner of markdown editor.
Others have mentioned about Search, In case you choose to implement it then I'd suggest a special attention towards code search. I presume formatting code with markdown is a non-issue, So implementing first class code search capabilities would be real differentiator among other notes applications and could likely fill a need-gap.
Thanks. Any number of users can use GitNoter simultaneously on any number of devices against a single repo as long as all of them has write access to the repository.
Because it does not require desktop client.
It stores the notes in git repository so you have access to all the revisions which is very useful in case you want to revert any changes
Does this support shared note-taking - I tried fast forwarding through the video tour (please consider making it shorter) and it mentioned changing repositories so in that same line of thought - is multi-repository note taking possible, each shared with different people?
Cool. If you add it, please use the \( \) and \[ \] delimiters rather than $ $ and $$ $$. The former plays better with automated processing and currencies.
Yes it does, and as I mention above, TiddlyWiki is another place to look for inspiration for a tool like this. It's been doing this sort of thing for 20 years now, and being a web-first tool, it's as open and standards-based as possible, and can be run without any server at all if you want to run it locally...
I'd like to try this but it seems that there are limited options to import from Onenote. As far as I can tell, you can either try converting to markdown with an older version of Evernote (IIRC with limitations such as text formatting being lost), or use one of a few users' hacky solutions involving Pandoc. Is there an easier/better way?
People keep saying it's missing this feature and missing that. People use note taking apps in many different ways. If an app has all the features, it wouldn't be a free open source one by a single developer. I would make it a commercial one and compete with apps like EverNote. Even EverNote has issues.
For whatever it's worth to anyone else. I just use colornote. Simple enough, I can sync it if needed and haven't had any major problems yet (though in my more recent phone it for some reason doesn't want to connect for a cloud backup with a Gmail account). It's also fairly light and actually note-oriented, without mountains of other bloat that confuses all over the place.
Hello @vivekweb2013, and thank you for creating this wonderful git based note utility.
I'd like to draw your attention to issue #59 and in the meantime I'll be posting a short Fediverse article, basically just an announcement at this point, with a much more in depth article to follow once the FOSS based git support enhancement is released.
You can add the images inside markdown using existing image url. The image upload is not implemented yet. I've noted it & I'll work on this functionality
Thanks for showing interest in the mobile app. I'm working on the android app prototype. You will see the app on play store soon.
I'm not a big fan of react-native. I've tried it earlier and the app size is huge as it has to bundle so many things to make it work on android. So I prefer java/kotlin for android app which is compact and performant than react-native.
BTW I'm also checking if https://fyne.io/ can be used. I'll love to use golang for the app :)
It's kind of amusing everyone here is talking about Evernote being amazing for dropping attachments and everything and I use it simply for text/links and hate that it wants to do all that extra stuff. :)
Are you sure about that? I tend to think that Evernote's differentiation is the vast feature diversity. IMO old software like this often continues to succeed because it can support the long-tail of use cases in a way that newer software does not.
> [Teh ElasticSearch Core Ingest Attachment Processor Plugin]: The ingest attachment plugin lets Elasticsearch extract file attachments in common formats (such as PPT, XLS, and PDF) by using the Apache text extraction library Tika.
> The source field must be a base64 encoded binary. If you do not want to incur the overhead of converting back and forth between base64, you can use the CBOR format instead of JSON and specify the field as a bytes array instead of a string representation. The processor will skip the base64 decoding then
> When extracting from images, it is also possible to chain in Tesseract, via the TesseractOCRParser, to have OCR performed on the contents of the image.
- Search results on a timeline indicating search match occurrence frequency; ability to "zoom in" or "drill down"
- "Find more like these" that prepopulates a search query form
- "Find more like these" that mutates the query pattern and displays the count for each original and mutated query along with the results; with optional optimization
Another alternative that Im using and very happy with - Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/). Also provides import from Evernote which mostly worked in my case.
yes right. I'm thinking of implementing add-ons for all popular note taking services like google, evernote, onenote etc so that the notes can be imported using gitnoter.
I was pretty disappointed when I set up a Joplin server only to discover there was no web UI. The desktop and mobile clients aren't bad, but if I can't also quickly get to the content via a browser, I'll never use it. It never even dawned on me before installing that there wouldn't be a web UI.
Second that. Used to be in Evernote, but eventually just exported the Evernote, imported to Joplin and set up their web clipper extension in Chrome. Joplin stores notes as basically markup files, so sync is pretty trivial through any file syncing service / app in the universe.
Thanks for sharing, but almost all "alternatives to Evernote" lack some of the most important (to me) features like web clipping, OCR and related notes.
The only real alternative to Evernote I've found is DEVONthink.
These days I tend to rely on archive.org (+ archive.today) and a plain link rather than web clipping tools. I just find it more useful coming back later to have access to the full fidelity of a page and its context.
It also feels appropriate to be publicly preserving parts of the web that you've found useful enough to note down. As someone at archive.org said, 'If you see something, save something.'
Edit: n.b. archive.org does honour takedown requests, though they're rare and usually somewhat predictable. cf. gwern's drastic approach of archiving all the pages he's ever visited, https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs
Hmm? I meant, instead of taking a web clipping or screenshot, I keep only a link to the page in question (and submit it to the archive if it wasn't already crawled). Though I'm still not happy with how I track what part of a page is most relevant--usually it ends up being an ad hoc mix of quoting and outlining. Related: Wasn't there an HN post about highlighting being considered harmful?
I'm also undecided still on whether to always record the original URL or the archive URL when the original page is unlikely to change. Archive links contain the entire original URL, so there's no risk there; on the other hand, it tends to be clear from the date of the note which snapshot to retrieve, so there's not really a need. But dates are close to being metadata and might be lost somehow...
I think they meant that instead of saving links to articles directly, they will save references to archive.org links. This is a protection against the host taking down the article for whatever reason.
For me, the missing feature is usually adding a note on my computer and accessing it seconds later on my phone. There are a lot of notes that would be tedious to create on my phone because of their complexity, but which I use on the go. Examples are workout plans, shopping notes, and travel notes. With Evernote, I create the note on my computer, walk out the door, and already have access on my phone.
How does that happen? Is it triggered by changes, or can I trigger it myself by flicking the page down? As long as the sync isn't determined by a schedule or hidden inside a menu, it could work for me.
As far as I know, there’s no specific button or action to trigger iCloud sync. I haven't notice issues, but I use the mobile Obsidian app much less frequently. It always seems updated to me.
This [source](https://help.noteplan.co/article/86-how-to-force-sync) says that opening the iCloud Drive on Finder will trigger sync. On the mobile Obsidian app, you can flicker the page down to download updated data, obviously it will only work if the more recent data was uploaded.
Not exactly open source, but as far as "alternatives to Evernote" goes, I've been told about Obsidian[0] (though I've not jumped in yet), which has plugins for OCR and web clipping, and considering the community, I'd be surprised if related notes aren't a thing.
The most important feature of Evernote for me is saving attachments locally so they can be modified on the client machine and then automatically synced. Most alternatives can only allow you to download the attachment and then reupload the attachment manually.
I feel compelled to mention that Zotero [1] has been around for ages, has clients for most platforms, it's as FLOSS as it gets[2], and you are free to self-host if that's something you'd like.
Can second this I love Zotero. I only use it for research papers, e-books, and notes about them and I don't use it for personal notes or saving snipits of websites and such but I could see it also working well for that.
Hey it’s nice to see some more open source apps in this space. I am working on a similar project bangle.io [1] for the past 3 years and it shares similar ideology as yours - an open source note taking web app. What are you using to interface with GitHub ? In my app I am directly using its api though I did consider looking into those git libraries for web. Definitely would like to collaborate if you are interested.
I love how more and more of us are using Git to store our notes, though in this case it's more coupled to GitHub than Git. If there is already a need to self-host this, then why not just hook into git and make this more generic?
In fact, why is a Postgres database even needed?
Please note that I'm biased. I work on [GitJournal](https://gitjournal.io) which is similar, but only mobile based.
I just pointed GitNoter at my GitJournal repo and it loaded fairly well :). I'll investigate fiddling with the settings (dates get dumped into GitNoter notes), would be nice to have them interoperate perfectly.
I'll shoot them an email and ask, and start thinking of a different name. In the case of Gitea [0], there doesn't seem to have been any response.
Thanks for bringing this up. Though I wonder how well can "Software Freedom Conservancy" claim "GitSomething" is not allowed when there are clearly so so many projects doing it. Eg - Gitolite / Gittea. Trademarks are only so good as long as they are enforced.
Been using simplenote for some time. Goal was to have just unobtrusive text notes, accessible via phone apps and browser, free, that allowed nesting bullet points (I write a lot of notes primarily using bullets)
Simplenote.com has been great for all of these usecases.
Awesome, I love the concept! I've also been working on an encrypted note taking application but it doesn't have a landing page yet. Encryption needs to catch on more!
If you _only_ want to keep textual notes--self hosted cloud style--then here's a minimalist web note solution. Just a few (Python) CGI's plus 6k HTML/CSS/JS:
This tool commits the cardinal sin of choosing a name GitSomething, where Git is only incidental to the domain that the product is concerned with (notetaking) and which is made worse by being yet another project that says "Git" where what it means is "we're using the GitHub API".
> You may not use the Marks in the following ways:
...
> In any way that indicates that Git favors one distribution, platform, product, etc. over another except where explicitly indicated in writing by Conservancy.
...
> In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy's written permission. For the avoidance of doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a product or service's use of Git code.
> Let's say as an example that it does backups. We'd prefer it not call itself GitBackups. We don't endorse it, and it's just using the name to imply association that isn't there. You can come up with similar hypotheticals: GitMail that stores mailing list archives in Git, or GitWiki that uses Git as a backing store.
What's also notable is that it conflicts with what is permitted: 'Commands like "git-foo" (so you run it as "git foo") are generally OK. This is Git's well-known extension mechanism[...]' When "git-foo" exists, we've approved "Git Foo" as a matching project name'. This combined with the fact that Git itself already ships with the "git-notes" command baked right in...
IIRC GitHub, (BitBucket), and GitLab existed before this new (license-addendum?) Trademark policy; but may be wrong. Which is to say that I don't recall there having been such a trademark policy at the time. Isn't it actually the "Old BSD License" that retains the "may not spaketh the name" clause?
(Bitcoin is also originally a LF project; in Git, like BitTorrent, and similar to BitGold only in name, for a reason. Bitcoin initially lacked a Foundation to hold trademarks, in particular.)
The choosealicense.com table of licenses in the appendix is a service of GitHub, and GitLab also donates free CI build runner minutes for Open Source projects:
https://choosealicense.com/appendix/#trademark-use :
> Trademark use
> This license explicitly states that it does NOT grant trademark rights, even though licenses without such a statement probably do not grant any implicit trademark rights.
> IIRC GitHub, (BitBucket), and GitLab existed before this new (license-addendum?) Trademark policy
Trademarks are like copyright licenses where if you haven't been given explicit permission, then you don't have any. (The difference is that you can lose your trademark if you don't actively police misuse, but that's beside the point.)
Read the cited sources. They were grandfathered in.
(GitHub is a good example of why the policy exists. They borrowed liberally from Git's brand; conflated Git and github.com in the minds of tens of thousands of people, maybe even millions, registered a trademark for "GitHub"; and began going after people who do the very type of borrowing that GitHub themselves did. They ultimately ended up causing issues for the Git project when it sought a trademark, since the GitHub trademark already existed at that point.)
And for that I need something that's lightweight on the screen. Just the text and none of the tools that take up extra space. Also, I'd have multiple notes (in separate windows) and have the app running all the time so that creating a new note is just a few clicks. (A global keyboard shortcut would be even better.)
Now the major shortcoming of Tomboy (besides the lack of real markdown support, though the bullet point handling is pretty much OK) is that it gets stuck at this lightweight level and there is no UI for the aforementioned organization. (Though it does create links semi-automatically, which is not bad, though I don't use it a lot.) So it seems that one can have either end of the spectrum, but most documents, at least for me, would start as lightweight notes and then some of them may turn out to be something more convoluted and for the long term. So it would be nice to have an app that covers both. (Unfortunately, copy-pasting from Tomboy doesn't work well, so the bullet point hierarchy gets lost. Also, it would be nice to have it based on markdown and plain text files, but it uses xml, IIRC.)