Looking for an app for note-taking with the following features:
- No ads ever
- No nudges to upgrade, subscribe, unlock premium features, or any bullshit like that.
- No recurring fee (ok paying up-front for the app)
- Clean, simple interface
That’s it. I don’t need multimedia, multi-device syncing, cloud storage. I just need a place to write down ideas and grocery lists.
Recommendations?
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Obsidian
- text files stored in markdown on your device
- no premium service to unlock features. You can buy sync and publishing if you want to, but there are no nags to purchase them.
- you can roll your own sync solution you wanted to. Its just text files. Same goes with publishing.
- community plugins if you want to extend it
- desktop clients and ios clients
- free forever
I use signal mesagaing app. They have a note to self feature thats awesome.
Not sure how I never found out about this feature before but this is awesome, thanks for sharing it!
I’ve been using Notally for a while and I think it checks all your boxes.
Very much agreed.
Quillnote + Signal’s “note to self”
You can find Quillnote in both Droid and Google’s Play Store.
.txt file + syncthing
For true rebels: pen and paper
There is Google Keep.
But if you want to degoogle, well I’m reading the thread. I’ve heard of Joplin (spelling?).
I like quillpad from f-droid as my Google keep alternative. Pretty identical to keep aside from the online syncing.
I see quillpad has Nextcloud syncing. This is a good start. And I think it’s possible to sync using Syncthing too.
I really need to go and get syncthing setup. Been meaning to in order to sync Steam Deck saves to my PC.
Not an app, and I haven’t really used it, but tinylist feels quite Google Keepy. You can add it to your home screen, but it doesn’t seem to work offline.
Obsidian is kewl cloud sync aint free though.
I just save my obsidian workspace in Dropbox/google drive/etc and that does the job for me
If you don’t mind self hosting, there is a community plugin for live sync backed to CouchDB.
Google keep works fine for me.
ColorNote
It meets every item on your list.
Markor. It’s as simple as it gets, but can scale up if you decide to later
I use OneNote usually, easy formating and works well on PC and mobile. Notion is cool too, but has a lot more features than a simple note taking app.
Element for Matrix. I know weird, but that’s how I like it
Do you send messages to yourself? Is this a thing you can do? I never tried. That would be pretty cool. edit: um… yeah. create an empty room with just yourself in it. Now I feel silly.
Something like that. I created a new space with just me, with encrypted rooms for each topic. Random Thoughts, Books, Movies I Like, etc
I think you’ve inspired me. I’m gonna try this.
I used to do this a long time ago when I was still on Facebook. I’d write notes with visibility set to myself only.
Notion has been pretty great so far; I recently moved there from Evernote. Only downside (for me) is that it’s based on electron.
According to this article, and others I’ve seen pen and paper is still best.
