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.

  • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    11 days ago

    Hi quaff!

    The app I use for this purpose is called Notally, on android. It supports reordering the checkboxes, but it doesn’t do find in page or sync to web (although it can do backup /restore – I sync the folder with nextcloud and I can access the text files)

    That said if you try it, you might love how simple it is and use it for something!

    https://f-droid.org/packages/com.omgodse.notally

  • BackYardIncendiary@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    Not for everyone, but I use a self-hosted single user email server for this. All the formatting your client permits, clients for every platform, attachments, organization into folders, synced automatically everywhere, etc. No spam filtering, DMARC, DKIM, and the like because you only ever email yourself and you don’t permit external senders. I love it.

  • Spooky Mulder@twun.ioEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    Every now and then this question comes up. It’s a timeless software engineering conundrum. Kind of like how med students might start to think they have all kinds of diseases and conditions because they’re learning all these symptoms.

    Software engineers, especially new ones, tend to be heavily biased toward applying technical solutions to non-technical problems. Most never actually grow out of this.

    I’ll advise what I advise every time someone approaches me or one of my peer groups with this very question:

    Get yourself a notebook and a pen.

    I’m dead serious, not trolling, and not some kind of technophobe zealot.

    When it comes down to it, if you let go of what you think you need in a to-do list app, you’ll find that what you actually need is much simpler.

    Notebooks are e2e encrypted. Self hosted. Offline. As ephemeral as you like. Indexable for search. Versatile. Take a picture of a page if you really want to. OCR it if you need to.

    Pen and paper.

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      11 days ago

      I carry a phone, I’m not carrying a notebook and pen.

      I did that 40 years ago.

      Plus that list doesn’t show up on my laptop or my desktop, other places I’m working.

      It’s not sortable by date/time, priority or project.

      That’s terrible advice, and doesn’t even meet the basic requirements of the question.

  • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    I spent several years looking for the perfect selfhosted solution to this, but ultimately I realized an offline solution was just going to be better. So I started using Obsidian which is as simple or complex as you want with no paywall.

    Some of the self hosted solutions I’ve tried were:

    • quaff@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      Whoa. This actually works pretty close. Although, I am not seeing the ability to drag and drop re-order list items. Which is the big feature I want and need.

      I am seeing in their github issues that CKEditor doesn’t support it. Thanks for the suggestion though!

      • Lfrith@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        10 days ago

        If there is a kanban extension or something of the sort you might get the drag and drop list you want.

        There is another Google Keep like app called NotallyX. Can even import in your Google keep backups. You can set up password protected auto backups with the app.

        As for syncing syncthing as others have mentioned would be the best solution that would let you be able to use whatever you choose to go with.