13 ms·

Show HN: An open source alternative to Evernote (Self Hosted)

241 points by vivekweb2013 4y ago

vivekweb2013 4y ago
Hi Friends, I'm the author of GitNoter. I'd love to answer any questions you have
- joe8756438 4y ago
  Looks really cool, congrats on the launch! How would multiplayer notes work? Assuming everyone has access to the repo.
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    Thanks. Any number of users can use GitNoter simultaneously on any number of devices against a single repo as long as all of them has write access to the repository.
- pantulis 4y ago
  I understand that this allows you to manage collections of notes in Markdown format backed up to a Git repository. This is nice and I consider this to be useful, but I would suggest not to position it against Evernote but against knowledge management tools for teams (internal wikis, confluences of the world, etc)
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    yeah I agree. This is really the knowledge management tool
    - lolive 4y ago
      When I presented Obsidian to a friend, and he told me that it was just a note-taking app, I was quite shocked by [what I consider to be] such a lack of consideration. Because I really use Obsidian as my second memory [marketing definitely worked on me, it seems :)]. Anyway... I have never used EverNote (==note taking?). And, as you have read, I am reaaaaally in Obsidian (==knowledge management?). Can any of you elaborate of the conceptual difference between both?
      - pantulis 4y ago
        Evernote positioned itself as a "second brain", but turned out to become an awesome Digital Vault. You can throw anything at it and Evernote will happily ingest it. You have blazingly fast search backed by Evernote cloud services, and even have some note linking capabilities but they are rudimentary when compared to a fully fledged PKM like Obsidian, DEVONthink, or others. These newer PKM tools allow you to reflect and reason on the content you have and massage it in ways that surface new ideas and allow you to follow unexpected relationships (hence being a true second brain). This is much more harder to achieve with Evernote. Both are valid and powerful tools but the use cases are different, maybe just because the definition of "second brain" has moved since Evernote was conceptualized on the 2000s.
      - adfm 4y ago
        If you like Obsidian, check out Logseq. Both handle plain-text Markdown, so you can use them interchangeably. Logseq also handles Org-mode files, if that’s your thing. Everything is local, but works well with cloud storage. There’s also an iOS app. It’s worth a look. (No affiliation) https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/
  - SamBam 4y ago
    Agree: Knowledge management, not EverNote at all. EverNote is all about dropping random files into it (images, pdfs, etc). It's where you store your bills, your receipts, your photos of wine labels. It also has a very handy web clipper extension to save web pages (whole pages, sections, or bookmarks). I'm sure plenty of people use it differently, but I'm also quite confident (from how I've seen others describe it) that one its primary use-cases is as a big shoebox to dump everything into. You then search for that stuff through titles, tags and OCR in photos. I use it in a fundamentally different way from Obsidian.
- eole666 4y ago
  Nice project. Is there any plan to handle gitlab login/other kind of login as well ? For now it seems to work only with github.
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    Yes. The idea is to support as many git services as possible. Which includes GitLab, Gitea, Bitbucket and more For the initial POC I have integrated it with GitHub
- glook 4y ago
  You don't have to compare this to Evernote. I really like what you have done so far. The preview of the MD is fantastic. Feels hard enough for me to find just that! I love the use of GitHub. I'm in!
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    Thanks so much for the kind words
- mkl 4y ago
  Hi, does this support maths notation via MathJax or Katex?
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    Not currently, But I've noted this. I'll see if this can be supported
    - mkl 4y ago
      Cool. If you add it, please use the  and \[ \] delimiters rather than $ $ and $$ $$. The former plays better with automated processing and currencies.
      - vivekweb2013 4y ago
        yeah sure
- RupertEisenhart 4y ago
  Could you support markdown headers like these: --- date: 2021-09-14T22:51:33+02:00 modified: 2021-09-29T15:40:38+02:00 --- Then it would interoperate with GitJournal perfectly I think :).
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    Sure. I'll implement this feature
- bachmeier 4y ago
  Just a few suggestions (some overlap with other comments). If you really want it to be an Evernote competitor, it should have: Image/file upload Web clipper (singlefile is great) OCR (Tesseract has done what I need, not sure how that compares to Evernote) Basic task management Customizable dashboard Tagging and excellent search (these are Evernote's bread and butter) WYSIWYG editing Templates Integrations And it would be really nice if it could do math, which would be an advantage over Evernote. It's possible some of this is already implemented; I only gave your page a short look.
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    Noted. thanks
  - dublin 4y ago
    TiddlyWiki has hit most of these capabilities for many years now, and is nearly unique in wrapping up all the code and data in a single unit that can be run in any regular browser, from either local storage or a remote server or storage. (It does need a killer web clipper, though...) TiddlyWiki really is one of the cleverest apps I've ever run across, but I'm not much of a JS programmer, so it's got a bit of a learning curve if you want to hack on it. It's pretty easy to use right out of the box if you don't want to hack on it, though, and I'm giving some thought to moving most of the data I've collected in OneNote to TiddlyWiki to escape Microsoft's clutches after I've finally disentangled myself from Google... One thing I love is that TiddlyWikis I built 20 years ago (granted, they were simpler then) are still perfectly usable today. My perfect data keeper might be something of a mashup between TiddlyWiki and a JuPyteR notebook.
    - bachmeier 4y ago
      Another nice thing about TiddlyWiki is that you don't actually have to be a JS programmer to extend it. I run a local CGI server and that allows me to make all kinds of customizations in the language I want (most languages support local CGI servers). The querying capabilities of TiddlyWiki make it a nice database.
- gimme_treefiddy 4y ago
  Definitely will give a go by deploying privately. Does it support markdown extensions, like GitHub flavored markdown or something.
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    yes it supports github flavoured markdown
- yurikoif 4y ago
  It looks clean and super good! Considering moving from Obsidian as it gets more refined. A few more features IMO would be nice: (fuzzy) search; task management; math formula support; or just expose API for such development would be great as well.
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    thanks. I've noted the feedback. I'll work on implementing these features.
- BrandoElFollito 4y ago
  Do you have a docker image for self-hosting?
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    Yes the application is containerised also I have created the helm charts for deployment on kubernetes cluster - https://github.com/git-noter/gitnoter-charts https://github.com/git-noter/gitnoter-charts
- mrichman 4y ago
  Why should I use your tool and not Joplin?
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    Because it does not require desktop client. It stores the notes in git repository so you have access to all the revisions which is very useful in case you want to revert any changes
- wharfjumper 4y ago
  Congrats. I think there's an opportunity for a markdown-based Confluence competitor. Something that can be used by non technical people. You might want to consider that use-case/positioning rather than personal note-taking. Major missing feature for the average user I think would be easy image/binary upload, embedding and preview. By leveraging Github (and Gitlab please) auth it makes this usable by enterprise which is smart I think.
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    thanks so much for the feedback. I'm working on providing the image upload functionality. Markdown preview is currently available with the preview button in the right corner of markdown editor.
- Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
  Congratulations on the launch! Others have mentioned about Search, In case you choose to implement it then I'd suggest a special attention towards code search. I presume formatting code with markdown is a non-issue, So implementing first class code search capabilities would be real differentiator among other notes applications and could likely fill a need-gap.
- baytowner 4y ago
  Does this support shared note-taking - I tried fast forwarding through the video tour (please consider making it shorter) and it mentioned changing repositories so in that same line of thought - is multi-repository note taking possible, each shared with different people?
hohloma 4y ago
Another alternative that Im using and very happy with - Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/). Also provides import from Evernote which mostly worked in my case.
- MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
  Second that. Used to be in Evernote, but eventually just exported the Evernote, imported to Joplin and set up their web clipper extension in Chrome. Joplin stores notes as basically markup files, so sync is pretty trivial through any file syncing service / app in the universe.
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Agree, but GitNoter is self hosted webapp it does not require any desktop/mobile client. It can be directly accessible with the browser. Thanks for the feedback. I'll check if import from evernote can be added as a feature to GitNoter.
  - dicknuckle 4y ago
    I realize this is probably a big ask, but an import from Google Keep would be a huge plus. Google eventually kills off EVERYTHING good.
    - vivekweb2013 4y ago
      yes right. I'm thinking of implementing add-ons for all popular note taking services like google, evernote, onenote etc so that the notes can be imported using gitnoter.
      - henearkr 4y ago
        Nice idea! And Google Tasks, please. That would be a relief to finally make a link between Google Keep and Google Tasks, something long overdue!
sandgiant 4y ago
Thanks for sharing, but almost all "alternatives to Evernote" lack some of the most important (to me) features like web clipping, OCR and related notes. The only real alternative to Evernote I've found is DEVONthink.
- deleted 4y ago
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- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Thanks for pointing the web clipping. I've noted it. I can add this feature to GitNoter. Hopefully soon
- KennyFromIT 4y ago
  Give Joplin a try
- lolive 4y ago
  Web clipping?
- lapser 4y ago
  Not exactly open source, but as far as "alternatives to Evernote" goes, I've been told about Obsidian[0] (though I've not jumped in yet), which has plugins for OCR and web clipping, and considering the community, I'd be surprised if related notes aren't a thing. [0] https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  These days I tend to rely on archive.org (+ archive.today) and a plain link rather than web clipping tools. I just find it more useful coming back later to have access to the full fidelity of a page and its context. It also feels appropriate to be publicly preserving parts of the web that you've found useful enough to note down. As someone at archive.org said, 'If you see something, save something.' Edit: n.b. archive.org does honour takedown requests, though they're rare and usually somewhat predictable. cf. gwern's drastic approach of archiving all the pages he's ever visited, https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs
igtztorrero 4y ago
Nice Go code in API !!! I will use it and contribute! Congratulations! Long waiting for this !
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Thanks so much. Golang is awesome. I've recently learned it. I'm looking forward to your contribution to codebase.
Kalanos 4y ago
Does it store images? Are you going to make a mobile app?
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  You can add the images inside markdown using existing image url. The image upload is not implemented yet. I've noted it & I'll work on this functionality Thanks for showing interest in the mobile app. I'm working on the android app prototype. You will see the app on play store soon.
  - Krastan 4y ago
    Why didn't you use react native? Your website is react which would have made it easy to copy over components.
    - vivekweb2013 4y ago
      I'm not a big fan of react-native. I've tried it earlier and the app size is huge as it has to bundle so many things to make it work on android. So I prefer java/kotlin for android app which is compact and performant than react-native. BTW I'm also checking if https://fyne.io/ https://fyne.io/ can be used. I'll love to use golang for the app :)
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
The name needs to change. This tool commits the cardinal sin of choosing a name GitSomething, where Git is only incidental to the domain that the product is concerned with (notetaking) and which is made worse by being yet another project that says "Git" where what it means is "we're using the GitHub API". > You may not use the Marks in the following ways: ... > In any way that indicates that Git favors one distribution, platform, product, etc. over another except where explicitly indicated in writing by Conservancy. ... > In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy's written permission. For the avoidance of doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a product or service's use of Git code. http://git-scm.com/about/trademark http://git-scm.com/about/trademark > Let's say as an example that it does backups. We'd prefer it not call itself GitBackups. We don't endorse it, and it's just using the name to imply association that isn't there. You can come up with similar hypotheticals: GitMail that stores mailing list archives in Git, or GitWiki that uses Git as a backing store. https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw@sigill.intra.peff.net/ https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw... What's also notable is that it conflicts with what is permitted: 'Commands like "git-foo" (so you run it as "git foo") are generally OK. This is Git's well-known extension mechanism[...]' When "git-foo" exists, we've approved "Git Foo" as a matching project name'. This combined with the fact that Git itself already ships with the "git-notes" command baked right in...
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  thanks for pointing out. I'll change the name.
- joekrill 4y ago
  How do GitHub and Gitlab get away with this? Have they been given permission by Conservancy? Or are they in violation?
  - hobbyjogger 4y ago
    Essentially explained by the timing of Git adopting this policy (and actually having a trademark to enforce): https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw@sigill.intra.peff.net/ https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...
vhanda 4y ago
I love how more and more of us are using Git to store our notes, though in this case it's more coupled to GitHub than Git. If there is already a need to self-host this, then why not just hook into git and make this more generic? In fact, why is a Postgres database even needed? Please note that I'm biased. I work on [GitJournal](https://gitjournal.io https://gitjournal.io) which is similar, but only mobile based.
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  GitJournal is nice. Just wanted to check with whats your opinion about this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31580996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31580996 Did you get the permission for using "Git" mark?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - vhanda 4y ago
    I didn't know it was required. I'll shoot them an email and ask, and start thinking of a different name. In the case of Gitea [0], there doesn't seem to have been any response. Thanks for bringing this up. Though I wonder how well can "Software Freedom Conservancy" claim "GitSomething" is not allowed when there are clearly so so many projects doing it. Eg - Gitolite / Gittea. Trademarks are only so good as long as they are enforced. [0] - https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/4175 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/4175
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- RupertEisenhart 4y ago
  I just pointed GitNoter at my GitJournal repo and it loaded fairly well :). I'll investigate fiddling with the settings (dates get dumped into GitNoter notes), would be nice to have them interoperate perfectly. Thanks for GitJournal!
vandyswa 4y ago
If you _only_ want to keep textual notes--self hosted cloud style--then here's a minimalist web note solution. Just a few (Python) CGI's plus 6k HTML/CSS/JS: http://sources.vsta.org:7100/notepad/index http://sources.vsta.org:7100/notepad/index When less is more.
- deleted 4y ago
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arinlen 4y ago
I feel compelled to mention that Zotero [1] has been around for ages, has clients for most platforms, it's as FLOSS as it gets[2], and you are free to self-host if that's something you'd like. [1] https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/ [2] https://github.com/zotero https://github.com/zotero
- Datenstrom 4y ago
  Can second this I love Zotero. I only use it for research papers, e-books, and notes about them and I don't use it for personal notes or saving snipits of websites and such but I could see it also working well for that.
- deleted 4y ago
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- jcuenod 4y ago
  I use Zotero every day, but (1) self-hosting the server is not actually supported and (2) your notes are in a sqlite db. It is a great tool. I do wish I could self host, though, and I wish the db were just an index of md files (and maybe json for bibliographic details).
kevinmgranger 4y ago
For me, Evernote’s killer feature is automatic OCR. (Subs that I can just upload a doc through my phone’s camera). It looks like this doesn’t have that, unfortunately.
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Noted! I'll see if this feature can be added.
  - westurner 4y ago
    https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/plugins/current/ingest.html https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/plugins/curren... : > [Teh ElasticSearch Core Ingest Attachment Processor Plugin]: The ingest attachment plugin lets Elasticsearch extract file attachments in common formats (such as PPT, XLS, and PDF) by using the Apache text extraction library Tika. > The source field must be a base64 encoded binary. If you do not want to incur the overhead of converting back and forth between base64, you can use the CBOR format instead of JSON and specify the field as a bytes array instead of a string representation. The processor will skip the base64 decoding then Apache Tika supported formats > Images > TesseractOCR: https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html#Image_formats https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html#Image_formats : > When extracting from images, it is also possible to chain in Tesseract, via the TesseractOCRParser, to have OCR performed on the contents of the image. /? Meilisearch "ocr" GitHub; Looks like e.g. paperbase (agpl) also implements ocr with tesseractocr: https://docs.paperbase.app/ https://docs.paperbase.app/ tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract /? https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#search-engines https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#sea... ctrl-f "ocr"
    - westurner 4y ago
      Would be good to have: - Search results on a timeline indicating search match occurrence frequency; ability to "zoom in" or "drill down" - "Find more like these" that prepopulates a search query form - "Find more like these" that mutates the query pattern and displays the count for each original and mutated query along with the results; with optional optimization
baggachipz 4y ago
I created a self-hostable, automatically syncing PWA to keep notes and checklists (more of a Google Keep clone): https://tinylist.app https://tinylist.app
- deleted 4y ago
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- beingflo 4y ago
  Awesome, I love the concept! I've also been working on an encrypted note taking application but it doesn't have a landing page yet. Encryption needs to catch on more!
kushan2020 4y ago
Hey it’s nice to see some more open source apps in this space. I am working on a similar project bangle.io [1] for the past 3 years and it shares similar ideology as yours - an open source note taking web app. What are you using to interface with GitHub ? In my app I am directly using its api though I did consider looking into those git libraries for web. Definitely would like to collaborate if you are interested. [1] https://bangle.io https://bangle.io
- deleted 4y ago
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mike503 4y ago
It's kind of amusing everyone here is talking about Evernote being amazing for dropping attachments and everything and I use it simply for text/links and hate that it wants to do all that extra stuff. :)
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  exactly. most of the users just use it for text notes.
  - redredrobot 4y ago
    Are you sure about that? I tend to think that Evernote's differentiation is the vast feature diversity. IMO old software like this often continues to succeed because it can support the long-tail of use cases in a way that newer software does not.
mr-ron 4y ago
Been using simplenote for some time. Goal was to have just unobtrusive text notes, accessible via phone apps and browser, free, that allowed nesting bullet points (I write a lot of notes primarily using bullets) Simplenote.com has been great for all of these usecases.
- deleted 4y ago
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- Vincenius 4y ago
  Same for me - simplenote is awesome :)
johnflan 4y ago
I love this era of Self Hosted tools, it really has echoes of the fun of early computing
- dublin 4y ago
  Yes it does, and as I mention above, TiddlyWiki is another place to look for inspiration for a tool like this. It's been doing this sort of thing for 20 years now, and being a web-first tool, it's as open and standards-based as possible, and can be run without any server at all if you want to run it locally...
atleta 4y ago
I'm still looking for the note taking app that can replace Tomboy. Not because Tomboy is great (it isn't), but because it's actually a note taking app. Most apps seem to be this huge convoluted editors, with a UI resembling an IDE. Which I'm sure is pretty nice for creating a nice hierarchical structure, writing long documents and crosslinking them but, for me at least, note taking is about taking random short or ad hoc notes. Be it during a meeting or just collecting information or organizing thoughts about a specific topic but not necessarily for the long term and then using those while working in other apps (e.g. writing code, creating a blog post, etc.) And for that I need something that's lightweight on the screen. Just the text and none of the tools that take up extra space. Also, I'd have multiple notes (in separate windows) and have the app running all the time so that creating a new note is just a few clicks. (A global keyboard shortcut would be even better.) Now the major shortcoming of Tomboy (besides the lack of real markdown support, though the bullet point handling is pretty much OK) is that it gets stuck at this lightweight level and there is no UI for the aforementioned organization. (Though it does create links semi-automatically, which is not bad, though I don't use it a lot.) So it seems that one can have either end of the spectrum, but most documents, at least for me, would start as lightweight notes and then some of them may turn out to be something more convoluted and for the long term. So it would be nice to have an app that covers both. (Unfortunately, copy-pasting from Tomboy doesn't work well, so the bullet point hierarchy gets lost. Also, it would be nice to have it based on markdown and plain text files, but it uses xml, IIRC.)
- renewiltord 4y ago
  The built-in Apple Notes has this I think. You just point to the bottom right of your screen and you can write a new note.
  - NonNefarious 4y ago
    I used Evernote for a while, and then (if I remember correctly) they changed their terms, and I said nope. Right around that time, Apple finally pulled its head out of its ass and added groups or categories to Notes, making it viable. Now I have everything in Notes, synced through iCloud. Apple Notes doesn't use any standard format, but you can export your notes. Otherwise, I'd be way into an open-source, self-hosted solution.
PikachuEXE 4y ago
For private notes & random images/files app I would suggest trying https://joplinapp.org https://joplinapp.org But I use as private notes mainly, so can't say much on file storage side. Multiple sync target (e.g. Dropbox, Nextcloud, OneDrive etc.) with E2EE. But it's not polished so expect there might some strange limitations.
- l8rlump 4y ago
  I'd like to try this but it seems that there are limited options to import from Onenote. As far as I can tell, you can either try converting to markdown with an older version of Evernote (IIRC with limitations such as text formatting being lost), or use one of a few users' hacky solutions involving Pandoc. Is there an easier/better way?
  - PikachuEXE 4y ago
    Sorry I have no idea I started using it after Evernote with very few notes
tallship 4y ago
Hello @vivekweb2013, and thank you for creating this wonderful git based note utility. I'd like to draw your attention to issue #59 and in the meantime I'll be posting a short Fediverse article, basically just an announcement at this point, with a much more in depth article to follow once the FOSS based git support enhancement is released. .
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  @tallship thanks so much. I'll start working on that issue
jpomykala 4y ago
I’m wonder who is the target audience for that? How fun is self-hosting note taking app.
helloworld11 4y ago
For whatever it's worth to anyone else. I just use colornote. Simple enough, I can sync it if needed and haven't had any major problems yet (though in my more recent phone it for some reason doesn't want to connect for a cloud backup with a Gmail account). It's also fairly light and actually note-oriented, without mountains of other bloat that confuses all over the place.
tony2016 4y ago
People keep saying it's missing this feature and missing that. People use note taking apps in many different ways. If an app has all the features, it wouldn't be a free open source one by a single developer. I would make it a commercial one and compete with apps like EverNote. Even EverNote has issues.
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  @tony2016 Agree. Thanks so much for the support.

241 points by vivekweb2013 4y ago

vivekweb2013 4y ago

Hi Friends, I'm the author of GitNoter. I'd love to answer any questions you have

joe8756438 4y ago
Looks really cool, congrats on the launch! How would multiplayer notes work? Assuming everyone has access to the repo.
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Thanks. Any number of users can use GitNoter simultaneously on any number of devices against a single repo as long as all of them has write access to the repository.
pantulis 4y ago
I understand that this allows you to manage collections of notes in Markdown format backed up to a Git repository. This is nice and I consider this to be useful, but I would suggest not to position it against Evernote but against knowledge management tools for teams (internal wikis, confluences of the world, etc)
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  yeah I agree. This is really the knowledge management tool
  - lolive 4y ago
    When I presented Obsidian to a friend, and he told me that it was just a note-taking app, I was quite shocked by [what I consider to be] such a lack of consideration. Because I really use Obsidian as my second memory [marketing definitely worked on me, it seems :)]. Anyway... I have never used EverNote (==note taking?). And, as you have read, I am reaaaaally in Obsidian (==knowledge management?). Can any of you elaborate of the conceptual difference between both?
    - pantulis 4y ago
      Evernote positioned itself as a "second brain", but turned out to become an awesome Digital Vault. You can throw anything at it and Evernote will happily ingest it. You have blazingly fast search backed by Evernote cloud services, and even have some note linking capabilities but they are rudimentary when compared to a fully fledged PKM like Obsidian, DEVONthink, or others. These newer PKM tools allow you to reflect and reason on the content you have and massage it in ways that surface new ideas and allow you to follow unexpected relationships (hence being a true second brain). This is much more harder to achieve with Evernote. Both are valid and powerful tools but the use cases are different, maybe just because the definition of "second brain" has moved since Evernote was conceptualized on the 2000s.
    - adfm 4y ago
      If you like Obsidian, check out Logseq. Both handle plain-text Markdown, so you can use them interchangeably. Logseq also handles Org-mode files, if that’s your thing. Everything is local, but works well with cloud storage. There’s also an iOS app. It’s worth a look. (No affiliation) https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/
- SamBam 4y ago
  Agree: Knowledge management, not EverNote at all. EverNote is all about dropping random files into it (images, pdfs, etc). It's where you store your bills, your receipts, your photos of wine labels. It also has a very handy web clipper extension to save web pages (whole pages, sections, or bookmarks). I'm sure plenty of people use it differently, but I'm also quite confident (from how I've seen others describe it) that one its primary use-cases is as a big shoebox to dump everything into. You then search for that stuff through titles, tags and OCR in photos. I use it in a fundamentally different way from Obsidian.
eole666 4y ago
Nice project. Is there any plan to handle gitlab login/other kind of login as well ? For now it seems to work only with github.
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Yes. The idea is to support as many git services as possible. Which includes GitLab, Gitea, Bitbucket and more For the initial POC I have integrated it with GitHub
glook 4y ago
You don't have to compare this to Evernote. I really like what you have done so far. The preview of the MD is fantastic. Feels hard enough for me to find just that! I love the use of GitHub. I'm in!
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Thanks so much for the kind words
mkl 4y ago
Hi, does this support maths notation via MathJax or Katex?
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Not currently, But I've noted this. I'll see if this can be supported
  - mkl 4y ago
    Cool. If you add it, please use the  and \[ \] delimiters rather than $ $ and $$ $$. The former plays better with automated processing and currencies.
    - vivekweb2013 4y ago
      yeah sure
RupertEisenhart 4y ago
Could you support markdown headers like these: --- date: 2021-09-14T22:51:33+02:00 modified: 2021-09-29T15:40:38+02:00 --- Then it would interoperate with GitJournal perfectly I think :).
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Sure. I'll implement this feature
bachmeier 4y ago
Just a few suggestions (some overlap with other comments). If you really want it to be an Evernote competitor, it should have: Image/file upload Web clipper (singlefile is great) OCR (Tesseract has done what I need, not sure how that compares to Evernote) Basic task management Customizable dashboard Tagging and excellent search (these are Evernote's bread and butter) WYSIWYG editing Templates Integrations And it would be really nice if it could do math, which would be an advantage over Evernote. It's possible some of this is already implemented; I only gave your page a short look.
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Noted. thanks
- dublin 4y ago
  TiddlyWiki has hit most of these capabilities for many years now, and is nearly unique in wrapping up all the code and data in a single unit that can be run in any regular browser, from either local storage or a remote server or storage. (It does need a killer web clipper, though...) TiddlyWiki really is one of the cleverest apps I've ever run across, but I'm not much of a JS programmer, so it's got a bit of a learning curve if you want to hack on it. It's pretty easy to use right out of the box if you don't want to hack on it, though, and I'm giving some thought to moving most of the data I've collected in OneNote to TiddlyWiki to escape Microsoft's clutches after I've finally disentangled myself from Google... One thing I love is that TiddlyWikis I built 20 years ago (granted, they were simpler then) are still perfectly usable today. My perfect data keeper might be something of a mashup between TiddlyWiki and a JuPyteR notebook.
  - bachmeier 4y ago
    Another nice thing about TiddlyWiki is that you don't actually have to be a JS programmer to extend it. I run a local CGI server and that allows me to make all kinds of customizations in the language I want (most languages support local CGI servers). The querying capabilities of TiddlyWiki make it a nice database.
gimme_treefiddy 4y ago
Definitely will give a go by deploying privately. Does it support markdown extensions, like GitHub flavored markdown or something.
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  yes it supports github flavoured markdown
yurikoif 4y ago
It looks clean and super good! Considering moving from Obsidian as it gets more refined. A few more features IMO would be nice: (fuzzy) search; task management; math formula support; or just expose API for such development would be great as well.
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  thanks. I've noted the feedback. I'll work on implementing these features.
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
Do you have a docker image for self-hosting?
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Yes the application is containerised also I have created the helm charts for deployment on kubernetes cluster - https://github.com/git-noter/gitnoter-charts https://github.com/git-noter/gitnoter-charts
mrichman 4y ago
Why should I use your tool and not Joplin?
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  Because it does not require desktop client. It stores the notes in git repository so you have access to all the revisions which is very useful in case you want to revert any changes
wharfjumper 4y ago
Congrats. I think there's an opportunity for a markdown-based Confluence competitor. Something that can be used by non technical people. You might want to consider that use-case/positioning rather than personal note-taking. Major missing feature for the average user I think would be easy image/binary upload, embedding and preview. By leveraging Github (and Gitlab please) auth it makes this usable by enterprise which is smart I think.
- vivekweb2013 4y ago
  thanks so much for the feedback. I'm working on providing the image upload functionality. Markdown preview is currently available with the preview button in the right corner of markdown editor.
Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
Congratulations on the launch! Others have mentioned about Search, In case you choose to implement it then I'd suggest a special attention towards code search. I presume formatting code with markdown is a non-issue, So implementing first class code search capabilities would be real differentiator among other notes applications and could likely fill a need-gap.
baytowner 4y ago
Does this support shared note-taking - I tried fast forwarding through the video tour (please consider making it shorter) and it mentioned changing repositories so in that same line of thought - is multi-repository note taking possible, each shared with different people?

hohloma 4y ago

Another alternative that Im using and very happy with - Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/). Also provides import from Evernote which mostly worked in my case.

MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
Second that. Used to be in Evernote, but eventually just exported the Evernote, imported to Joplin and set up their web clipper extension in Chrome. Joplin stores notes as basically markup files, so sync is pretty trivial through any file syncing service / app in the universe.
vivekweb2013 4y ago
Agree, but GitNoter is self hosted webapp it does not require any desktop/mobile client. It can be directly accessible with the browser. Thanks for the feedback. I'll check if import from evernote can be added as a feature to GitNoter.
- dicknuckle 4y ago
  I realize this is probably a big ask, but an import from Google Keep would be a huge plus. Google eventually kills off EVERYTHING good.
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    yes right. I'm thinking of implementing add-ons for all popular note taking services like google, evernote, onenote etc so that the notes can be imported using gitnoter.
    - henearkr 4y ago
      Nice idea! And Google Tasks, please. That would be a relief to finally make a link between Google Keep and Google Tasks, something long overdue!

sandgiant 4y ago

Thanks for sharing, but almost all "alternatives to Evernote" lack some of the most important (to me) features like web clipping, OCR and related notes. The only real alternative to Evernote I've found is DEVONthink.

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vivekweb2013 4y ago
Thanks for pointing the web clipping. I've noted it. I can add this feature to GitNoter. Hopefully soon
KennyFromIT 4y ago
Give Joplin a try
lolive 4y ago
Web clipping?
lapser 4y ago
Not exactly open source, but as far as "alternatives to Evernote" goes, I've been told about Obsidian[0] (though I've not jumped in yet), which has plugins for OCR and web clipping, and considering the community, I'd be surprised if related notes aren't a thing. [0] https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
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mgdlbp 4y ago
These days I tend to rely on archive.org (+ archive.today) and a plain link rather than web clipping tools. I just find it more useful coming back later to have access to the full fidelity of a page and its context. It also feels appropriate to be publicly preserving parts of the web that you've found useful enough to note down. As someone at archive.org said, 'If you see something, save something.' Edit: n.b. archive.org does honour takedown requests, though they're rare and usually somewhat predictable. cf. gwern's drastic approach of archiving all the pages he's ever visited, https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs

igtztorrero 4y ago

Nice Go code in API !!! I will use it and contribute! Congratulations! Long waiting for this !

vivekweb2013 4y ago
Thanks so much. Golang is awesome. I've recently learned it. I'm looking forward to your contribution to codebase.

Kalanos 4y ago

Does it store images? Are you going to make a mobile app?

vivekweb2013 4y ago
You can add the images inside markdown using existing image url. The image upload is not implemented yet. I've noted it & I'll work on this functionality Thanks for showing interest in the mobile app. I'm working on the android app prototype. You will see the app on play store soon.
- Krastan 4y ago
  Why didn't you use react native? Your website is react which would have made it easy to copy over components.
  - vivekweb2013 4y ago
    I'm not a big fan of react-native. I've tried it earlier and the app size is huge as it has to bundle so many things to make it work on android. So I prefer java/kotlin for android app which is compact and performant than react-native. BTW I'm also checking if https://fyne.io/ https://fyne.io/ can be used. I'll love to use golang for the app :)

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

The name needs to change. This tool commits the cardinal sin of choosing a name GitSomething, where Git is only incidental to the domain that the product is concerned with (notetaking) and which is made worse by being yet another project that says "Git" where what it means is "we're using the GitHub API". > You may not use the Marks in the following ways: ... > In any way that indicates that Git favors one distribution, platform, product, etc. over another except where explicitly indicated in writing by Conservancy. ... > In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy's written permission. For the avoidance of doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a product or service's use of Git code. http://git-scm.com/about/trademark http://git-scm.com/about/trademark > Let's say as an example that it does backups. We'd prefer it not call itself GitBackups. We don't endorse it, and it's just using the name to imply association that isn't there. You can come up with similar hypotheticals: GitMail that stores mailing list archives in Git, or GitWiki that uses Git as a backing store. https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw@sigill.intra.peff.net/ https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw... What's also notable is that it conflicts with what is permitted: 'Commands like "git-foo" (so you run it as "git foo") are generally OK. This is Git's well-known extension mechanism[...]' When "git-foo" exists, we've approved "Git Foo" as a matching project name'. This combined with the fact that Git itself already ships with the "git-notes" command baked right in...

vivekweb2013 4y ago
thanks for pointing out. I'll change the name.
joekrill 4y ago
How do GitHub and Gitlab get away with this? Have they been given permission by Conservancy? Or are they in violation?
- hobbyjogger 4y ago
  Essentially explained by the timing of Git adopting this policy (and actually having a trademark to enforce): https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw@sigill.intra.peff.net/ https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...

vhanda 4y ago

I love how more and more of us are using Git to store our notes, though in this case it's more coupled to GitHub than Git. If there is already a need to self-host this, then why not just hook into git and make this more generic? In fact, why is a Postgres database even needed? Please note that I'm biased. I work on [GitJournal](https://gitjournal.io https://gitjournal.io) which is similar, but only mobile based.

vivekweb2013 4y ago
GitJournal is nice. Just wanted to check with whats your opinion about this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31580996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31580996 Did you get the permission for using "Git" mark?
- deleted 4y ago
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- vhanda 4y ago
  I didn't know it was required. I'll shoot them an email and ask, and start thinking of a different name. In the case of Gitea [0], there doesn't seem to have been any response. Thanks for bringing this up. Though I wonder how well can "Software Freedom Conservancy" claim "GitSomething" is not allowed when there are clearly so so many projects doing it. Eg - Gitolite / Gittea. Trademarks are only so good as long as they are enforced. [0] - https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/4175 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/4175
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RupertEisenhart 4y ago
I just pointed GitNoter at my GitJournal repo and it loaded fairly well :). I'll investigate fiddling with the settings (dates get dumped into GitNoter notes), would be nice to have them interoperate perfectly. Thanks for GitJournal!

vandyswa 4y ago

If you _only_ want to keep textual notes--self hosted cloud style--then here's a minimalist web note solution. Just a few (Python) CGI's plus 6k HTML/CSS/JS: http://sources.vsta.org:7100/notepad/index http://sources.vsta.org:7100/notepad/index When less is more.

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arinlen 4y ago

I feel compelled to mention that Zotero [1] has been around for ages, has clients for most platforms, it's as FLOSS as it gets[2], and you are free to self-host if that's something you'd like. [1] https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/ [2] https://github.com/zotero https://github.com/zotero

Datenstrom 4y ago
Can second this I love Zotero. I only use it for research papers, e-books, and notes about them and I don't use it for personal notes or saving snipits of websites and such but I could see it also working well for that.
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jcuenod 4y ago
I use Zotero every day, but (1) self-hosting the server is not actually supported and (2) your notes are in a sqlite db. It is a great tool. I do wish I could self host, though, and I wish the db were just an index of md files (and maybe json for bibliographic details).

kevinmgranger 4y ago

For me, Evernote’s killer feature is automatic OCR. (Subs that I can just upload a doc through my phone’s camera). It looks like this doesn’t have that, unfortunately.

vivekweb2013 4y ago
Noted! I'll see if this feature can be added.
- westurner 4y ago
  https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/plugins/current/ingest.html https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/plugins/curren... : > [Teh ElasticSearch Core Ingest Attachment Processor Plugin]: The ingest attachment plugin lets Elasticsearch extract file attachments in common formats (such as PPT, XLS, and PDF) by using the Apache text extraction library Tika. > The source field must be a base64 encoded binary. If you do not want to incur the overhead of converting back and forth between base64, you can use the CBOR format instead of JSON and specify the field as a bytes array instead of a string representation. The processor will skip the base64 decoding then Apache Tika supported formats > Images > TesseractOCR: https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html#Image_formats https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html#Image_formats : > When extracting from images, it is also possible to chain in Tesseract, via the TesseractOCRParser, to have OCR performed on the contents of the image. /? Meilisearch "ocr" GitHub; Looks like e.g. paperbase (agpl) also implements ocr with tesseractocr: https://docs.paperbase.app/ https://docs.paperbase.app/ tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract /? https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#search-engines https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#sea... ctrl-f "ocr"
  - westurner 4y ago
    Would be good to have: - Search results on a timeline indicating search match occurrence frequency; ability to "zoom in" or "drill down" - "Find more like these" that prepopulates a search query form - "Find more like these" that mutates the query pattern and displays the count for each original and mutated query along with the results; with optional optimization

baggachipz 4y ago

I created a self-hostable, automatically syncing PWA to keep notes and checklists (more of a Google Keep clone): https://tinylist.app https://tinylist.app

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beingflo 4y ago
Awesome, I love the concept! I've also been working on an encrypted note taking application but it doesn't have a landing page yet. Encryption needs to catch on more!

kushan2020 4y ago

Hey it’s nice to see some more open source apps in this space. I am working on a similar project bangle.io [1] for the past 3 years and it shares similar ideology as yours - an open source note taking web app. What are you using to interface with GitHub ? In my app I am directly using its api though I did consider looking into those git libraries for web. Definitely would like to collaborate if you are interested. [1] https://bangle.io https://bangle.io

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mike503 4y ago

It's kind of amusing everyone here is talking about Evernote being amazing for dropping attachments and everything and I use it simply for text/links and hate that it wants to do all that extra stuff. :)

vivekweb2013 4y ago
exactly. most of the users just use it for text notes.
- redredrobot 4y ago
  Are you sure about that? I tend to think that Evernote's differentiation is the vast feature diversity. IMO old software like this often continues to succeed because it can support the long-tail of use cases in a way that newer software does not.

mr-ron 4y ago

Been using simplenote for some time. Goal was to have just unobtrusive text notes, accessible via phone apps and browser, free, that allowed nesting bullet points (I write a lot of notes primarily using bullets) Simplenote.com has been great for all of these usecases.

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Vincenius 4y ago
Same for me - simplenote is awesome :)

johnflan 4y ago

I love this era of Self Hosted tools, it really has echoes of the fun of early computing

dublin 4y ago
Yes it does, and as I mention above, TiddlyWiki is another place to look for inspiration for a tool like this. It's been doing this sort of thing for 20 years now, and being a web-first tool, it's as open and standards-based as possible, and can be run without any server at all if you want to run it locally...

atleta 4y ago

I'm still looking for the note taking app that can replace Tomboy. Not because Tomboy is great (it isn't), but because it's actually a note taking app. Most apps seem to be this huge convoluted editors, with a UI resembling an IDE. Which I'm sure is pretty nice for creating a nice hierarchical structure, writing long documents and crosslinking them but, for me at least, note taking is about taking random short or ad hoc notes. Be it during a meeting or just collecting information or organizing thoughts about a specific topic but not necessarily for the long term and then using those while working in other apps (e.g. writing code, creating a blog post, etc.) And for that I need something that's lightweight on the screen. Just the text and none of the tools that take up extra space. Also, I'd have multiple notes (in separate windows) and have the app running all the time so that creating a new note is just a few clicks. (A global keyboard shortcut would be even better.) Now the major shortcoming of Tomboy (besides the lack of real markdown support, though the bullet point handling is pretty much OK) is that it gets stuck at this lightweight level and there is no UI for the aforementioned organization. (Though it does create links semi-automatically, which is not bad, though I don't use it a lot.) So it seems that one can have either end of the spectrum, but most documents, at least for me, would start as lightweight notes and then some of them may turn out to be something more convoluted and for the long term. So it would be nice to have an app that covers both. (Unfortunately, copy-pasting from Tomboy doesn't work well, so the bullet point hierarchy gets lost. Also, it would be nice to have it based on markdown and plain text files, but it uses xml, IIRC.)

renewiltord 4y ago
The built-in Apple Notes has this I think. You just point to the bottom right of your screen and you can write a new note.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  I used Evernote for a while, and then (if I remember correctly) they changed their terms, and I said nope. Right around that time, Apple finally pulled its head out of its ass and added groups or categories to Notes, making it viable. Now I have everything in Notes, synced through iCloud. Apple Notes doesn't use any standard format, but you can export your notes. Otherwise, I'd be way into an open-source, self-hosted solution.

PikachuEXE 4y ago

For private notes & random images/files app I would suggest trying https://joplinapp.org https://joplinapp.org But I use as private notes mainly, so can't say much on file storage side. Multiple sync target (e.g. Dropbox, Nextcloud, OneDrive etc.) with E2EE. But it's not polished so expect there might some strange limitations.

l8rlump 4y ago
I'd like to try this but it seems that there are limited options to import from Onenote. As far as I can tell, you can either try converting to markdown with an older version of Evernote (IIRC with limitations such as text formatting being lost), or use one of a few users' hacky solutions involving Pandoc. Is there an easier/better way?
- PikachuEXE 4y ago
  Sorry I have no idea I started using it after Evernote with very few notes

tallship 4y ago

Hello @vivekweb2013, and thank you for creating this wonderful git based note utility. I'd like to draw your attention to issue #59 and in the meantime I'll be posting a short Fediverse article, basically just an announcement at this point, with a much more in depth article to follow once the FOSS based git support enhancement is released. .

vivekweb2013 4y ago
@tallship thanks so much. I'll start working on that issue

jpomykala 4y ago

I’m wonder who is the target audience for that? How fun is self-hosting note taking app.

helloworld11 4y ago

For whatever it's worth to anyone else. I just use colornote. Simple enough, I can sync it if needed and haven't had any major problems yet (though in my more recent phone it for some reason doesn't want to connect for a cloud backup with a Gmail account). It's also fairly light and actually note-oriented, without mountains of other bloat that confuses all over the place.

tony2016 4y ago

People keep saying it's missing this feature and missing that. People use note taking apps in many different ways. If an app has all the features, it wouldn't be a free open source one by a single developer. I would make it a commercial one and compete with apps like EverNote. Even EverNote has issues.

vivekweb2013 4y ago
@tony2016 Agree. Thanks so much for the support.