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FSNotes: Notes manager for macOS and iOS – native, open source

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Re: FSNotes: Notes manager for macOS and iOS – native, open source

#21

Post by jlundberg »

blondin wrote: post #5
coldtea wrote: post #3

FSNotes is amazing. It's what I've settled on, not liking the lock-in (bad export options) of Notes.app, paying for increasingly crappier Evernote (I used in the past), cloud-sync-based note apps, very barebones FOSS apps, half-arsed stuff like Agenda, and Electron crap.

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?

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.

Re: FSNotes: Notes manager for macOS and iOS – native, open source

#22

Post by ydant »

technological wrote: post #18
blondin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: FSNotes: Notes manager for macOS and iOS – native, open source

#23

Post by Matthias1 »

blondin wrote: post #5
coldtea wrote: post #3

FSNotes is amazing. It's what I've settled on, not liking the lock-in (bad export options) of Notes.app, paying for increasingly crappier Evernote (I used in the past), cloud-sync-based note apps, very barebones FOSS apps, half-arsed stuff like Agenda, and Electron crap.

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.

Re: FSNotes: Notes manager for macOS and iOS – native, open source

#25

Post by simonw »

The thing I want most from a notes app is a web API that lets me programmatically fetch my notes data.

Evernote's public API uses Thrift, which is really weird. Usually it takes me a couple of minutes to start getting data out of a web API - in Evernote's case I gave up after an hour.

Re: FSNotes: Notes manager for macOS and iOS – native, open source

#26

Post by ydant »

utunbu wrote: post #17
Keverw wrote: post #16

So funny this pops up. Last few days I've been wanting a new notes app that wasn't using some database and was files based, plus I feel like other notes app rich text copying and pasting notes can be a mess. Plus a bit unorganized so wanted a new notes app and just copy things over as I need. This one looks pretty prefect for my wants. I also like how it has both folders and hash tags too instead of being forced to p…

Just curious if you had tried Obsidian ( https://obsidian.md )?

Obsidian really is a great choice if you are looking for Markdown. Windows, Linux, Mac, Android/iOS mobile apps soon. It's polished, fast, and all around a great experience. Flexible inter-note linking (wiki style), visualization, backlink discovery, handles images and embedded documents well. All around a good product.

I'm still looking for something with a cross-platform GUI that I like as much as I liked Obsidian.md - but with the same sort of arbitrarily nested hierarchy (with TODOs and the like at any level) and the ability to adhoc rearrange my notes like org-mode provides. The Emacs/org-mode level of customization would be nice, too.

Trilium Notes ( https://github.com/zadam/trilium ) was also a good contendor, but not having a text-content-first focus made for some frustrating experiences of data corruption, and testing data export of my initial trial run was messy as a consequence as well.

Re: FSNotes: Notes manager for macOS and iOS – native, open source

#27

Post by ydant »

ghostpepper wrote: post #7

Coincidentally I discovered another iOS app for note-taking this week called Beorg, which leverages the emacs + org mode format so I can easily sync between iOS and Linux. This one looks nice too though; always good to see open source apps for Mac and iOS. I wonder how similar the markdown formats are.

And on the Android side, Orgzly http://www.orgzly.com/

I'm finding that syncing between Emacs/org-mode and my phone has been nothing but problems, though. Sync conflicts abound. I'm not sure how much of that is my Emacs config, Syncthing on Android, or Orgzly.

Any ideas on avoiding that? How are you syncing with Beorg?

Re: FSNotes: Notes manager for macOS and iOS – native, open source

#29

Post by coldtea »

blondin wrote: post #5
coldtea wrote: post #3

FSNotes is amazing. It's what I've settled on, not liking the lock-in (bad export options) of Notes.app, paying for increasingly crappier Evernote (I used in the past), cloud-sync-based note apps, very barebones FOSS apps, half-arsed stuff like Agenda, and Electron crap.

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 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.

Re: FSNotes: Notes manager for macOS and iOS – native, open source

#30

Post by dinkleberg »

utunbu wrote: post #20

I've jumped between note-taking Apps, Evernote, Bear, Typora, Notion, Obsidian, ..., you name it. Finally settled down with Obsidian as I can manage note files directly such as using Syncthing for backing up and syncing. This one does seem interesting and possible to integrate into my workflow, gotta give it a try.

I'm in a similar spot, recently started using Obsidian and am enjoying it. It's far from perfect, but it is better than the others imo. And the fact that it is all markdown based means no lock-in which is fantastic.
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