If you're looking for a free alternative, check out how to use Markdown files. Obsidian is a popular (but not open-source) program. The beautiful of .md is that it's plain text and can be easily imported into a variety of applications, including a simple text editor like Notepad. Here's a good overview video.
Yes, Obsidian is great. The app itself is proprietary but the files are portable plain text. I feel like that makes it pretty future proof. If it ever shuts down or enshittifies, there will be alternatives.
People need to watch out for Obsidian’s license. If you use it for notes for your job there is a strong possibility you need to pay.
I’ve been pleased with Marktext for editing and Joplin for storing notes.
what? I have never heard this about them. is that possibly if you use their sync service?
Sync is always paid, and optional. A commercial license and sync are separate.
They list it pretty clearly, but most people probably don’t read it. This is a bit troublesome since it’s in flathub and very easy to install. Probably routinely violated, that’s the danger of proprietary software. https://obsidian.md/license
Commercial Use Licenses are required whenever Obsidian is being used for work for a business with two or more personnel. Sole proprietorships or other one-person organizations do not require a Commercial Use License. Work for educational purposes does not require a Commercial Use License.
Non-profits are also exempted.
They say on their website that as soon as you use it for commercial projects, you need to get a paid plan. Their own sync is only availble on a paid plan iirc, so you should be fine.
Or logseq which is open source.
Or joplin. Or a meriad of other apps
Logseq has worked best for me and my ADHD so far.
Last I checked, Joplin does not use a folder structure that is easy to port over. Their files are all id's instead of usable file names, so without Joplin, you won't be finding anything.
They are still plaintext .MD files though.
Joplin requires you to migrate each notebook individually so it's fiddly if you have lots of notebooks in lots of folders.
But one you've done it you're free!
Well worth the effort. I downgraded to free Evernote after the last price hike and stopped using it... Now I can delete the app entirely.
I don't use Evernote, so I don't have a great feel for its capabilities, but my impression from the skims I've done in the past is that if someone is using Evernote, their workflow may not adapt directly to Markdown.
It has the ability to have paper documents (handwritten things, business cards, etc) scanned in and the system is aware of it, can use the business cards as contacts.
It's got to-do lists. Markdown doesn't really have a concept of that. Org-mode does, but that's not really a standardized format like Markdown is.
It has calendar integration.
It has embedded images. From samples, Evernote seems to bill this as people using this for things like hand sketches. There are ways to embed images in some variants of Markdown, but Markdown (and associated software) isn't really primarily aimed at mixed-media documents, and I would guess that part of the selling point of Evernote is that there's a low bar to adding them.
It supports embedding things like Excel documents.
All that being said, I like Markdown, and for my own notes, I tend to use org-mode for things that aren't gonna be distributed, and Markdown for things that are. But while I use them -- and for my use cases, they do some things better, like having tables that recompute values in org-mode, and I can easily use source control on them -- I don't think that they'd be a great drop-in replacement for many people who use Evernote. They'd have to use a different workflow.
Markdown is great if you spend a lot of time typing text on a computer. But if you spend time jotting notes by with some sort of stylus input mechanism or on paper, interspersing them with text, putting other non-text documents with it, I don't know if it's the best approach.
I'd add that I'd like to see a couple changes to Markdown, and would like to see a "Markdown Advanced" that tries to be more like org-mode.
Markdown's numbered lists are, IMHO, a mess. Markdown auto-renumbers numbered lists. Having an auto-numbering numbered list feature is a nice idea, but with the syntax used -- where lists often accidentally wind up renumbered -- it is, I think, not a good idea. I've seen a ton of people wind up with mangled quoted numbered lists that they didn't want renumbered and approximately nobody using the syntax for auto-numbering. I think that it'd be neat to do auto-numbering with something like a leading dash, but not where existing numbers are present.
As it is:
2. foo
3. bar
becomes
foo
bar
EDIT: Okay, just noticed that in lemmy's Markdown variant, the auto-renumbering apparently doesn't occur, while it does on Reddit.
I think that Markdown's use of parens in link syntax was a mistake, because parens are valid characters in a link, and using them requires escaping the URL. I think that using angle brackets or pretty much any character that isn't used all over in URLs to delimit the URL would have been a better idea.
Markdown isn't fully standardized. Lemmy Markdown isn't the same as Reddit Markdown isn't the same as pandoc Markdown. For example, in the above, list, Reddit Markdown supports embedding things like blockquotes in unnumbered list items, and Lemmy Markdown does not. kbin doesn't even have perfectly-intercompatible syntax with Lemmy -- they don't have a common "spoiler text" syntax. You generally get something more-or-less usable as long as you don't use some of the less-common features, but it's really not in a form where I'd be comfortable really advocating for it for document interchange.
"Markdown Advanced"
What I'd like to also have is a "Markdown Advanced". Today, I use org-mode as a marked-up text format that can do a lot of useful things (to-do lists as a first-order concept, calendar-integrated deadlines, inline spreadsheets that can update when values update, etc). Markdown can't do that. But org-mode was developed for emacs, and while I understand that vim and probably some other editors have partial implementations, it was not standardized. I think that for org-mode, that's probably a good thing -- it lets the format be easily-extended. But it kills org-mode for document interchange -- it's only useful for stuff that you plan to keep to yourself, where you can ensure that you're using the same program to read and write it. I'd like to see a marked-up text format that has these features and has a frozen, fully-specified, syntax, so that many programs can read and write it.
Another option here is GitHub. I keep my markdown notes in a repo that I just clone from there to my various machines... And then I get to edit them in vim. 😂
It looks great, but I’m not sure if it’s a good fit for storing and searching documents. Do you think that might work?
You can have non-markdown files in your vault, but I'm not sure how readily you can search them by default; there may be plugins that support that use case though.
If you're looking for a free alternative, check out how to use Markdown files. Obsidian is a popular (but not open-source) program. The beautiful of .md is that it's plain text and can be easily imported into a variety of applications, including a simple text editor like Notepad. Here's a good overview video.
Yes, Obsidian is great. The app itself is proprietary but the files are portable plain text. I feel like that makes it pretty future proof. If it ever shuts down or enshittifies, there will be alternatives.
People need to watch out for Obsidian’s license. If you use it for notes for your job there is a strong possibility you need to pay.
I’ve been pleased with Marktext for editing and Joplin for storing notes.
what? I have never heard this about them. is that possibly if you use their sync service?
Sync is always paid, and optional. A commercial license and sync are separate.
They list it pretty clearly, but most people probably don’t read it. This is a bit troublesome since it’s in flathub and very easy to install. Probably routinely violated, that’s the danger of proprietary software. https://obsidian.md/license
Non-profits are also exempted.
They say on their website that as soon as you use it for commercial projects, you need to get a paid plan. Their own sync is only availble on a paid plan iirc, so you should be fine.
Or logseq which is open source.
Or joplin. Or a meriad of other apps
Logseq has worked best for me and my ADHD so far.
Last I checked, Joplin does not use a folder structure that is easy to port over. Their files are all id's instead of usable file names, so without Joplin, you won't be finding anything.
They are still plaintext .MD files though.
Joplin requires you to migrate each notebook individually so it's fiddly if you have lots of notebooks in lots of folders.
But one you've done it you're free!
Well worth the effort. I downgraded to free Evernote after the last price hike and stopped using it... Now I can delete the app entirely.
I don't use Evernote, so I don't have a great feel for its capabilities, but my impression from the skims I've done in the past is that if someone is using Evernote, their workflow may not adapt directly to Markdown.
It has the ability to have paper documents (handwritten things, business cards, etc) scanned in and the system is aware of it, can use the business cards as contacts.
It's got to-do lists. Markdown doesn't really have a concept of that. Org-mode does, but that's not really a standardized format like Markdown is.
It has calendar integration.
It has embedded images. From samples, Evernote seems to bill this as people using this for things like hand sketches. There are ways to embed images in some variants of Markdown, but Markdown (and associated software) isn't really primarily aimed at mixed-media documents, and I would guess that part of the selling point of Evernote is that there's a low bar to adding them.
It supports embedding things like Excel documents.
All that being said, I like Markdown, and for my own notes, I tend to use org-mode for things that aren't gonna be distributed, and Markdown for things that are. But while I use them -- and for my use cases, they do some things better, like having tables that recompute values in org-mode, and I can easily use source control on them -- I don't think that they'd be a great drop-in replacement for many people who use Evernote. They'd have to use a different workflow.
Markdown is great if you spend a lot of time typing text on a computer. But if you spend time jotting notes by with some sort of stylus input mechanism or on paper, interspersing them with text, putting other non-text documents with it, I don't know if it's the best approach.
I'd add that I'd like to see a couple changes to Markdown, and would like to see a "Markdown Advanced" that tries to be more like org-mode.
As it is:
becomes
EDIT: Okay, just noticed that in lemmy's Markdown variant, the auto-renumbering apparently doesn't occur, while it does on Reddit.
As it is:
produces
The Fallout series
"Markdown Advanced"
What I'd like to also have is a "Markdown Advanced". Today, I use org-mode as a marked-up text format that can do a lot of useful things (to-do lists as a first-order concept, calendar-integrated deadlines, inline spreadsheets that can update when values update, etc). Markdown can't do that. But org-mode was developed for emacs, and while I understand that vim and probably some other editors have partial implementations, it was not standardized. I think that for org-mode, that's probably a good thing -- it lets the format be easily-extended. But it kills org-mode for document interchange -- it's only useful for stuff that you plan to keep to yourself, where you can ensure that you're using the same program to read and write it. I'd like to see a marked-up text format that has these features and has a frozen, fully-specified, syntax, so that many programs can read and write it.
Another option here is GitHub. I keep my markdown notes in a repo that I just clone from there to my various machines... And then I get to edit them in vim. 😂
It looks great, but I’m not sure if it’s a good fit for storing and searching documents. Do you think that might work?
You can have non-markdown files in your vault, but I'm not sure how readily you can search them by default; there may be plugins that support that use case though.