Note-Taking Markdown Editors

After 4 years, in 2020, I’ve returned to this topic because “Simplenote” has been stagnant this whole time.

Notion is revolutionary and I still use it today, but it has its shortcomings, among which I would include the fact that the client is a very “inert” application, the fact that it saves in its own format rather than plain text files, the fact that it is not self-hosted or open source, but it makes up for all this with its brilliant design and ideas.

Crossnote is an online-only markdown note-taking application with a visually appealing design, developed by the author of the Markdown Preview Enhanced extension. It allows users to retrieve and save their notes directly to a GitHub repository, and by examining the commits in the 0xGG/crossnote repository, it is clear that Crossnote is actively under development. Because it can be self-hosted, Crossnote is comparable to and even better than StackEdit in terms of functionality and features.

Simplenote was my go-to editor around 2016, but they haven’t made any significant improvements in years, and I think Automattic let it go to waste. I used it because it had decent text search and was very fast, but I disliked that it isn’t open source, that it doesn’t support images, and that it lacks dual-pane editing, with editing on the left and preview on the right. In retrospect, I realise that choosing Simplenote was a mistake, so all the data was moved to markdown files in VSCode, with some sensitive data also stored in Notion.

Standard Notes: The Almost Perfect Note-Taking Solution

Standard Notes is a pretty well-rounded offering, even in the free version. There is just one flaw that is a deal-breaker for me. The flaw is that the notes in the free version can’t be in the Markdown format, and for me that’s not up for discussion.

Everything else is almost perfect and more than enough, even in the free version, if I ignore this drawback. There’s unlimited device syncing, the web app is great, the desktop app is great, there are nice native mobile apps, and there’s the Listed platform, which is essentially a public blog journal for your notes.

There are a few things I’m not entirely clear about. The whole platform is 100% open source, and the server can be self-hosted, which they highly recommend. I don’t understand what’s stopping me, or what the limitations are in the self-hosted version, if there are any. It is clear that the server component can be self-hosted, and according to their documentation I can also host the web application and compile both the desktop and mobile applications, but the client compilation is not something that many people do, as each application already has the option of specifying which server to connect to.

As for my dilemma, it turns out that many people have the same doubt, see here and here, and yes, I have to solve the Markdown problem in the self-hosted version somehow. Fortunately, the solution is quite acceptable.

But now listen to this. When it comes to the web and desktop Electron applications, the solution to the markdown limit is really solid, in the form of edior add-ons, listed at jonhadfield/awesome-standard-notes. As far as I know, the best editors are Append Editor and Rich Markdown Editor by Outline.

Now that the “markdown limit” has been solved on the desktop, I wonder if it still applies on the mobile phone. Surprisingly it does not! It seems that the mobile app is web based as well, and these upgrades will normally work on the mobile phone as well. I can’t be sure, but I think so.

According to one comment on Reddit: “So I set up an extension over the web and it syncs with my Android app? Presumably the mobile app is also web-based, so upgrades should work there too. I’m not sure, but I think that’s how it works.

StackEdit

StackEdit is a browser-based markdown editor that offers an aesthetically pleasing and efficient user experience. It seamlessly synchronizes with various cloud services.

For personal use, it is perfect, although image support is not excellent. However, it should allow importing from Google Photos, which did not work for me due to active blocking by Google. Nevertheless, since it can be integrated with Gist and GitHub, that is the only way to work with images.

At one point, it was rumored that StackEdit was no longer being developed and that “Classeur” was the true successor. However, several years later, they migrated from the classeur.io domain to stackedit.io, so StackEdit is still the current version.

Other Note-taking Tools

QOwnNotes is a highly efficient, cross-platform, open-source, file-based notepad that has advanced capabilities to import Evernote notes, sync with NextCloud or any other backend, as it stores all data in plain .md files. To install it, use scoop/brew install qownnotes. It has undergone significant improvements and is now a respectable package that even includes a web clipper browser extension, an excellent CLI snippet manager, supports automatic git push, etc. QOwnNotes continues to be actively developed and improved on its repository pbek/QOwnNotes, making it a truly superb package.

Joplin je vrlo poznat i podržan

MarkdownPad is a simple desktop markdown editor for Windows, not open-source.

AlephNote is an open source, lightweight desktop note-taking application that supports synchronisation with Simplenote, Standard Note, Nextcloud and other “normal” backend platforms, is only available for Windows and is essentially a stripped down version of QOwnNotes.

• Milanote is online tool to organize ideas and projects into visual boards, limited to 100 notes in free version.

• Turtl is an open-source desktop app, an actively developed note-taking app, offering a generous free plan for cloud service.

Research Helpers

Weava and PowerNotes are annotation tools for organizing research, rather than note-taking applications.

GitJournal GitJournal/GitJournal: Mobile first Note Taking integrated with Git