• skepticalifornia@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I switched to Joplin a few years ago from Evernote and haven’t looked back. Take control of your own notes - Joplin is open source and has clients for every platform, and imports notebooks from Evernote.

    • douglasg14b@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Or Obsidian? Take actual control over them including rendering if you want to customize that.

      Maybe it’s a different use case 🤔

      • axum@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Obsidian is closed source, so once the company dies, no one can modify the app. Joplin on the other hand is open source.

        • astrionic@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          What I really like about Obsidian is that it stores your notes as plain text/markdown files on your computer. So you always have access to them, even without Obsidian itself. Markdown is also a fairly common format, so it shouldn’t be too hard to move them somewhere else later.

          But your concerns are still valid and I generally also prefer free open source software.

        • hascat@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          The app may be closed-source, but the data is all markdown, which should be easy to move to other apps.

          • Mummelpuffin@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            At some point I realized that the solution to this little problem is Emacs org-mode. It’s just sitting there waiting for people to use it.

            • wim@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 year ago

              I’m a l former emacs user of ~10 years and I could never get used to org mode, so it’s definitely not for “normal” people.

              Additionally, in modern times being emacs bound means no decent mobile client, no web interface, and mandatory roll-your-own sync and backup.

              There’s a few friends I know who swear by org mode up and down, but it’s a considerable effort for most people to use it.

      • skepticalifornia@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Haven’t tried Obsidian, but have heard good things about it. I have about 12,000 notes and continue to be impressed with Joplin’s ability to handle that with no issues.

        • douglasg14b@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Obsidians really good with lots of notes and linking them together as well as adding metadata to them.

          It really depends on your use case. The plug-in ecosystem is also quite rich.

      • Overzeetop@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Different use cases, indeed. All I need is plaintext, images, and in-line pdf rendering. No audio, no video, no LaTeX, not even italics or bold.

        Now, to be completely fair, while Joplin is great for simple notes, it’s data entry modes are weird AF. I assume, in a programmers mind, the operation is normal for an IDE as it can’t/won’t render links/objects in line with editing. You either get a markup-only window that’s editable, a rendered window that is read only, or lose half your screen to a split-view version. These options are selected via two, separate, unlabeled, non-status-indicating toggle buttons which cycle through 2 and 3 versions if the view.

        Aside from that, it seems nice.

  • Exec@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    I forgot Evernote was still a thing. Used it for a short while back in 2012 when there were not many decent note taking apps.

      • Nyla Smokeyface@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        God I love Obsidian. Especially the community around it.

        Obsidian honestly spoiled me with the fact that my vault is literally just a folder of markdown files.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I’ve been using Zim, because I wanted something that was completely brain-dead simple and also completely not in any sort of “cloud.” It’s entirely local to my hard drive. It stores its files as a folder of markdown files too.

          How non-cloudy is Obsidian? I might take a look at that.

          • Nyla Smokeyface@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            It’s completely local unless you specifically opt into cloud options. There is Obsidian Sync but that’s completely optional, and your files are still on the computer. I know some people make their vaults Google Drive folders, which, again, is something you have to deliberately do.

          • theory@social.fossware.space
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            1 year ago

            100% non-cloud. There are sync options but they are completely optional. No log-in required unless you use the cloud features.

        • nhgeek@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          LogSeq

          I never heard of it until now. I’m a veteran of trying out and dumping so many note taking solutions. I’m certain to try this one, too! Maybe I’ll finally find The One.

          • Matt@netmonkey.tech
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            1 year ago

            It’s a timeline approach. So, I just enter notes for each day. I’ve developed a habit of just putting things down when I need, including random stuff, links to Slack conversations, etc. I then use tags to bind things together, and there are a couple of plugins in use.

            • nhgeek@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              I installed it and took a quick look. It reminds me of Obsidian’s approach. I got excited about that, too, but I found it very burdensome to use in practice. What I need is a sort of life log that grabs a lot of stuff quietly from integrations and that I can then further augment (for things like meeting notes). The problem with all of these graph approaches (for me) is that they become burdensome to manage.

        • FriendlyFusion@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Just started using Logseq and it has been a game changer. All other note apps I‘be used become black holes…notes go in and are never seen again. I can actually find things now with logseq. It’s helping with brain fog and getting my shit together. Can’t recommend it enough

        • simple@lemmy.mywire.xyz
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          1 year ago

          So like LogSeq, Obsidian is a free note taking application which stores notes in Markdown format locally on your PC. Unlike LogSeq however, it is not open source and is designed more for long form text (LogSeq is more bullet points).

          You can check out Obsidian here

        • sub_o@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Obsidian.md, you need to import some community plugins to make it better (e.g. Advanced Tables, Multi Column, etc). But it’s quite fast and powerful, it doesn’t look as pretty as, say Notion, though. I love using it, you can search on youtube for some samples / tutorials, it’s quite easy to use though.

      • penis@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I love Obsidian but haven’t heard of LogSeq, do you use both but for different things?

        • simple@lemmy.mywire.xyz
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          1 year ago

          They are very similar. The main differences are:

          • LogSeq uses bullet points. Obsidian is just pure markdown
          • LogSeq is open source. Obsidian is closed source
          • LogSeq has a predefined structure to it (folders). Obsidian allows you to have whatever folders you want

          Personally, I use LogSeq for my day to day work. Primarily because I prefer the bullet point approach when taking notes. But some people would prefer writing long continuous text with Obsidian.

          So to each their own. If you’re interested, try both (they’re both using markdown, so you can transfer between the two). I went back and forth a few times before settling with LogSeq

    • ParanoidPizzas@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      After leaving Evernote way back when I was in the wilderness for a while. Finally landed on notesnook, haven’t gone back since.

      • Dane@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Fellow Notesnook user, here. I’m enjoying it. It’s what Evernote should have been.

  • FriendlyFusion@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Years ago I was a paid Evernote user. The app kept displaying ads on startup trying to get me to pay even more for the “higher tier”. Right then and there I knew the company was dead.

    • ranandtoldthat@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Not only that, but they kept adding features and telling me about it. I was paying for their existing features, and yet half the time I would go to add a note and by the time I clicked through their “we did something you probably don’t care about” popups, I’d forget what I wanted to note.

  • Jim P.@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    There is a recent thread discussing Evernote alternatives at https://beehaw.org/post/986939

    Personally I exported my notes from Evernote, imported them to Joplin, and setup Syncthing to handle synchronization of note content between my devices. Not exactly a trivial setup but not difficult either. Also fully open source and much more secure.

    • Overzeetop@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      They had my inertia. I moved from free to $25/yr. Then watched as it crept up to $60/yr with basically zero improvements. I bailed at $120/yr for a terrible transition to a new db style that could only be updated in real time as you opened each note (taking 3-45 seconds per note to update) and a promised AI component for which I have no use.

      • Jim P.@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Inertia was carrying me as well. First it was $35 for premium, then $70 for several years, and then last month they announced it was going up to $130 and that’s when I bailed.

        At $70 it wasn’t too bad and I stayed the last year or so also because they actually published a native Linux app that worked on par with the Windows and macOS app. I won’t say it worked great because since they moved it all to Electron or whatever it’s been slow/clunky all around. But at least it was available and consistent.

  • megsmagik@feddit.it
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    1 year ago

    I gave my resume to Bending Spoons and they didn’t hire me, so fuck them And fuck them for the layoffs, they have people working from home so relocating seems like an excuse

  • macstainless@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Once Apple overhauled Notes a few years ago AND offered a way to import from Evernote, I never looked back. For anyone in Apple’s ecosystem Notes is one of the best (and completely free or cheap on any iCloud+ plan).

    • chaotic_goody@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      One thing that Evernote got right is that it made it easy to export your content. I really appreciate that about the service. Leaving Apple Notes is not as easy.

      • macstainless@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        From what I remember, you do a full Evernote export and then in Notes on the Mac you do “File --> Import” and you point it to the exported file. I only did it once and many years ago so the process may be different now.

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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    1 year ago

    Surprised they still had all that programmers for something that’s still stuck in the year 2014

  • doctor_han@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Everyone here are so cool with fancy open source alterantives. I’ve been basic and been using Notion for all my med school notes and beyond and while it’s been mostly great the few episodes of outages have been so frustrating. Wish there were some easy to use solutions with all the text formatting options Notion has.

      • Mummelpuffin@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        As much as I love obsidian, I’ve been moving on to Emacs org-mode! I like that Obsidian notes are just text files but with org-mode I get that and it’s Emacs which is open-source, thirty years old and literally never going to die. I can export org-mode files to PDFs or even turn them into HTML pages.

      • doctor_han@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I made the mistake of having bunch of columns, annotated images with captions, and tables everywhere that obsidian’s addons couldn’t really replicate the experience. For prep work around writing research papers, it’s probably easier to use than notion for sure.

  • Pepper@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I hadn’t heard about Evernote in years. Honestly thought they’d gone under years ago.