I’ve been using Google Keep for over 5 years now, and personally I cannot think of parting with having a synchronized notepad. Slowly I have done my best where convenient and possible to shift away from Google in as many ways as I can, but I cannot seem to find a unified note taking application that can sync between Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android that works as smoothly as Keep. Joplin is the only thing I’ve tried, and it personally feels a little clunky.
What other options are out there that are open source and can be self-hosted?
The only platform that I need to have a good and usable native application for is Android, just due to the inherent quirks of using a touch screen compared to a mouse and keyboard. Joplin is alright in the mobile app, but the UI is not nearly as well designed for a mobile touch screen.
So despite my initial issues with Joplin, I decided to give it another go for the last 36 hours. My conclusion is that it is even more annoying and pointless than I initially thought. It’s ability to set reminders/alarms is horribly inconsistent and only worked briefly on one of my two Windows 10 machines. The mobile app is not as clunky as I remember it being, but it does such a poor job sending and receiving notes between it and the desktop versions via the integrated Dropbox syncing.
On the bright side I’ve realized that what I have been looking for was not necessarily a note taking application, but rather a task tracking and notification system which would more likely be found in varying calendar applications and software.
So it’s looking like my new best options are to explore some things like NextCloud or ownCloud
After much annoyance in getting my files synced, I have started using Joplin as a notebook to jot down longer form ideas and thoughts instead of using it for any sort of reminders. I recently just installed and signed up for Todoist, and I am going to give that a shot for reminders and notifications.
So far Todoist is impressing me with its presentation, but I do not like that it is closed source and that the ability to set an alarm or a reminder is a Premium feature meaning I will have to play to even give it a try. It’s $3/month but they bill annually meaning I am stuck shelling out $36 just to even see if it is useful.
I need the application to do push notifications to my phone for it to be useful. Todoist and ‘remember the milk’ both require paid subscriptions, the milk one is $39 a year, in-order to do notifications. It’s quite infuriating.
Use whatever notes app you like, and just synchronize the files with NC.
Use a notes app actually supported by NextCloud.
As far as option 2 goes, there’s a few different apps. There’s the official NextCloud Notes app which is pretty feature-lite but reliable enough and gets constant updates. They have a decent Android app as well.
Then there’s Carnet, which is super well fleshed out, basically a Google Keep clone, and has an Android app as well.