A Text File... No, really, a simple text file is imo the best way to take notes, you can open it on any computer, it's fully FOSS, you can sync it in 100 different ways
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Rnote is currently the best for handwritten notes in my opinion, but its organization is minimal. I have never found a 1:1 replacement for OneNote, but luckily I no longer need it desperately like I did a decade ago.
My own use for OneNote was mainly drawing/hand written notes using a drawing tablet. For that use case, I have replaced it with Xournal++
For other notes written with the keyboard, I use simple local markdown files.
All my notes are synced between computers with Syncthing
I only really use the web version of it in Linux but I dumped OneNote for notion.
I have some scripts that use their API to send notes from the command line to a db page and some nvim mappings that I'm trying to get to send my buffers to a page but that part is problematic still.
I looked at obsidian but never really tried it out. I don't like the limits notion has but it's much faster for me to find my notes than OneNote. I have a metric fuckton of notes
I want to like libre office, but every time I have tried to use it, it ended up crashing eventually
Obsidian could work, its a markdown editor but I doesn't have any handwriting or drawing support, also its sync feature costs money but you can use nextcloud or github to sync your stuff anyway. An opensource alternative would be logseq but I prefer Obsidian
Joplin.
I've tried Joplin, Logseq, and Obsidian. The best one was Obsidian but it's not FOSS and is getting bloated over time.
I'm settling on zk now. This small command line utility solves almost all of the note managing needs for me.
Double links and tags make me forget about these "infinite free board" functionalities in OneNote: turns out they tend to be used inefficiently. Graphical sketches can be embedded in markdown or linked to a drawn picture.
The best thing about zk is that its notes consist of plain text and no extra tracking data is required outside of the file (unlike any others above), which means it's absolutely free to pair it with / move on to other tools when needed, or working temporarily without the support of it.
10+ years ago there was something called Basket Note Pads that had the same blank canvas style note taking that onenote has now.
My heart broke in two when the project died because the metaphor wasn't popular at the time. It'd be so well positioned if it had stayed in development until today.
I'm new to windows as a service desk guy and one note is the only thing I have available. I just wish I knew how to get the best out of it for templates I throw into notes and incidents.
Siyuan is probably the most advanced note taking app out there right now. Affine.pro is also a good one Appflowy is also good. All are FOSS.
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