Hey y’all. I’ve been testing a bunch of Note taking solutions and nothing seems to check off what I want and need.

I want a simple interface (both for list view and note editor/view), preferably similar to Google Keep, but a regular list is fine as well.

Key features:

A. being able to drag and drop re-order checkbox lists.

e.g.

  • [ ] item 1
  • [ ] item 2
  • [x] item 4
  • [x] item 3

I’d like to be able to just drag and drop the above to sort things correctly.

B. E2EE at rest.

C. CTRL+F inside the note view/edit!!

Honestly, the only functionality I truly want is A. But most of the solutions I found are either proprietary or can’t do it.

Self hosted options I’ve tried:

  • Joplin (can’t do A; UX is not great)
  • Standard notes (A + C is gated by their self hosted premium subscription; I don’t mind paying for my apps, but the prices are ridiculous)
  • Silverbullet.md (can’t do A)
  • Quillpad (very similar to Google Keep and can do A, but has terrible file syncing, not E2EE)

Notesnook looks almost as insane as Standard Notes to self host (mimicing AWS stack locally is nuts). Has anyone tried Notesnook yet? I don’t want to spend another afternoon setting something heavy up only to find that the feature I want is gated by a heavy $.

Any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Woops! I am looking to use the notes app on both Android and Web/Desktop Linux. Preferably an open source solution.

  • nycki@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    12 hours ago

    code editors might have the features you want, and its easy to repurpose a code editor into a notes app.

    sync a folder between your devices (syncthing is great for this) and put markdown text files in it. I like to call this folder “Memo” since its like writing letters to myself.

    edit the markdown using VS Code (desktop) or Carbon (android). I haven’t tested whether Carbon can do this, but I know in VS Code, you can reorder a list with keyboard shortcuts.

    click anywhere on a line of text, then hold Alt and press Up arrow, and the text will swap places with the line above it.

    edit: Syncthing and Carbon are open source. VS Code has some proprietary code added by Microsoft, but none of it is relevant to your use case, so you may prefer the fork called Codium.