Tired of note-taking apps

My main complaint is that markdown hyperlinks are just extremely ugly to look at in text form, so I wish there was a nice editor or extension that supports hyperlinks. I've stuck with Sublime Text for the note-taking simply because it loads so fast and the keyboard shortcuts are great, but open to alternative editors (ideally open source). Or maybe there's a good Markdown extension for Sublime that I'm not aware of.

It is essentially virtual paper, it replaces a notebook, no more, no less.

But the thing it has that I've seen nowhere else is that it is vector based, with an unlimited size canevas and high zoom (10%-1000%).

It sounds so obvious as a feature. I mean, if you have a stylus, besides drawing, taking notes is the most obvious thing you can do with it. And what can a screen do and paper cannot? Scrolling and zooming. And because smartphones are powerful computers and we have good algorithms, there is no reason to limit canevas size artificially.

So I went in and looked at the most popular note taking apps, thinking: these are made by many-million dollar companies they must have that. And no. All I found was cloud-synchronized text files. None took advantage of the drawing capabilities of smartphones, or they did it in a half-assed way. The S-Note app (I have a Galaxy Note 4) is nice, but it is bitmap and with a limited canevas size, why? Can't Samsung do better?

Only one app did it right and that's Squid (previously Papyrus). And it is a little known one compared to the likes of Evernote. It isn't even mentioned in the article even though it is the closest thing to the "writing things down" solution it recommends, so I suspect the author doesn't know its existence. Otherwise I think he would have mentioned it, even if it is just to talk about how it doesn't fit his needs.

It's also irritating to have bunches of notes in Apple's Notes app, in Confluence, in Notion, in Google Docs and goodness knows where else.

The movement to cloud has driven a coach and horses through the whole reasoning behind the EU/US push to get Microsoft to be more open and not hold institutions to ransom with data locked within a proprietary vendor's platform:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2618153/how-microsoft-was-...

Now we've gone full tilt towards a world of proprietary clouds where we don't even have custody of our own data and instead entrust it to a MongoDB cluster somewhere managed by the latest hot, new note taking startup.

Where are the regulators when you need them to ensure we can get our data in and out of these platforms?

As for me, I find vim or Sublime and Markdown synced via Dropbox work tolerably well. I keep toying with the idea of writing an open source Markdown syncing solution with open source clients for note taking...

That aside the proprietary nature of the cloud and especially how it pertains to note taking (and todo apps) is a real step backwards. The regulators who forced Microsoft to submit in the past would be gnashing their teeth at the situation we have today.

It has almost no features beyond a daily page and a term cloud (basically, an index of terms where the most frequent terms have bigger fonts).

I use some informal markdown syntax, in the sense that i mostly recognize visually.