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Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

laverna.cc

131–140 of 178 posts

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#131

For notes, I use a text editor and Resilio Sync/Syncthing. It's great!

Can you please describe this setup ?

Yes, I have a folder called "pocket-cloud". Using syncthing, this folder is synced between my phone, laptop and a server at my house. Whenever I add or modify a file on any of those devices, it automatically syncs to the others. Because there are three devices, it's very uncommon to miss updates. If my laptop or phone are asleep, the server picks up the changes and passes them on.

Did I mention? The devices don't even need to be connected to the internet! They only need to be on the same LAN!

I have other synced folders, including PDFs, music and phone pictures/videos.

My girlfriend and I have a Resilio Sync folder that we use to share stuff with each other. It works flawlessly and we don't even need the internet!

Resilio Sync and Syncthing are amazing tools. If you have any capacity to fix bugs, I recommend using Syncthing (open source), so that you can potentially fix bugs :) It's becoming much more stable, but could always use the support!

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#132
post #66

I'd really love a good Evernote alternative, but the one feature that tends not to exist is full page bookmarking / web clipping. I want to be able to clip a full page easily into the program, which will also save a copy of whatever article I happen to be reading. I really wouldn't mind (and would even love) to roll my own notes system with vim/etc. But without full page clipping, it would be a problem. Another good…

The biggest reason for point 1 is point 2, IMO.

Their software pretty universally sucks - if it was just Mac it would be possible (although not reasonable) to argue that MacOS was an afterthought but IME it's terrible on Windows and iOS too and they just don't seem to care.

I've had weird syncing bugs where the content of one note appears in place of another's, or the note's content has had all the formatting ripped out so everything is on one line, which mostly fix themselves if you clear the app's cache. They keep saying they've fixed it in release notes but the issue keeps happening, and if you raise a support ticket (I've got Evernote Premium with supposedly prioritised support) you'll get useless responses that suggest they haven't properly read your ticket, days after you opened the ticket in the first place.

It's terrible, and I'd really like to stop giving them money, but I've struggled to find an alternative (tried OneNote and stopped for a reason I can't recall right now, plus the now-dead Vesper and Simplenote) despite a long line of comments below suggesting that emacs org-mode or papyrus and carrier pigeon is a viable alternative.

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#133

I've given up on using any sort of branded app for notetaking. At best it's open source and the maintainers will lose interest in a few years. When you write things down, you're investing in your future. It's silly to use software that isn't making that same investment. After trying Evernote, wikis, org-mode, and essentially everything else I could find, I gave up and tried building my own system for notes. Plain tim…

I like your effort and all but honestly the last thing I want to do on a phone is to use a command line on it. It's just not cut out for the job

Command line isn't really necessary. I have a similar setup (gollum wiki on Dropbox) and I only need a text editor to edit files, and there's tons of mobile text editors that hook up with Dropbox.

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

org-mode's format sucks, is only partially supported outside of Emacs, and is on its way out. org-mode is only any good if you're using the full power of it (tasks, agenda, etc), which is buying into a system that's soon going away.

> Emacs, and is on its way out Being active on the Emacs and Org mode mailing lists, and other forums, I can say with confidence that this is not true. In fact, I am seeing active development in both Emacs and Org; not just bug fixes, but frequent additions of new features. > org-mode is only any good if you're using the full power of it (tasks, agenda, etc), which is buying into Org markup is much more powerful than…

(I have a customization built on top of that.. instead of specifying the line numbers, I can specify the start and end regexp for the lines containing my snippet).

This is awesome. Is this available anywhere? I'd like to use it.

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#135
post #61

I've given up on using any sort of branded app for notetaking. At best it's open source and the maintainers will lose interest in a few years. When you write things down, you're investing in your future. It's silly to use software that isn't making that same investment. After trying Evernote, wikis, org-mode, and essentially everything else I could find, I gave up and tried building my own system for notes. Plain tim…

For those who want a very similar setup but don't mind the risk of a vim-plugin going unmaintained, I can highly recommend vimwiki. Its a very simple markdown based wiki all within vim. A few features that I find particularly good: - a 'diary' function that allows you to make a page per day. Vimwiki then produces an index page of all diary entries. - you can go to your wiki anytime from within vim with a command ( ww…

+1 for vimwiki, though I mostly use it for the diary shortcut (ww).

I also use it in conjunction with gollum, which works nicely (gives search, live editing, etc).

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#136
post #66

I'd really love a good Evernote alternative, but the one feature that tends not to exist is full page bookmarking / web clipping. I want to be able to clip a full page easily into the program, which will also save a copy of whatever article I happen to be reading. I really wouldn't mind (and would even love) to roll my own notes system with vim/etc. But without full page clipping, it would be a problem. Another good…

I couldn't agree more. I am using a different note taking app beside Evernote because I just can't stand the interface and usability of their Mac and iOS apps. But their OCR feature is by far the best on the market so I have to keep using it. As far as I can tell, Evernote is in a league of its own when it comes to OCR. They make it really easy to read physical books with that feature. (I like to keep notes of the books I'm reading and I hate to sully actual pages.)

I really want them to succeed, but I also recognize they will never make an app that I consider to be perfect or even good. They'd have to get rid of like 50 features, which is a hard thing to do by itself but also not in their MO.

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emacs, and is on its way out Being active on the Emacs and Org mode mailing lists, and other forums, I can say with confidence that this is not true. In fact, I am seeing active development in both Emacs and Org; not just bug fixes, but frequent additions of new features. > org-mode is only any good if you're using the full power of it (tasks, agenda, etc), which is buying into Org markup is much more powerful than…

(I have a customization built on top of that.. instead of specifying the line numbers, I can specify the start and end regexp for the lines containing my snippet). This is awesome. Is this available anywhere? I'd like to use it.

Sure, here it is: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/.emacs.d/blob/master/elisp/or...

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to do this, but I missed a lot of the convenient features and flexibility of OneNote too much and made my way back to it. OneNote is proprietary, with a proprietary file format, but at least it's "self hosted" (your notes live in concrete files you control, not in a service), and it's got a lot of nice features that make it a joy to use.

I once tried to use one note for taking notes for work (1:1s, etc.) on a surface pro 4, and found that unless you go to great lengths, OneNote does everything it can to sync your notes to OneDrive. Even after turning off sync for specific books, those books ended up in OneDrive. In the end, I had to uninstall onedrive, disable syncing globally, and then login to OneDrive to delete the previously synced copies. So use…

That sounds like the free version of OneNote that comes with Windows 10. The "full-fat" desktop version that comes with Office ("OneNote 2016") is much more flexible in this regard, and has a more powerful interface.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-s-the-differen...

That said, the OneDrive integration is something I like about it; my notes aren't very useful to me unless they're cloud-synced.

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#139
post #73

Just FYI, more than one year has passed since the last release. The commit frequency has declined significantly. I use it, but I am not sure if I would recommend it in its current state. It does it's job and I like it, but the future is uncertain.

A bit misleading. The maintainers have been working on large experimental features like a self-hosted "signaling server" which helps sync notes without storing any note data on it, and without relying on third-party hosting like Dropbox [1].

Also if you look at the dev branch [2], they have been making sweeping changes to the codebase; most recently it appears they have been removing "old" JavaScript libraries like Bower, presumably to move everything to an NPM setup.

[1]: https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/778

[2]: https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/commits/dev

Re: Laverna – A Markdown note-taking app focused on privacy

#140
post #50
post #46

There are so many note taking apps and yet I still can't find one I like. My requirements are simple: - Markdown - cross platform with sync - tags I have settled on SimpleNote for now, but I'm not completely happy. It's mac app is low quality and doesn't have markdown, It's open source but they ignore most of the issues. Bear Notes looks cool but wasn't cross platform. I am still looking. If this thing had phone apps…

Glad you like SimpleNote. How much time or money have you donated to it to get your desired feature set up to snuff?

Simplenote takes donations? I thought Automattic bought it.
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