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

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

#61

Post by andrewrothman »

PaulBGD_ wrote: post #21

I used Standard Notes paid for over a year, and switched to Obsidian recently. My experience with SN was that the editors are half fleshed out, incompatible with each other, and make it hard to use with other tools. The notes can be markdown, html, text, or other formats as well as being encrypted. This makes exporting very annoying to use. Contrast to other tools like obsidian.. it’s just markdown. I can sync it acr…

I'm in the process of the same switch.

I've liked Standard Notes. It's really nice that it's open source and encrypted. However I ran into some instances of cross-device conflicting edits which were a bit annoying, and Obsidian's UI and Second Brain features swayed me to try it. The graph view is really cool and I realized I didn't need syncing as much as I thought.

Obsidian does seem to also have a paid sync feature (no mobile app yet). For now I've been emailing myself from my phone and taking small audio memos, then typing them into Obsidian when back at my laptop. Not an ideal workflow but it's not bad and has some advantages.

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

#62

Post by thecodrr »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #53

I don't mean to be snarky, but what's the purpose of apps like this? Notepad.exe is 227 KB, runs instantly and flawlessly on even ancient environments, and gives all the basics. If you need something more "Power User," Notepad++ gives some language-sensitive formatting, tabs for easy switching between files, and plugins for custom use cases. If you need something more specific to a given language, that's an IDE, not…

You are forgetting that a huge category of people need all their notes in one place, organized and separate from everything else. Sure you can do this with Notepad and manage everything in folders etc. but that takes significant effort. Effort that many people don't want to put in. That is why most note apps, even something like Notion, exist. To simplify the organising process. You aren't paying for the editing experience but everything else.

Of course, for very simple note taking you don't need this but it again comes back to my original point that by using a dedicated app, everything, including the rough 1 minute notes, are in one easy-to-find place.

I myself take a lot of txt notes but easily lose them as well. Fortunately for me, they aren't important and I rarely need to access them again but it's always nice if I have them all in once place so I can go over them and see what I wrote/did.

Disclaimer: I am a developer of a note-taking application called Notesnook[1]. Some might say it is a (hopefully better) alternative to Standard Notes.

[1] https://notesnook.com/

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

#63

Post by hildebrand_rare »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #53

I don't mean to be snarky, but what's the purpose of apps like this? Notepad.exe is 227 KB, runs instantly and flawlessly on even ancient environments, and gives all the basics. If you need something more "Power User," Notepad++ gives some language-sensitive formatting, tabs for easy switching between files, and plugins for custom use cases. If you need something more specific to a given language, that's an IDE, not…

I think for this app, the purpose is a convenient and secure writing space that's available across devices. I've been a Standard Notes customer for several years now, and I went with it because I was looking for a secure solution for my journaling. I wanted a secure place to write my deepest thoughts at home and on the go, and also a way to quickly and easily access, edit, and review those thoughts across all of my devices. That's a tall order.

This conflict of desires lead me to the age old trade-off of security versus convenience. If I want security / privacy, I should use only local text editing tools and keep everything on an encrypted volume, preferably on an airgapped machine. If I want pure convenience, I should use any of the million great cloud-based note and document options that are available on any device. If I want to fall anywhere between those extremes on the spectrum, I'll need to decide the most convenient option I can bear that provides the most security. And for me, I landed on Standard Notes when exploring this question for myself.

It's a lightweight and easy text editing program that is encrypted and secure anytime my writing leaves my sphere of control. It allows for search of my notes, filtering by title and date created/modified, and it has great sync between all of my devices to the point that I can pick it up any device and write a thought as it comes and not worry about sync conflicts if multiple instances of my note are open across devices. There are easy options to automate encrypted local backups and even daily cloud-based ones if you're a paying customer. I can export everything to plain text quite easily - which is my preferred format - so I'm in no way dependent on their continuing to exist.

If you want to read/write notes seamlessly across all of your devices and you also want to stay private and secure, your options grow limited right away. Standard Notes is the best compromise of these competing interests that I've found so far for my own situation. So even though I have the ability to use other tools as you've described - and many of them are better writing tools than Standard Notes - I still choose to pay SN as a customer.

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

#64

Post by throwawayboise »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #43
Trasmatta wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A piece of paper doesn't have the same level of privacy as something like Standard Notes. Anyone who finds your written paper notes can read them. Standard Notes is encrypted, and password protected. It can't ever be read by the provider or the host (which is the major problem with the majority of syncing notes apps), and it can't be read by a nosy friend or family member, unless you leave your computer unlocked and…

I am 100% sure there is no root kit installed on my piece of paper transmitting every pen stroke to the internet. I am 100% sure there is no defect in the design of the piece of paper that could make it instantly readable to the entire world once discovered. You can't say that about any software or hardware.

A piece of paper (in the USA at least) also has stronger constitutional privacy protection than digital files uploaded to cloud storage/sync services.

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

#65

Post by bachmeier »

I don't mind paying, but I've never cared for this product's pricing. If you want to pay monthly, it's $10 a month, which no sane person would pay for a plain notes editor and nothing else. The reasonable price is $30/year but you have to pay for five years in advance. Sure, we all have to eat, but it's not a sign of confidence if you're trying to push me to pay for five years in advance. If you believe in what you're selling, charge me $2.50 a month and give me a reason to stay.

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

#66

Post by thecodrr »

bachmeier wrote: post #65

I don't mind paying, but I've never cared for this product's pricing. If you want to pay monthly, it's $10 a month, which no sane person would pay for a plain notes editor and nothing else. The reasonable price is $30/year but you have to pay for five years in advance . Sure, we all have to eat, but it's not a sign of confidence if you're trying to push me to pay for five years in advance. If you believe in what you'…

For this, you might find Notesnook (https://notesnook.com/) a better alternative. I mean its still $4.49 but I suppose that's still a lot cheaper. (Disclaimer: I am the developer so this may be a shameless plug, idk).

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

#67

Post by onedr0p »

aftergibson wrote: post #39
PaulBGD_ wrote: post #21

I used Standard Notes paid for over a year, and switched to Obsidian recently. My experience with SN was that the editors are half fleshed out, incompatible with each other, and make it hard to use with other tools. The notes can be markdown, html, text, or other formats as well as being encrypted. This makes exporting very annoying to use. Contrast to other tools like obsidian.. it’s just markdown. I can sync it acr…

I did the exact same swap recently. Obsidian is far superior. I even paid for the 5 year Standard Notes subscription as I believed in the project and assumed design improvements would come, but the editor experience never improved and just feels clunky.

I bought the 5 year sub and completely agree on the desktop app clunkiness, it's been so many years but there's still no right click menus. I use it once in awhile and still find myself trying to right click > archive or right click > pin or whatever.

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

#68

Post by crooked-v »

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…

> But Obsidian's mobile app is still in development, and I'm a bit iffy about buying another subscription just for encrypted sync.

Obsidian's pricing seems a bit weird to be in general, in that its publish/hosting functionality is priced around individual workspaces rather than either users or total usage.

Because of that I'm never going to actually use said publish functionality (even though I would have paid for it in an instant if it was set up differently), because my use cases for it would involve publishing from a number of different small workspaces for entirely different audiences, and the devs apparently haven't considered at all that people may want to do that.

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

#69

Post by thecodrr »

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…

You should give Notesnook[1](i am the developer) a try as well. It should solve most, if not all, of the above issues and its cheaper than every other notes app out there as well.

[1]https://app.notesnook.com/ (it has a 14 day free trial)

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

#70

Post by crooked-v »

tartoran wrote: post #45
jacobsenscott wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 100% sure there is no root kit installed on my piece of paper transmitting every pen stroke to the internet. I am 100% sure there is no defect in the design of the piece of paper that could make it instantly readable to the entire world once discovered. You can't say that about any software or hardware.

Private journaling is likely to end up encrypted forever and not accessible to the families of deceased persons. Sure, it could be argued that it was encrypted on purpose but one never knows. Someone may suddenly pass and their loved ones would never get access to this piece of their work even if the author intended to share it and never got to leave the encryption key (they never expected their sudden departure) Sur…

That's a problem with encrypted stuff in general, and as a society we really haven't worked out any better way to manage that yet than measures like "keep a clearly-labeled master password in a safe deposit box where your estate can get at it".
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