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The endless quest for a great notes-taking tool

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The endless quest for a great notes-taking tool

#1
What I've been wanting for a long time for my tech notes:

- taking notes easily, preferably markdown (love its simplicity and I seem to remember it pretty well, maybe from stackoverflow's training) - must be available everywhere, I don't want to sync folders over dropbox or stuff like that across my computers, tablets and phones... it should be hosted maybe on AWS and be available as soon as I type my domain (even public would be fine) - must be simple to edit (with a password at this point, no public editing :P) to add pages - must be simple to add images (cut/paste and/or drag and drop) on the document - there must be a quicksearch (something like I start typing and immediately full-text search into the documents appear below with a small preview of the paragraph where my text was found)

I tried text markdown files + grep -> good but no sync across devices, no images (markdown files can't display that directly, I have to store the images somewhere and link to them, that's a lot of work without a 3rd party program) I tried google docs -> good but search is terrible, plus a lot of formatting complexity since it wasn't created for tech notes (text + images/graphs) I tried dropbox -> same issues as above, plus install stuff everywhere. Hate it.

So here I am asking again, maybe I'll be more lucky this time: is there a preferably opensource software (or combination of softwares) that will allow me to have simple tech notes in markdown with fulltext responsive search + extremely quick edit of whatever I'm seeing + web access from any device + paste images directly in those rendered MD files?

It's a VERY simple tool but since my memory is gradually failing (getting old), I'm looking for a way to have my knowledge, coding tips and snippets, programming guides, graphs, linux commands and stuff like that all at a glance at my fingertips.

Sorry for asking again something that has probably been asked a thousand times. As I said: I'm getting old :P

Re: The endless quest for a great notes-taking tool

#2
For super quick notes that are password managed, and markdown supported, I've been using https://nnote.io. Simple, no-ads, and might be OSS sometime soon.

However with nnote, I do end up with a lot of links, and since those notes live everywhere and are hard to manage, I end up making a task in Amna (https://getamna.com) [disclaimer I built it], and use nnote as a tab inside of the browser it provides.

Re: The endless quest for a great notes-taking tool

#4
If you're on the Apple ecosystem, I really like the simplicity of Bear. You do have to pay a very small fee for it (like maybe $1/mo?) but I've found their interface and tags system to be the best combination of power and simplicity. Apps always work and sync with iCloud.

Re: The endless quest for a great notes-taking tool

#5
post #4

If you're on the Apple ecosystem, I really like the simplicity of Bear. You do have to pay a very small fee for it (like maybe $1/mo?) but I've found their interface and tags system to be the best combination of power and simplicity. Apps always work and sync with iCloud.

$1.49 a month or $14.99 annually.

And I agree, Bear is awesome. It's fast, it's simple yet powerful (eg. x-callback-url fun), and it stays out of your way. Sync is rock-solid and reliable and requires no effort on my part. It's great for programmers, too.

https://bear.app/

Re: The endless quest for a great notes-taking tool

#9
post #5
post #4

If you're on the Apple ecosystem, I really like the simplicity of Bear. You do have to pay a very small fee for it (like maybe $1/mo?) but I've found their interface and tags system to be the best combination of power and simplicity. Apps always work and sync with iCloud.

$1.49 a month or $14.99 annually. And I agree, Bear is awesome. It's fast, it's simple yet powerful (eg. x-callback-url fun), and it stays out of your way. Sync is rock-solid and reliable and requires no effort on my part. It's great for programmers, too. https://bear.app/

I've even been using the todo feature more regularly these days to capture action items from meetings. Anytime you do the markdown checkbox (- [ ]), it bubbles up into a nav item for "Todo". I like that they haven't tried to overcomplicate things.
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