Simple, Non-Commercial, Open Source Notes

last year I finally decided I need a notion replacement I was sick of big Tech stealing my data their employees stealing my nudes and feeding my high quality high value personal notes and documents to sell to advertisers or train large language models they're all doing it I don't care what their privacy policy says one day they're just gonna update it and it's oh yeah your data is yours except psych we're creating personally identified consumer profiles of your internet activity GPS data and selling it to advertisers and yes even though you didn't upload them notion has your nudes I don't make the rules so before I waste your time I need a notion replacement for a personal Wiki notes to do's and documents not the 400 other things that notion tries to be so I needed a program that is free non-commercial open source this is philosophical and most people don't care so this might not be the right video for you I don't want development to be beholden to venture capital prioritize monetizing a cloud service or underrated reason build on pointless checkbox features for the sake of marketplace differentiation so if it's run by a business or has a pricing tab on the website even if it's totally free for personal use it's probably not for me like logseek is funded by four million dollars in Venture Capital cool get that bag I just need to turn my text files into slightly more organized text files I think this is a problem that can be solved without incorporating a business to extract value from the solution local and self-hosted privacy and data ownership is the biggest reason I needed to get off notion so there's no sense of just giving my data over to another cloud service no matter how private it currently claims to be storing notes as plain text I want zero vendor locking I want to sync my notes using whatever program I want I want to use my own Version Control I want to be able to view my files on everything from a Commodore 64 to an Amazon Kindle without worrying about client software when my new software inevitably dies I just want to dump my notes folder into whatever the new thing I'm using is and fast notion is the slowest note-taking software I have ever used and while I said this bit I was going to put in a little clip of me clicking a link and it taking two seconds for the page to load but instead for drama attic effect I went to click a database View and the page took 24 seconds to load notion is garbage all right and some nice to haves simple I don't need a second brain or dear God a life operating system with databases kanban charts whatever endless features I just need to store notes scripts recipes travel plans whatever a bright future throwing this out there because dendron suddenly ceased development in the middle of my search encrypted notes a lot of these projects are just like oh encrypt your entire hard drive we're not an encryption project well guess what I do encrypt my hard drives but I do this really weird thing called decrypting them when I'm using my computer and I also sync and back up my notes to all sorts of devices which yes should be encrypted but it's still nice to know if I accidentally sync or back up my notes somewhere that's not encrypted that personal info and account numbers and stuff would still be encrypted within my notes alright let's quickly run down everything that didn't make the cut so you don't think I forgot about your favorite node app because you're just watching this video to see if some guy on YouTube ended up using doing the same thing as you leave a thumbs down when I get to your favorite proprietary or commercial software obsidian OneNote Evernote Rome log seek typora boost note standard notes simple notes notable used to be open source isn't anymore mem.ai notes Nook and Google keep programs that don't store notes in plain text are cherry tree laverna tomboy NG tiddlywiki I used to use that in college Tiddly Rome had no idea that that existed but that's cool as hell and finally Joplin and Trillium which look like two nice options if you don't care that notes are just stored in a sqlite database I did consider all of these though and the case in point is dendrin which wouldn't have made my cut anyway but I loved how dendron stores notes via hierarchically organized file names in a flat directory this was my favorite method of any program I considered and I adopted a similar system myself now you may have noticed I just threw out almost every note app you ever considered because yeah the non-commercial open source plain text notes software scene is a little bit Niche I ended up with four programs that I really like that probably suit different people in the end I don't think it matters what you use as long as you stick with it and use it to the full potential and get off the productivity treadmill that you're currently on because it's a disaster I promise before that real quick three runners up did meet all of my criteria zettler is a markdown editor with a really fancy editing window it's got these GUI tables which save as plain text and yes that is very fancy it has this little hidden folding bar on the left side of the editing window as you can see everything resizes and recolors itself it is a very beautiful program the only minor issue I even have with it is that sometimes it feels a little bit too fancy you've got this little window that pops up whenever you select text and sometimes when you try to select something the text window just tries to guess what you're trying to select rather than go where the cursor is I have no idea why programs ever do this you also have to control click links just because it's primarily an editing window but super minor nitpicks aside if you are looking for like full featured desktop software zettler is by far the most beautiful program on the list there's also Vino note which wow 10 000 stars on GitHub and I have never heard of this come up anywhere once maybe there's some cool feature but this really just seems worse than zettler to me this is also a markdown editor and it has a toggle between editing mode and read mode except on two separate computers I couldn't get the read mode to work and you can't follow links from within edit mode which kind of made it unusable I mean this is Linux so it's probably my fault for being a dumb user but I'm just saying my experience here and then there's also NB if you're a nerd this is a single bash script that runs from the terminal and organizes notes for you you can open and edit the notes in whatever text editor you want it even has fancy features like link notes encrypted notes inserting images into notebooks the only reason is not for me is because I can just use plugins from within a text editor to do pretty much all of this rather than having to run a separate script alongside it alright Zim now we're getting to the really excellent stuff Zim is as simple as it gets a hierarchical list of notes the editor doesn't support markdown but instead it has a a very Snappy Rich Text Editor where you use shortcuts like control123 to make headings or control I to italicize attachments and pictures just drag into the editor like you'd expect the files themselves are stored as legible plain text but it does have its own weird syntax and attachments and images are stored in a separate folder in Zim each note is a parent node to the notes underneath it meaning the notes organized themselves hierarchically rather than having a folder structure on top of it basically each folder is also a note this is similar to notion or dendron and I personally love it but most apps seem to use the folder or graph paradigms rather than just pure hierarchical notes for some reason it's also got all the features you might want like tags tables task lists journals encrypted notes but by default it doesn't burden you with any of that crap all of those are available as plugins and you don't have to dig through GitHub or Google them they're right in the menus and you just enable them with two clicks my biggest gripe is that the table plugin while it does allow GUI editing of tables you can't tab between cells which makes it feel ridiculous and clunky it's also really ugly with this default green theme you can change the theme with gtk3 themes but especially on Windows computers I tried a bunch and none of them looked good out of the box so expect to do manual theming because no one is making Zim themes if you hate software in general if you can't stand seeing a project that you like get bloated over time with pointless features if you use Microsoft Outlook at work and you don't understand how an email client that you use to do three things can possibly have so many tabs menus ribbons and buttons Zim is probably the program for you it is purely what you need to take simple notes and anything else is hidden from you until you specifically enable it Zim genuinely makes me sad we live in a world without more software like Zim alright if you want something a little more featureful and a little bit nicer looking than Zim down from the heavens Comes This traditional stupid markdown app with a double pane view fighting for first place with tomboy NG to be the worst named application on this list Q own notes this software is so obscure in the productivity space you could barely find a YouTube video where someone even talks about it let alone an entire video dedicated to it the Linux experiment mentioned it for a whole minute once which I'm positive is the most exposure this has ever gotten the world has been so consumed by their Notions and obsidians and vims that there is no room in anyone's heart left for a simple native desktop markdown Notes app but I love this program man it has the snappy editor with the markdown preview there is no stupid JavaScript stuff that pops up while you type it doesn't try to organize your notes into logical blocks or guess what you want to select when you paste text in there's not going to be any weird formatting and it has a truly customizable interface that can be as dumb and Bloated or as minimalist as you want again I hate menus and buttons and panels and software that are constantly on screen but I never use and you can literally turn all of it off in qo notes for example it has hierarchical tags meaning you navigate to a folder and you've got all your notes here and then you can click through your tag hierarchy to narrow down which of those notes you want to see this is apparently a killer feature to some people I don't even use tags not for me it's gone the navigation has separate folder navigation and notes navigation pane so first you go to the folder that has notes within it and then in a separate panel you click the note within that folder I'm more used to like a single tree where you know everything appears in the same pane but like I guess I could get used to this but then I go to settings and I go to experimental and there's literally one setting and it makes the navigation look exactly how I want it to it's like the program is reading my mind up top there's an incredibly convenient encrypted notes feature that's easier to use than the vast majority of these apps thank you and look at this I'm synced to my next Cloud Server and I can just check and restore version history for every note does obsidian even do this so nicely and if it does don't tell me yeah you can use git to do this manually but this is so convenient and I mean this is Linux you can't dismiss a notification without opening the terminal and checking stack Overflow but I just put in my server IP and credentials into settings and all of this just worked automatically no problems maybe it's just years of software abuse that I've dealt with but I just didn't expect this feature to work with like one click and I know this is a minor thing but this program it's like whatever the opposite of Death By A Thousand Cuts is all these good themes are built right in it doesn't come with a crappy light and a crappy Dark theme and like you have to go to GitHub to go find a real theme you could just pick monokai a real welcome change after looking at Zim like hey I still love Zim but I don't know guys maybe build in like one dark theme that's not green nothing gets in my way with qo notes nothing pops up nothing slows down nothing acts in an unexpected way there's nothing I don't want that I can't just simply hide if I right click a note I can open it in my file manager V note has that but Zim and zettler don't it's not make or break but it's a five second convenience if I press control and mouse wheel up and down that increases or decreases the font size which is exactly what I would expect it to do for comparison Zim does nothing zettler does nothing and Vino works the same way but it Scrolls the text at the same time so it's annoying and yet guessing hotkeys is maybe not the best metric of software quality but I don't know man when you download someone's bootleg free GitHub project and everything just works exactly how you would expect it just feels a little magical the minor issues I have with it are inherent to any markdown editor the split view for markdown editors just feels like a fundamental design problem with markdown in general it is just this really weird thing the editor doesn't have as many fancy rich text features it will change your font size and colors but you can't display images in line so you will need to look at the preview pane to see images it does have this little table editor though and that's kind of nice I kind of feel like the same way as this Reddit post am I missing something why don't the simple markdown editor come up more in lists of productivity tools surely there are people who just need to take some notes and don't need to spend their lives optimizing productivity software into a life operating system what happened to those Apple notes people surely there are people who have seen the light and they're over complicating their productivity workflows right big thumbs up to qo notes I know it doesn't look very distinct from a lot of other markdown programs but I can't emphasize enough how I never had to dig through documentation I never had to search the web to solve an issue and everything worked exactly how I expected it to now before I continue I'm about to talk about emacs and neovim and I very much believe it's possible to cross the point where futzing with your productivity software outweighs the benefit of doing so how much time have you wasted getting your notion layout just right background pictures here columns just so cute icons maybe you've wasted time refactoring your obsidian graph moving index pages around fixing and changing backlinks trying some stupid system you saw on YouTube that works for someone else you you are wasting time right now watching a video about productivity is not productivity I don't care that you're on your morning run and you just put this random video on in the background the fact that you're here means you are prone to this if you genuinely care about being productive emacs and Vim are [ __ ] I have spent many many hours doing random things like shaving a few milliseconds off my boot up time optimizing key bindings or troubleshooting random GitHub extensions that purport to make my life ever so slightly easier literally while I was recording footage for this video I found there was a breaking change in emacs org mode since I last used it so I had to roll back to an earlier version of org mode which involves pinning the old version of org deleting a directory re-running an install script thankfully smart people on GitHub already figured this out for me and this isn't common but this is stupid troubleshooting crap that's not your fault that you'll have to deal with if you don't just use Q own nodes and this is besides the initial investment of just learning how to use use these if you're not a software developer if you already live in these editors and you have your hyper optimized configs you're probably already taking notes with them so you don't need my experience from this video unlike probably most people watching this who care about things like free and open source software I'm not a software developer so I'm coming from the perspective of someone who mainly uses these text editors for notes and tasks rather than someone who completely lives in them for their job so if you're a normal person who actually needs to be productive you kind of don't want none of this the learning curve the troubleshooting the endless tweaking like seriously just you Zim but that being said these are obviously the most personal customizable and by far the most fun pieces of software on this list fun is not a productivity metric but life is short last year I had no idea what emacs actually was I saw people on Hacker News touting org mode which just looked like a way to fold bulleted lists but otherwise I thought it was just some terminal text editor for Boomer die hards who use weird 1970s key bindings as someone who has never even considered emacs a sensible piece of software to use in the 21st century emacs [ __ ] really everything it's both a terminal program and a GUI program which I didn't even know because it's so text based mouse support is totally reasonable with emacs and an intended feature although your nerd friends will still make fun of you for that but it works fine and the GUI allows for things like switching between fonts font sizes and inline images no stupid secondary markdown window required having a terminal version of the app with most of the same features means I can SSH into my home server and run it from any device having the text-based GUI but also a terminal version really gives you the best of both worlds now I use Doom emacs which basically gives you Vim key bindings and easy to modify configuration and a nice theme because I mean I'm not crazy emacs kinda sucks but do me Max makes it super usable out of the box I did watch like 10 hours of tutorials on how to set up emacs from scratch and then after all that I ditched my scratch config and kept using do me Max so what is org mode I don't even know man it's another rabbit hole on top of emacs it has all the things you think it has automatically bulleting lists check boxes headings folding of course you can link between files into headings and other files it has its own scheduling and agenda system you can put dates and deadlines on tasks and it will show you your whole agenda this isn't some emacs to-do list feature that's separate from your document your agenda is built from the to-do list and deadline syntax in your document everything in org mode is built from the plain text in the document it is like a dream come true and the tables oh my God the tables you just start typing your content and put bars around cells and it automatically formats the table for you Tab and shift tab to move around create separators with just two characters just this super intuitive Syntax for things like alignment I said zettler is the program for tables but if you're committed to the way of plain text I have never had a better time making tables and it's not just the formatting you can evaluate expressions you can run code you can crunch data from within your org document it's a programmable spreadsheet in text form this is where org mode went from okay so it's basically a markdown editor with some really nice tables to org mode is a being of unlimited power and I'm staring into the abyss of possibility and I don't even know where to start like I realize these super fancy features like running code from within a text document is totally defeating the purpose of vendor lock-in but also emacs has been around for 50 years so maybe this one program gets a pass and on top of all of this there's the Plug-In or groom as in Rome research this gives you backlinks in your graph which I kind of questioned the true necessity of but maybe it's your thing but it also gives you this really convenient note capture buffer with different note templates I've got one template that puts hierarchical notes into the correct spot in the hierarchy and then another template that stores unorganized notes in a separate directory my system is chaos but you know it shut up your system is too you don't even have a system you're watching a YouTube video on notes apps another thing I really like about org roam is it stores every note with a unique identifier this means that you can link to any file regardless of where it is in the directory structure or its file name so if you like to organize your notes into directories or you find yourself renaming them it's never going to mess up your links and I guess if any plug-in developers are watching this just do this why do I gotta worry about what changing my file name or moving my file messing up all my links just use this unique identifier it is so much better I've lamented complicated overly featureful software earlier in this video and emacs is objectively complicated and overly featureful but it's also Willy Wonka's chocolate factory for editing text it just feels magical and unlimited because it's so text focused but the GUI allows for things that a terminal couldn't do and unexpectedly it was totally not intimidating to get started with I found do me Max relatively easy to pick up considering email Max's reputation for stupid key bindings and I was only one of those occasional Vim users before this it wasn't some grueling learning curve like switching your keyboard layout if you're this deep into YouTube watching a video about open source software you either know it already or you're motivated enough to learn how to use emacs if emacs has a main issue it's not exactly Snappy no issue on my high spec Linux desktop on Windows a little bit chunkier on my underpowered work issued Lenovo Windows 11 laptop it was slow there's no two ways about it Firefox can be slow we all still love Firefox but it wasn't great and on my phone it sucked and I'm not talking about some app I literally just installed do me Max on my phone which surprisingly worked without any issue except that it's garbage and you shouldn't do that so I figured my best bet was to install doomimax on my Home Server so that if I'm on a slow device I could just SSH into my server and run it from there except that it doesn't run well in a Raspberry Pi either now you think you see where this is going this is where he's going to say he switched to Vim because it's faster no no I bought a 500 ryzen 7 Mini PC alongside my Raspberry Pi and I specifically overspect it to make sure it would run Emax as smooth as possible this thing can play AAA video games what did you buy your home server for home automation virtualization storage yeah I bought it to run a heavyweight text editor emacs rules I'm I'm telling you guys it's not for old nerds it is a totally cool program for normal people I've realized that Outburst does not make me sound like a normal person alright as much as I love emacs I find myself using a wide variety of computers and I found myself SSH into that Home Server a lot while it's super cool that there's a terminal version of emacs that basically has all the same features as the GUI version when like 75 of the time I'm missing things like images fonts and font sizes I'm starting to wonder why I'm going through all this effort to run basically a terminal program most of the time which of course is what led me to neovim ladies and gentlemen we have officially reached the point in the video where I can make the thumbnail I switched from Emax to neovim and 5 000 people will watch it just to have their pre-existing opinion validated neovim is of course just a text editor and it's as far from notion as we can get and we're giving up fancy things like fonts and images off the bat now there are some workarounds to get some kind of image support like with nbe but this is a terminal program so that stuff is obviously not first class and another cool thing about emacs is that you're probably not really deciding what plugins you're going to use for notes you're going to use the built-in org mode or you're just going to get the org roam plugin that goes with org mode with Vim not only is there Vim versus neovim but conservatively let's say vimwicky wikivim task Wiki vimwikiki neuron.vam neuron.nvim different project Vim detu no Tor Vim notes Vim table mode New York Vim org mode and Vim org mode the list goes on and on with projects that don't have as easily guessable names and you've got markdown org syntax vimwicky syntax norik syntax there are a lot more options and a lot more partial implementations whereas org mode is sort of this monolithic complete thing anyway my notes look like this now I have truly achieved my goal of turning my text files into slightly more organized text files I'm not going to pump any particular plugins because they share a lot of functionality what really matters is how easy it is to create link and search notes and basically all of them are good at that with some differences in their accoutrements I ended up using new org which is not at all a very mature plug-in and some might say needlessly Reinventing the Wheel by introducing its own syntax but I really didn't want to use an org mode plugin that had like one or two missing features or differences from emacs and then just say well this sucks compared to really Max so instead I'm using an unfinished plugin so it's really easy to make excuses when it's missing functionality also it has the best logo by far you guys don't make your software choices based on logos Zim phone notes what year is it log seek it looks like a paw print stupid and obsidian wait what this logo has reactive Reflections is that even legal in graphic design alright screw the rest of this video I'm going back to obsidian but for real I think there are enough other YouTube videos going over what Vim plugins make the greatest system ever I'm a big fan of hierarchically organized index pages with numeric identifiers you'll notice that what I was doing in Vim was simplified from the fancy table I tried to make an emacs I was really into emacs tables when I was using that but my pages are numbered like 202.1 a and that's my trip notes for the Colorado Trail 200 is Hobbies 202 is backpacking 202.1 is trips 202.1 a the first trip Colorado Trail this way the files organize themselves hierarchically by file name and each note has a unique ID but again personal note-taking systems are nonsense you do things that I think are a pointless waste of time I do things you think are incorrectly structured and destroying my life everyone has a personal system all of us take notes wrong you know what do your quote unquote modified settle casting system as if every note-taking system ever devised isn't just a slightly different way of organizing blurbs of text so is neovim good yeah have I achieved my goal of distraction free fast simple notes that is obviously never going to be commercialized absolutely yes does this mean this is the most productive software I could be using no I find neovim harder to configure than emacs and to be clear Envy Chad and do me Max which are both text editor distributions for dummies there's been another learning curve and that means many more hours of tutorials and troubleshooting neovim does less out of the box than anything else so I have to find and configure more plugins things in neovim also seem to change a lot two years ago people were using vimscript configuration files now everyone uses Lua configuration files vimplug used to be the package manager of choice and it was Packer and now it's lazy the organization plugin I use neorg isn't even finished so I have to follow development to see if I like any of the future features or if I stick my nose up at it call it bloated and have to go find something else so I have my perfect simple note system with a turbulent overly customizable piece software but again it's fun life is short we all have our weaknesses it's a weird trade-off my first recommendation to someone off the street would probably just be to use Zim my mom is never going to wrap her head around neovim and even if she does she's not gonna keep up with it over time and Something's Gonna Break the search for perfect software when I already have perfectly fine software has never stopped you know how it goes this look at how long this video is neovim is certainly as simple fast and usable as I could ever want and Vim is super popular and it will be supported in some form forever but when you have perfect why not search for something better for no reason my next plan is getting rid of Envy Chad which is a neovim bass config that I ended up not really needing emacs does not resemble software a human being would use out of the box do me Max makes emacs totally sane and usable neovim on the other hand already resembles a usable text editor and the Envy Chad configuration directory structure is a lot more work and reading to understand for example I don't need tabs in doomme Max I just open a knit.el Find the tabs module and comment it out in nvchad I go to Lua custom plugins.lua and I have to find wherever the exact name of the plugin is documented in nvchat docs and then set enabled to false so yeah stupid user just has to read the docs but I only used Envy chat to begin with because I found do emacs so incredibly useful and on neovim I think it would be easier to actually just roll my own config than to turn off all the crap I don't need with one of these base configs I also looked at simpler editors that software developers seem to turn their nose up at simply because it's not Vim cocoon is a really interesting modal editor that's almost like if Vim normal and visual modes were combined and the key mappings were reversed it emphasizes a limited scope so it doesn't include things like window management file management or IDE features but it does have a small Wiki and table plug-in I really like its philosophy of just being a text editor rather than an entire development platform there's all also Helix which seems like cocoon with some more developer crap built in but it doesn't support plugins yet so it's not really in consideration right now learning and switching to such a similar yet unique program would certainly not pay productivity dividends but there's a part of my brain nagging me that cocoon is part of a very small class of text editor that actually sort of follows the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well rather than becoming a shambling mass of features but to be clear like Vim is a super useful and usable shambling mass of features and I even looked at Super Bare Bones hipster editors like viz and neat VI neat VI is something like 6 000 lines of C code and you could forget about unnecessary features like mouse support or opening multiple files but it does have a key mapping that opens a file path under the cursor and I mean this sure isn't vimwicky but this is dangerously close to the core of a really simple linked note system we have gone too far down the rabbit hole I just kind of wanted to take you here for the sake of it it's kind of hilarious that a video that started with the words I need a notion replacement took us to the most hipster text editors out there like cocoon and neat VI but if you want to be the coolest most suckless most minimal Elite note-taking hacker out there I don't know how it's possible to get more minimal than neat VI you'd just be using Ed at that point or God forbid a notebook but and this isn't engagement bait just look at my channel there's no subscribers this obviously is never getting monetized if you have gone some Ultra minimalist software route that's not just like one text file I'm really interested to know what's actually usable for you anyway I hate software I hate computers I hate note-taking the fact that I even like four entire programs in a single category of software and I didn't just end up as one of those single giant text file people is astounding to me you should try and use any of these or I don't know leave an angry comment about me dismissing log seek this video is way too long I know this script started months ago as an Ode to qo notes being such an under discussed note-taking platform then the script shifted to wait Emax is actually a great piece of software for regular people script and now it ended up as a I guess I'm just using Vim plugins like every other nerd to take notes video which is kind of a zazzlest finale because there's already tons of popular videos from Linux nerds and software divs about how great Vim is alright bye good luck in your search do I have hope for you no if you watch this whole video you are lost you're just gonna click the sidebar and click another productivity video You're Gonna tweak your system more you're not actually going to use your notes and get things done Amir yes Amir I'm talking to you this is your wake-up call stop watching these YouTube videos get some actual work done

Channel: By Default

Views: 770,486

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Id: XRpHIa-2XCE

Length: 30min 24sec (1824 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2023