Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work • Hacker News Board

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#151

Post by scpedicini » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:22 AM UTC

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #132

thecodrr wrote: post #80

Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits. With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don't mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but: 1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can't even try out many of their editors. 2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am…

I have tried many note-taking apps. From Evernote to Google Keep to OneNote to Standard notes yo plain old notepad to Zotero to Word and really honestly many more. If you say this list is all over the place, then that is because requirements vary depending on purpose, not the other way around. After almost a decade of experimenting, I have come to realise that the best note-taking tool by far is org-mode. It is free,…

I read the Wikipedia entry for it but it didn't really shed a lot of light on these types of questions:

1. Can I embed images and more specifically can I embed animated GIF files?

2. Can I embed MP3s and play them within the note?

3. Does it support rich text editor functionality including the ability to insert tables easily from programs like Microsoft excel?

4. Can I use multiple fonts in the same individual note including monospaced ones and broad support for Unicode?

5. Can I easily sync and edit the data on my iPad, then on my android phone without having to worry about where the data is stored?

6. Will it automatically OCR embedded images and allow me to do text searches across my entire set of notes based on that text?

If the answer to most of these questions is no, then it doesn't sound like org-note is the best note taking editor as you claim, it just sounds like it's the best editor for your specific set of criteria which does not apply to all notetakers. And that's the problem with trying to narrow down the best note editing tool, it's such a broad area that every notetaker will have their own idiosyncratic needs and priorities.

As for me, I have also experimented with a great deal of note editing utilities and the only one that has reasonably met most of my requirements is Evernote.

EDIT: of course if the answer is yes, then I may just have a new favorite note editor.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#152

Post by bngybmgrglflps » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:29 AM UTC

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #132

thecodrr wrote: post #80

Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits. With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don't mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but: 1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can't even try out many of their editors. 2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am…

I have tried many note-taking apps. From Evernote to Google Keep to OneNote to Standard notes yo plain old notepad to Zotero to Word and really honestly many more. If you say this list is all over the place, then that is because requirements vary depending on purpose, not the other way around. After almost a decade of experimenting, I have come to realise that the best note-taking tool by far is org-mode. It is free,…

"Encrypt, store, share [files] on your own terms" is elegantly handled by (Rob Pike's) Upspin.

Practically: upspinfs fusermounts a cloud storage bucket. (TCO: $0.01/GB/mo.) Transparent public-key crypto. Sharing is built into the protocol. Sane defaults.

https://upspin.io/doc/faq.md

https://youtu.be/ENLWEfi0Tkg

Building notes on top feels almost too straightforward to monetize. (For that matter: 1password, any number of small-scale B2C things, ...)

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#153

Post by windthrown » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:37 AM UTC

aryehof wrote: post #142

Does Standard Notes require a network connection to store data, or is data stored locally and synced when a network connection is available? I wonder how important (offline) local first storage of data is these days to users of these types of apps?

It is stored locally (encrypted) and then synced when a connection is available.

Personally, I write enough notes on my phone in situations without an internet connection (airplane travel, subway commuting etc) that losing local storage would be a deal-breaker for me.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#154

Post by bebna » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:37 AM UTC

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #132

thecodrr wrote: post #80

Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits. With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don't mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but: 1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can't even try out many of their editors. 2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am…

I have tried many note-taking apps. From Evernote to Google Keep to OneNote to Standard notes yo plain old notepad to Zotero to Word and really honestly many more. If you say this list is all over the place, then that is because requirements vary depending on purpose, not the other way around. After almost a decade of experimenting, I have come to realise that the best note-taking tool by far is org-mode. It is free,…

like u said notes are really personal. I personally prefer paper the most, but if its about electronic notes, I settled with a folder that gets synced with syncthing to all devices and also got git for easy offsite backups with push. (yeah, syncthing does that too, but I like to have a history in my backups, to allow for single file and state restores)

In this folder I categorise with subfolders and use simple markdown files to write down stuff and todo.txt for when I need tasklists. A dedicated file in root is used for collecting random stuff before there get sorted and another to collect all links that I wanna bookmark.

This works very well on different types of devices at the same time. On android Markor is a good editor for it, on desktop/macs I recommend typora for the nice interface and obsidian.md for the nice navigation between files, if you don't have already have setup a favourite editor. Also works well with vim/emacs/vscode or anything else that handles plain text files.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#155

Post by YuukiRey » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:38 AM UTC

I have a 5 year subscription but I'm not sure if I would recommend SN to others. They're vision is secure, encrypted notes. User interface and editing experience is unfortunately not part of that vision.

Rather than giving users over a dozen editors, some maintained by the SN folks, some merely integrated, I'd prefer a single, opinionated and robust editor.

You often can't easily go from one editor to another. Some of them have bugs or are just a bit annoying to use.

All my SN notes are therefore plaintext.

I honestly think all note taking solutions out there kinda suck. You always end up sacrificing something. Often that's seamless cross device sync and security. Sometimes it's editor features. Google Keep for example is great for what it tries to achieve but it's just too limited for serious note taking in my opinion.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#156

Post by brnt » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:42 AM UTC

bmarquez wrote: post #58

I have a love/hate relationship with Standard Notes (and with most encrypted editors in general). Standard Notes is one of the few apps that has end-to-end encrytion AND password protection on the desktop (or Face ID on mobile devices). Joplin is E2E but refuses to encrypt locally, meaning someone who browses your computer can view your notes unless you use Joplin Portable in an encrypted container (with the added pe…

Ive changed from Joplin to QOwnNotes. I dont think it does encryption, but it is just a folder of markdown files so is flexible to use.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#157

Post by tanin » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:46 AM UTC

Shameless plug. I wrote a go app that keeps syncing your notes to GitHub/gitlab.

I simply maintain a giant plain text note. Sometimes I hope there is a better way to search, but it's decent enough.

https://github.com/tanin47/git-notes

It runs on Mac, windows, and Ubuntu

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#158

Post by e3bc54b2 » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:49 AM UTC

scpedicini wrote: post #151

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried many note-taking apps. From Evernote to Google Keep to OneNote to Standard notes yo plain old notepad to Zotero to Word and really honestly many more. If you say this list is all over the place, then that is because requirements vary depending on purpose, not the other way around. After almost a decade of experimenting, I have come to realise that the best note-taking tool by far is org-mode. It is free,…

I read the Wikipedia entry for it but it didn't really shed a lot of light on these types of questions: 1. Can I embed images and more specifically can I embed animated GIF files? 2. Can I embed MP3s and play them within the note? 3. Does it support rich text editor functionality including the ability to insert tables easily from programs like Microsoft excel? 4. Can I use multiple fonts in the same individual note i…

1. Embedding of images is pretty much file linking. It can display and let you intract with images inline, but that may not be up to your requirement.

2. Same as above, except playback will require a plugin.

3. Absolutely! Tables are fully supported, with automatic formatting and formulae and lots more. This is one of the strong areas of org-mode.

4. You can get bold, italic, monospaced varieties inline, with minimal markdown-like syntax. If you are asking for rich text mixing two different fonts, then no.

5. Yes! Since everything is stored in text files, you can syc them via any means you deem fit. I personally have multiple Syncthing nodes (desktop, laptop and phones) and it works flawlessly.

>it's the best editor for your specific set of criteria

You are right. Perhaps better description would be org-mode is the worst note-taking tool, except all others.

Why I would deem it best is because after decade of experimenting, I've cone to realise that plaintext is the king. Rich editors with inline images, media and fancy fonts are nice and necessary when you're preparing presentations or impressing someone, but when time comes to actual utility when talking about years upon years of notes and other documents, everything else falls short very quickly.

Images and videos cannot be grepped, searching through formatted documents like Word where search program has rk ignore all the formatting is inherently slow and ultimately inaccurate. Compressing and encrypting and sharing plaintext is a breeze. Plaintext can be read thoroughly or skimmed through as needed. While writing plaintext, I don't have to worry about messing up formatting of whole document by entering right character at wrong place and then fiddling about it for hours.

Rich text is nice for when your notes are small. They are nice to feel. But when you are rummaging about a mountain (which everyone eventually builds up if they document anything seriously), nothing matches sheer speed and utility of plaintext.

Which leaves either dumb text or markdown. Markdown is nice, but org-mode is markdown in steroids. Even the simple act of being able to collapse sections with single key is a huge huge QoL improvement. Then there or org-babel for inline programming like Jupyter, org-roam for back links, org-ref for bibliography, pdf-tools with org roam for inline PDF annotation, and you can still grep everything mentioned here.

Ultimately the purpose of notes (for me, goes without saying) is to preserve and eventually refer to, information. And plaintext, in my personal anecdotal opinion and experience, beats every other medium for storing, transferring, modifying and analyzing information.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#159

Post by bartvk » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:58 AM UTC

ipiz0618 wrote: post #113

thecodrr wrote: post #80

Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits. With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don't mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but: 1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can't even try out many of their editors. 2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am…

Thanks for posting! It checks most of the boxes for me. I've been using Simplenote which is perfect and minimal for note taking. But when I start to blog I find the lack of live preview and spellcheck inconvenient. Looking forward to the desktop apps and possibly offline support!

What's great about Simplenote, is that it's backed by a nice company that seems to be a good steward year in, year out. No unnecessary features, just continued stable maintenance.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#160

Post by e3bc54b2 » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 8:00 AM UTC

bebna wrote: post #154

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried many note-taking apps. From Evernote to Google Keep to OneNote to Standard notes yo plain old notepad to Zotero to Word and really honestly many more. If you say this list is all over the place, then that is because requirements vary depending on purpose, not the other way around. After almost a decade of experimenting, I have come to realise that the best note-taking tool by far is org-mode. It is free,…

like u said notes are really personal. I personally prefer paper the most, but if its about electronic notes, I settled with a folder that gets synced with syncthing to all devices and also got git for easy offsite backups with push. (yeah, syncthing does that too, but I like to have a history in my backups, to allow for single file and state restores) In this folder I categorise with subfolders and use simple markdo…

I use Syncthing too! I will have to look into got backups sometime soon, so thanks for reminder.

I once waivered between markdown and org-mode. But the ecosystem of Emacs packages that build on top of org-mode is mindblowing. Tables with formulae, inline programming (in your language of choice), back links, PDF annotations, bibliography, automatic conversion to HTML/PDF/LaTeX, still unmatched repetitive tasks in TODOs, even simple text collapsing, and so much more. And none of this weighs down your particular setup because you just ignore what you don't use and it never loads!

I personally realised that I'm never going todo any serious editing on my phones so Orgro/Orgzly work very well on Android. And since everything is plaintext, any org file can be opened in any editor and edited normally. I have a simple editor app from f-droid which works very well.