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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?

#61
This may not be completely acceptable, but I swear by Mempad (http://www.horstmuc.de/wmem.htm). It's not open source, but that isn't a huge deal breaker for me, since it can import/export human readable text files very easily, and its file format is really simple. If I ever needed to convert my thousands upon thousands of notes to a different format, I could probably write a program to do it an hour, and most of my work would be writing the new format. Most of the open-source programs I looked at didn't make getting to my data that easy. (Plus, since I use speech recognition for everything, I can't get picky about source availability. Anything that uses non-native widgets is almost entirely unusable for me, so I can't use anything that uses GTK or Qt. That rules out like 80% of open-source.)

It only supports plaintext, which might be a deal breaker, but I've gotten used to it. I rarely find myself needing formatting, and it has some functions to get around that, like the ability to drag arbitrary URLs and files into the text box and have them turn into clickable links. If I ever need to have images in my stuff, I usually just have links like that in my text.

That might make working with the notes a bit awkward on Android, though. Honestly, I wouldn't know. I rarely edit my notes on the go. If I need to look at my notes when I'm not using my computer, I usually export a small section of my file and physically print it out.

The program's so small I just keep it and all the files it generates in my Dropbox. With that setup, I pretty much get all the benefits of Evernote I'd need without worrying about losing notes or proprietary file formats or whatever. It's kind of weird, but I would really recommend giving it a shot.

(Among other things, I wrote this entire post in it. :p )

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

#62
post #6

I started with onenote but it shot my notebook. I never got on with evernote. I tried a number of open source ones but settled on google keep for quick notes and google docs for longer ones. Mainly because they have good sharing and concurrency support and I already use apps because I'm lazy and a cheap ass. I have a rather shonky python script that exports the docs nightly in case google drive dies. That's good enou…

> shonky

Imma gonna take that there word.

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

#63
post #48
post #38

Amazed no one has mentioned Emacs' org-mode yet. Nothing I've ever tried comes close to the flexibility and usefulness of org-mode in Emacs. Combined w/ MobileOrg sync and the MobileOrg app, it serves all of my note-taking needs quite well. It's much more than dumb text, too, like Evernote. Structured documents with headers, markdown-like formatting, links, fast-capture templates for stray thoughts, an Agenda system…

It looks like there is an org-mode for vim too: https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode

Far from as good and complete, and will never be as good and complete given the limitations of scripting vim. Vim aficionados (like me) can use evil-mode in Emacs, to gain access to org-mode and keep the use of their existing editing knowledge.

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

#64
post #38

Amazed no one has mentioned Emacs' org-mode yet. Nothing I've ever tried comes close to the flexibility and usefulness of org-mode in Emacs. Combined w/ MobileOrg sync and the MobileOrg app, it serves all of my note-taking needs quite well. It's much more than dumb text, too, like Evernote. Structured documents with headers, markdown-like formatting, links, fast-capture templates for stray thoughts, an Agenda system…

What protocol does org-mode use for syncing with mobile devices, can it be adapted to use WebDAV? An open ecosystem of human-signal-capture apps will improve security of the future, i.e. events that have not yet happened. The past is already well monitored and recorded. See "The Adjustment Bureau" for exploration of the topic. If apps use a mature sync protocol (e.g. WebDAV, CalDAV), they can collectively debug inter…

MobileOrg (the extension to org-mode in Emacs) requires an index.org file that points at the org files you want to export. You configure it to dump out anything from that index to a specified directory.

You then use something to sync that file tree to any of your devices. I used BTSync for a bit but found it annoying and I now use Google Drive with a GDrive syncing client on my phone so that the mobile-org Android app is always up-to-date.

It's bi-directional and they use a checksum matching scheme and some import tooling that allows you to suck in changes to those index files from other clients.

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

#65
post #38

Amazed no one has mentioned Emacs' org-mode yet. Nothing I've ever tried comes close to the flexibility and usefulness of org-mode in Emacs. Combined w/ MobileOrg sync and the MobileOrg app, it serves all of my note-taking needs quite well. It's much more than dumb text, too, like Evernote. Structured documents with headers, markdown-like formatting, links, fast-capture templates for stray thoughts, an Agenda system…

Org-mode really is vastly more functional than other solutions, with the added benefit that you can learn and use as much or as little as you want and not be bothered by what isn't useful. The other thing I try to call out about org-mode is that there is nothing else that is likely to be around and useful in 20 years.

Right and the ability to customize every nuance of it w/ a tiny bit of Emacs Lisp (or not, that's not required) has been great.

For example I didn't quite like how org-drill, a spaced repetition extension for org-mode, handled flash-card grouping and drill selection at run-time so I completely customized it with my own group selection interface.

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

#66
post #38

Amazed no one has mentioned Emacs' org-mode yet. Nothing I've ever tried comes close to the flexibility and usefulness of org-mode in Emacs. Combined w/ MobileOrg sync and the MobileOrg app, it serves all of my note-taking needs quite well. It's much more than dumb text, too, like Evernote. Structured documents with headers, markdown-like formatting, links, fast-capture templates for stray thoughts, an Agenda system…

How is MobileOrg's search? I tried switching from Evernote on all my devices to synced text files, but I found that on my phone I really needed a text/file editor/browser that searched document contents rather than just title. Evernote does this, but I couldn't find anything else that came close.

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

#67
post #21

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…

[deleted]

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

#68

I've looked hard and tried lots of packages as well as rolling my own. Frankly, Evernote has been at it for 7 years and spent $225M on the problem, and they have done a pretty damn great job at it. I've asked myself WHY do I want to host my own data. My innermost thoughts are hard to imagine being broadcast to the NSA, Chinese government, and any ambitious cracker... but what I write about I will eventually publish a…

Instead of a new tool, most people just need a new system. GTD is not anymore in fashion but it is the most efficient system I ever used. If you ever decide to try GTD have a look on this ultra simple implementation:

https://github.com/we-build-dreams/hamster-gtd

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

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not use OwnCloud if the files you are storing are important. There is a discussion elsewhere on the page with an explanation. TL;DR It eats your files.

As I am using it, I am a little Bit scared right now. Could you point me to said discussion? Thanks a lot in advance. [Edit] OK, I look es around and Asket the mighty Google. Looks like the problem happens when updating. Good to know. Thanks for the hint.

Hey, sorry, I just saw your request. There's another OwnCloud discussion here on this page (just search). But we had our problem over the span of about seven months and not at all when updating. We had everything from entire directories go missing, down to individual single-page documents. It took us a couple of months to figure out what was going on, and the tension in our office was extraordinarily high as you can imagine (people becoming paranoid about the true story of what happened to their documents). Finally when we discovered that OwnCloud does this, the only solution offered was to back up the files with another application (so why even use OwnCloud in the first place??).
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