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Any good open-source self-hosted evernote alternatives?

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Re: Any good open-source self-hosted evernote alternatives?

#11

Post by lorddoig »

I've been prototyping in this space for a while now - trying to scratch my own itch, as it were - and seeing as this is climbing the front page I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask HN: what exactly is it you want from this kind of application? I dislike Evernote because of it's lack of structure, dumb text with a few bells and whistles added doesn't work for me.

Would love to hear any and all suggestions: personal wiki, deeply structured personal knowledge graph, UI concerns...anything! I'm not saying anything will come of it for sure, and doing it open-source wasn't my plan, but I'd be very grateful for any input.

Re: Any good open-source self-hosted evernote alternatives?

#14

Post by hrktb »

lorddoig wrote: post #11

I've been prototyping in this space for a while now - trying to scratch my own itch, as it were - and seeing as this is climbing the front page I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask HN: what exactly is it you want from this kind of application? I dislike Evernote because of it's lack of structure, dumb text with a few bells and whistles added doesn't work for me. Would love to hear any and all suggestions: person…

I tried evernote for a while, but the main road block was the lack of good import/export/sync features.

If it's just for lightweight note taking, text apps using dropbox as a backend allow more versatility.

If I'm going to enter important information or thing I want to keep around a long time, I'll need to be able to do backups, move the data around and batch process if needed.

Regarding data management, Evernote feels more like a pretty walled garden than an efficient warehouse. Right now I feel a folder and files vased approach with a dropbox like sync service is the sweet spot, and I use a set of apps like tagspaces or simplenote on top of that to ease specific use cases like text editing, browsing or searching.

Re: Any good open-source self-hosted evernote alternatives?

#17

Post by fotcorn »

lorddoig wrote: post #11

I've been prototyping in this space for a while now - trying to scratch my own itch, as it were - and seeing as this is climbing the front page I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask HN: what exactly is it you want from this kind of application? I dislike Evernote because of it's lack of structure, dumb text with a few bells and whistles added doesn't work for me. Would love to hear any and all suggestions: person…

I'd like a combination of Evernote and Workflowy. Workflowy is an editable tree of information, but every branch/leave is only one line of text.

Screenshot: http://stillblondeafteralltheseyears.com/wp-content/uploads/...

Every branch of the tree should be a Evernote-style multi line note with text formatting functionality. The tree would be a file system like structure, but the Workflowy UI feels much less clunky than Google Drive/Dropbox or similar services. Workflowy supports marking nodes as completed, so a service like this could even work as task management system.

Re: Any good open-source self-hosted evernote alternatives?

#20

Post by npaquin »

CyberShadow wrote: post #15

I use ownCloud and plain old text editor. ownCloud has an Android client (it's not free on Google Play but you can build it from source code yourself), and Android text editors are easy to find.

Don't. Use. OwnCloud. We tried rolling it out at a small (80) employee company and it ended up being a nightmare.
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