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Apple Notes is my go-to for “almost plain text.” It’s simple, instantly syncs across phone/desktop, and I can throw in bulleted lists, photos, PDFs, or whatever

by dmart 5y ago

Apple Notes is my go-to for “almost plain text.” It’s simple, instantly syncs across phone/desktop, and I can throw in bulleted lists, photos, PDFs, or whatever else if needed. I have meeting notes, to-do lists, journal entries, and god knows what else in there. It’s not perfect - Markdown, or at least code blocks, would be nice, and tags (I think those are coming in the next OS release), but in terms of ease-of-use, I haven’t found anything close.

jakeva 5y ago
I recommend https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/. It has good markdown support with code blocks and a tagging system I like.
inferense 5y ago
I used to be a power-user of apple notes too. I loved how simple it is but I also missed having more functionality. My notes and folders became messy very quickly with limited options to organise. I also had to review my notes and put the action points into a calendar which became too much work. Decided to start building something better, https://acreom.com/ https://acreom.com/ Happy to share the access and get feedback.
spideymans 5y ago
> It’s not perfect - Markdown, or at least code blocks, would be nice, and tags (I think those are coming in the next OS release), but in terms of ease-of-use, I haven’t found anything close. On that note (no put intended), I’d expect iOS 16 Notes to support markdown now that SwiftUI and UIKit in iOS 15 now have native markdown support.
tunesmith 5y ago
With markdown, it'd be so killer if you could just drop in tables from Numbers.app, or especially code kernels. I'm still looking for that shangri-la of "reactive Jupyter for the desktop" ObservableHQ is basically reactive Jupyter, and Jupyter-on-desktop can be hacked together, but I want all three.
easrng 5y ago
It can do monospace text at least. (On iCloud accounts, not IMAP though)
axguscbklp 5y ago
I started using Notes a lot at some point because it is just right there in the Dock, it has an attractive design, and unlike with text files, it is easy to just drop images into it. Problem is, now I have probably thousands of notes in Notes but as far as I can tell there is no easy way to export them to text format or HTML or any other simple format. I recently tried a third-party app that is supposedly able to do export from Notes to text for you but the exported text files lacked the original note last-modified times and a bunch of the first lines of the original notes were also missing. I wish that Notes itself made it easy to export to text files - I would be ok with not having images exported. It would be really nice to back up all my notes to plain text rather than being locked in to some sort of Apple cloud nonsense. Notes does have a built-in export to PDF feature, but it seems that you can only export one note at a time that way and also, the note last-modified times get dropped on export. So a word of caution for other Notes users - Notes has its advantages, but if you ever end up with a large number of notes and you want to copy them outside of the Apple ecosystem, it will probably not be straightforward.
pmw 5y ago
I am a fan of Apple Notes because they support syncing with Fastmail's Notes[1], so I could access my notes from iPhone and web, and my data is not locked into Apple's ecosystem. But I got irritated with Apple Notes. It lacks Markdown support. It auto-converts my note from plaintext to rich text anytime I start numbering, bulleting, or pasting, without a way to convert the note back to plaintext. Lastly, my notes had no structure or hierarchy. They were simply sorted by last-modified date. So this month I researched note-taking apps having (1) Markdown support, and (2) support for syncing my data to Fastmail. Because again, I don't want to be locked into Apple. I settled on 1Writer[2]. It syncs to WebDAV endpoints, which Fastmail offers. My notes are now files, and I can organize them into folders, all within 1Writer. For now, I love it. Markdown support is great, including highlighting in edit mode, and I don't miss anything from Apple Notes. Go, plain text and open standards! 1: https://www.fastmail.com/help/notes/usage.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/notes/usage.html 2: https://1writerapp.com https://1writerapp.com
abinaya_rl 5y ago
I highly recommend Simplenote[1] for you. It has a markdown support, sync between multiple devices like Android/iOS environments. [1] - https://simplenote.com/ https://simplenote.com/

by dmart 5y ago

jakeva 5y ago

I recommend https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/. It has good markdown support with code blocks and a tagging system I like.

inferense 5y ago

I used to be a power-user of apple notes too. I loved how simple it is but I also missed having more functionality. My notes and folders became messy very quickly with limited options to organise. I also had to review my notes and put the action points into a calendar which became too much work. Decided to start building something better, https://acreom.com/ https://acreom.com/ Happy to share the access and get feedback.

spideymans 5y ago

> It’s not perfect - Markdown, or at least code blocks, would be nice, and tags (I think those are coming in the next OS release), but in terms of ease-of-use, I haven’t found anything close. On that note (no put intended), I’d expect iOS 16 Notes to support markdown now that SwiftUI and UIKit in iOS 15 now have native markdown support.

tunesmith 5y ago

With markdown, it'd be so killer if you could just drop in tables from Numbers.app, or especially code kernels. I'm still looking for that shangri-la of "reactive Jupyter for the desktop" ObservableHQ is basically reactive Jupyter, and Jupyter-on-desktop can be hacked together, but I want all three.

easrng 5y ago

It can do monospace text at least. (On iCloud accounts, not IMAP though)

axguscbklp 5y ago

I started using Notes a lot at some point because it is just right there in the Dock, it has an attractive design, and unlike with text files, it is easy to just drop images into it. Problem is, now I have probably thousands of notes in Notes but as far as I can tell there is no easy way to export them to text format or HTML or any other simple format. I recently tried a third-party app that is supposedly able to do export from Notes to text for you but the exported text files lacked the original note last-modified times and a bunch of the first lines of the original notes were also missing. I wish that Notes itself made it easy to export to text files - I would be ok with not having images exported. It would be really nice to back up all my notes to plain text rather than being locked in to some sort of Apple cloud nonsense. Notes does have a built-in export to PDF feature, but it seems that you can only export one note at a time that way and also, the note last-modified times get dropped on export. So a word of caution for other Notes users - Notes has its advantages, but if you ever end up with a large number of notes and you want to copy them outside of the Apple ecosystem, it will probably not be straightforward.

pmw 5y ago

I am a fan of Apple Notes because they support syncing with Fastmail's Notes[1], so I could access my notes from iPhone and web, and my data is not locked into Apple's ecosystem. But I got irritated with Apple Notes. It lacks Markdown support. It auto-converts my note from plaintext to rich text anytime I start numbering, bulleting, or pasting, without a way to convert the note back to plaintext. Lastly, my notes had no structure or hierarchy. They were simply sorted by last-modified date. So this month I researched note-taking apps having (1) Markdown support, and (2) support for syncing my data to Fastmail. Because again, I don't want to be locked into Apple. I settled on 1Writer[2]. It syncs to WebDAV endpoints, which Fastmail offers. My notes are now files, and I can organize them into folders, all within 1Writer. For now, I love it. Markdown support is great, including highlighting in edit mode, and I don't miss anything from Apple Notes. Go, plain text and open standards! 1: https://www.fastmail.com/help/notes/usage.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/notes/usage.html 2: https://1writerapp.com https://1writerapp.com

abinaya_rl 5y ago

I highly recommend Simplenote[1] for you. It has a markdown support, sync between multiple devices like Android/iOS environments. [1] - https://simplenote.com/ https://simplenote.com/