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I tried to move my notes out of Emacs. I failed. Again

18 points speckx 2 days ago 25 comments

Grombobulous 2 days ago | parent

I’ve had an odd amount of difficulty finding a “perfect” notes app.

For me, mobile and desktop apps plus easy family sharing of individual notes are important.

Apple Notes is really the best I’ve got.

The other solutions I’ve found mother cost too much or have some odd dealbreaker features, or they’re over-complicated, or they’re ugly.

Zoho Notebook is on the ugly side but it’s cheap and has apps on all platforms.

Craft is pretty good but if you hit the need for the paid tier it’s a bit pricey.

I think it’s possible that vibecoding an Apple Notes clone is actually the best solution for me.

A lot of people like Obsidian but I think it’s a bit crazy, and I think it’s unacceptable how difficult it is to self-host the sync functionality, especially since again the paid tier is too expensive.

tstrimple 2 days ago | parent

I've settled on markdown with optional linking semantics. I've bounced around between the various popular apps, but having plain text files at the end of the day is important to me. I was quite happy with logseq and abandoned them as soon as they decided to invest in a database first model. Fortunately all of my notes were mostly just markdown and migration is relatively easy. In the era of LLMs I'm not really using a dedicated notes front end. I've got a notes system which includes the ability to add things to Family Apple Notes and Apple Reminders under various categories. My "LLM Assistants" can read my Apple Notes and Reminders so that's the way I stay in sync on most devices I own.

xtajv 1 day ago | parent

my deepest darkest secret is that i secretly really like macOS Stickies.app to jot things down with just enough WYSIWYG markup to capture an idea (before I immediately shuffle the idea somewhere else, e.g. emacs).

the application itself is relatively hideous, and I kinda see that as a feature (because the app is not particularly fit-for-use for just about anything else besides a quick "tmp" buffer with RTF).

2b3a51 22 minutes ago | parent

Just wondering if MacOS people have looked at Eastgate Systems' Tinderbox application? I was a happy user back just after the Millennium.

(For me on Linux it is a directory full of text files with markdown and sometimes a groff pic diagram or even a metapost diagram (just starting with that one))

Moomoomoo309 1 day ago | parent

I use obsidian and use a third party plugin for sync and sync it to my NextCloud server.

asdff 1 hour ago | parent

The breakthrough on this for me is just using plaintext files. Talk about liberation. You can get as simple or as complicated as you want with those and also sync them anywhere, to basically anything, now and in the indefinite future.

jll29 45 minutes ago | parent

plain text:

- longevity

- portability

- ease of processing

- cannot "break"

- viewable and editable with anything

Any other way is only acceptable if it can export to plain text.

alt227 40 minutes ago | parent

+1 for plaintext files. Nothing else gives me the flexibility and reliability.

torh 1 hour ago | parent

I just started using Obsidian with Word-Smith plugin [1]. And when I say "just started", I literally mean a few days ago, so I can't really give a verdict yet. Sync is handled by Dropbox.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLq91cDWx0s

1024bits 1 hour ago | parent

I'm working on Totem [0], feel free to give it a try! I try to post about it in the "What are you working on" thread monthly but haven't mustered the courage to do a "launch" yet.

It's cross-platform, Rust core with native UIs (Rust UI for Desktop, I'm using Iced [1]). I built it due to similar problems, and because I got tired of waiting on nvUltra [2].

Totem is meant to be more of a team/collaboration app in truth, but it turns out that realtime sync is also immensely helpful when working by yourself on multiple devices.

Everything is stored in SQLite and Markdown as well, but in a bit of an obscure location in a thin wrapper format (I might build in an escape hatch later on). The reason to do it this way is largely because allowing people to externally edit Markdown in a live sync context is tricky and I didn't want to make it super easy to screw yourself over.

[0] https://thinktotem.com

[1] https://iced.rs/

[2] https://nvultra.com/

P.S.: With consideration to the time that I am posting this...the iOS/iPadOS offering is currently restricted to a few countries. If you're not in those countries and are interested, let me know and I can add you to Testflight, or you can use the web version.

turtlethink 2 days ago | parent

It is 2026... You can't complain about other people's software anymore. Spend about 30 minutes vibe coding your perfect app and you'll never go back. I've basically done that, remade every utility on my phone, on my computer, hyper customized everything that bothered me about all those other software. All local and connected to my private server for sync and backup. And I barely know how to code... I even included in every one of my apps a button that sends me to a session in my custom made ai agent app to change/update/debug any complaints I have about my own apps, on the spot. "Hey codex, that button doesn't do exactly what I wanted quite as fast as I wanted please make it better and faster" wait 5 minutes - done. It's the future... Take advantage of it

xtajv 1 day ago | parent

[humor]

The rub of using emacs is that you really can't complain about anybody else's software, because it's 100% your fault :grin:.

creata 1 hour ago | parent

Blog about it, or ask Codex to blog about it.

PunchyHamster 57 minutes ago | parent

Ignorance seems to correlate 1:1 with hype for LLMs

opan 2 days ago | parent

I went from notes.txt in vim to notes.org in emacs for a while (didn't use much org stuff beyond bullet points), back to vim with the same notes.org file but I basically treat it like notes.txt again. Synced with SyncThing, so I could edit it on my phone but in practice I don't think I ever do.

brudgers 15 hours ago | parent

It uses an SQLite database, which doesn't bother me. Databases are great at this stuff.

A Database is great.

Two databases are a migration.

Org-mode plus a file system is a database.

All databases are not relational; relational databases are the tool you want when you want algebraic operations; you might not need algebraic operations for your operations but relational databases are a hammer.

sdcfgy 1 hour ago | parent

I use Microsoft Word.

I now await my fate.

rmunn 1 hour ago | parent

The two things about Emacs I would love if I used it (tried twice, bounced HARD off the keyboard controls both times. I hate modifer+key control schemes — give me modal editing any day — and I don't even have RSI!) are magit and org-mode. I've never tried magit so I don't know if lazygit is a decent substitute. But for org-mode in Neovim, there's https://github.com/nvim-neorg/neorg. I'm sure it's only a partial, half-broken implementation of the real org-mode, but it covers the parts that I need most, structured note taking.

If you're a diehard modal-editing aficionado like me and think that Emacs is a great IDE but it's a shame about its editor (and its keyboard scheme), maybe give neorg a try. Might well make you shift away from notes.txt files.

And yes, I know I could just use `evil` in Emacs. Maybe someday I'll overcome my decades of learned resistance to running Emacs, but every time I see the Emacs control scheme, I wince and I'm reminded why I don't use it. Having some key combos be "hold down the Control key while you press two keys" (like `C-x C-s` to save a file) while other key combos are "hold down the Control key while you press one key, then release it before pressing the second key" (like `C-x s` to save all files) is just not going to fit into my brain. Maybe that's intuitive for some people, but it just doesn't work for me. And so I bounce off Emacs before ever giving it a real chance.

precompute 41 minutes ago | parent

You should try using evil again. I use it full-time and 90% of my non-web-browsing work is in Emacs (the other 9% is in the terminal). It's very stable and IMO more full-featured than plain vim. In time you'll pick up some native emacs shortcuts to simplify your life but you'll still have modal editing everywhere. Best of both worlds.

creata 30 minutes ago | parent

Do you have any examples of these Emacs shortcuts that simplify your life?

I tried using Emacs with Evil but I was just using it as a somewhat laggier Vim.

rmunn 23 minutes ago | parent

Emacs is definitely more full-featured than plain vim. But for me, I wouldn't be switching to it from plain vim, I'd be switching to it from a LazyVim setup. Which I've barely had to configure: it's an IDE straight out of the box. And to get that IDE setup back in Emacs, I'd have to learn which Emacs plugins do what, reconfigure several plugins' default keystrokes to match what LazyVim did because those are in my muscle memory now... it's a big effort. I won't rule out doing it someday, but for now it costs too much in lost productivity while I'm trying to get work done. Maybe sometime when I'm on vacation, and the temporarily-lost productivity doesn't cost as much.

But NeoVim has made writing plugins so much easier, even things like editing Lisp are getting not too bad. https://github.com/Olical/conjure has been a pretty decent substitute for SLIME, there's a paredit implementation that works well, and so on. So the need to switch is lower and lower, and the cost of switching stays high-ish, and so I haven't done it yet. Someday, as I said, I'll give it a shot.

tmtvl 16 minutes ago | parent

For modal editing there's also meow, god mode, and devil. Personally I quite dislike modal editing because of how you have to work very, very slowly and smash every key to make sure you don't accidentally do something like delete half the file, save, and quit; but I do have escape bound to god-local-mode for those rare times I need a long chain of chords. M-x some-command is usually good enough for me when I can't be bothered to memorise the chord, though.

precompute 44 minutes ago | parent

> Then, I simply grow tired of staring at the same thing every day.

Use different mixed-pitch fonts for different directories. Use a different header/modeline.

Emacs is a necessity for me. I can't function without it. Moving functionality off emacs to the web browser or another clunky UI application is a straight downgrade.

illuminated 39 minutes ago | parent

I have a pending task to tryout the COG [1]. The description makes it one of the best thought-through processes for me to write things down while not being a major time consuming event. Whenever I've tried in the past to take more notes, I'd had to plan a time to do it and it was very difficult to find time. Another problem I occasionally have is that if I write something down, my brain kind of let go of the most of the memory of it, so the more I write and organize, I feel more stupid.

[1] https://github.com/huytieu/COG-second-brain

crnkofe 37 minutes ago | parent

I tried some of these note taking apps but eventually just ended up with a self-hosted wiki + Git/Forgejo/markdown. Once I had enough material, diy projects, scripts, random media just thinking about moving them around, backing them up, sorting them resulted in a heavy mental strain. Having a simple, familiar system to work with just brings a lot of value.