Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Any good open-source self-hosted evernote alternatives?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 79 posts

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

#21

Post by sander »

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've asked myself for a long time why Evernote even has users and eventually landed on the conclusion that Evernote is almost like a file system. You can easily create notes, which can contain more or less everything, which is more easy than creating various sorts of files in folders to store your stuff. The "more or less everything" part, is why the whole thing is such a big mess, imho.

What I'd like is an Evernote with less possibilities and perhaps sections in each note. E.g.: - plain text (or up to Google docs kind of formatting) - a photo section where I can dump some pics without them showing on ridiculous full screen resolution. - a URL (which maybe shows a small screenshot of the webpage, or even loads a copy of the text)

To me it's about about storing/remembering stuff I care about in a simple and portable way.

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

#22

Post by hepcatjk »

Are the any with the amazing webclipper. I tried onenote but it takes odd images and does not clip out the junk like Evernote. Yes there are standalone clippers but I like having the functionality of evernotes...and the only the reason why I stick with it. The second feature is the screenshot/editor...again greenshot, pickpick are out there but the fact these two features are 'built in' makes Evernote far superior. I would love an open source alternative that integrated both features....

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

#23

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#24

Post by detaro »

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…

What I'd like:

Something wiki like that works good with snippets (e.g. show all snippets with a particular tag on one page relatively compact, not just a list of wikipages where you have to click at each one). TiddlyWiki comes closest from all I've seen so far.

Good way of inserting/attaching random files.

quick way to add stuff to tags/categories (hierarchical tags maybe?)

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

#25

Post by kasabali »

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…

My biggest concern with tools in this domain is UI: there must be a native desktop GUI. Period. It must allow creating new notes, taking screenshots etc. by global keyboard shortcuts and systray icons etc. Onenote is top notch in this regard and it's sad there is no alternative in linux.

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

#26

Post by mixedmath »

npaquin wrote: post #20
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.

What went wrong? And what did you end up using instead, and how did it handle the previous what went wrong better?

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

#27

Post by driverdan »

npaquin wrote: post #20
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.

Can you go into more depth? Was it because of the number of users?

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

#28

Post by tibbetts »

fotcorn wrote: post #17
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 tha…

Agree so much. Beyond the their-server and sync errors, the biggest missing feature of Evernote is task outlines as good as workflowy.

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

#29

Post by jimktrains2 »

rainmaking wrote: post #5

I use a git repository with text files and Terminal IDE to git on android.

Have you used evernote? My use cases involve saving pictures and documents to it (and having them be searchable), as well as being able to share specific things with specific people.

Additionally, having everything available on my phone is extremely useful.

A simple git repo doesn't suffice for that.

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

#30

Post by webwanderings »

fotcorn wrote: post #17
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 tha…

If Workflowy gets a bookmarklet, I'd use it more often. It is no nonsense honest service in its space.
Post reply on HN