I am currently using Trilium for my notes. But I am constantly annoyed by the mobile experience. What I want:
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sync across devices from a central server (this is why I went with Trilium, as having a web client means there’s always the same notes everywhere)
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native Android app with local storage so that I don’t have to log in just for looking up a single note (this is what annoys me most about Trilium, plus the UX on mobile)
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web version (for use on PC)
I only need very basic markup, markdown support is enough. I don’t worry about security, as I run everything inside my own VPN.
Is there something like this out there? I always see people raving about Obsidian, but sync seems to really suck there. Using some folder sync is a no go for me.
Quillpad forever ❤️
Look at Notesnook. You can even self-host the server, though it’s somewhat more complicated than it needs to be.
Take a look at Affine. I am using Joplin currently, however I am leaning more and more towards Affine due to OIDC support
Joplin for sure. But I personally use Obsidian because of the UI. I sync it with my server using Syncthing. All devices are synced to the server and not with each other so I have one source of Truth.
I suggest looking into using or hosting Notesnook
Mobile app is great. Desktop and web clients are great. End to end encrypted.
Self hosting docs I am unsure of. But it exists.
Joplin will do this for you. It comes ready to sync with all sorts of cloud options, as well as “local folder” which works well with Syncthing. It’s offline-first, cross-platform, and FOSS.
Can confirm. This app is great! I particularly like that it works across all OSs.
Obsidian with Syncthing running on both your Android and your server for syncing your notes.
That solution doesn’t exactly spark joy. Folder sync in general is, in my experience, too error prone. So I just stay away from it. Maybe I’ll need to finally give it another try.
I sync hundreds of gigs, (if not terabytes at this point) using Syncthing with errors on only one machine (it’s running on 6 devices, including a VM). And those errors are of my own doing, not random Syncthing errors.
It’s surprisingly robust these days, especially for a single-user notes.
I have an indexing job that runs on my server every 30 minutes, saving into a text file (it indexes my media folder, which is about 3TB of movies and TV shows).
Those text files sync to my phone when they’ve changed (so every 30 minutes). They’re always up to date when I open them.
My phone also has jobs to continually sync my photos to home, an ad-hoc folder to my laptop, and about 25 other folder pairs (including NeoBackup) that sync under different conditions, without fail.
I’m currently testing Cherrytree using Sourcherry on Android and it seems to work fine as a single-user solution with Syncthing.
Obsidian livesync works really well. Notes are live synced between my desktop and Android device
Well, OK, you got me to give that a try!
Well, that sounds good. But my god is that a complicated mess. It’s not working for me and I don’t have the will to deal with that crap anymore. Set up my own CouchDB, ran the init script, connection test is fine. But I can’t get the plugin to actually sync anything, it just keeps failing with “Failed to initialise the encryption key, preventing replication”. Whatever that means. It won’t explain which encryption key or what failed. I did not enable E2E encryption.
Maybe run through the installation again, and run via Docker if you aren’t already. It was plug-and-play when I set it up
Alternatively, obsidian offers a 1st party paid sync feature
I am using SiYuan and I use the web app as a short cut, so that I can easily create notes on my phone.
This along with a home VPN and you can hit it from anywhere.
I’ve been happily using SilverBullet lately too. Can recommend
Can recommend, works offline and online with PWA support and stores everything in Markdown files for easy migration if you want to change your frontend.
For this scenario, I can recommend Standard Notes and/or Notesnook. I’ve tried Joplin and Logseq and didn’t like either.
If privacy is important for you, https://anytype.io/ has E2EE (End-to-End Encryption). You can run your sync nodes also. Personally, I’ve used Roam Research, Doom Emacs, moved to Logseq, then Obsidian, back to Logseq and now I’m using Anytype for two years.
Edit (hit post by mistake): The encryption part was not a must for me also, but then I started using my notes in my work laptop also and I didn’t want my notes stored in plain text on a computer which is not fully controlled by me. I’m mentioning it because over time you’ll have many, many notes and the transition from one tool to the other is very time consuming.
Org-mode and git push works for me.
I’m not mentally ill enough for that. 😛
I use the Quillpad app and sync it with Nextcloud notes. Been pretty flawless so far.
I have Joplin with Nextcloud sync. It works fine for me! It’s got a desktop app and a mobile app with, in my opinion, pretty good UI. Markdown support, syncing between devices, etc. are all there. You don’t need to connect to the network to view notes, a local copy is saved.
Obsidian aldo has (paid, subscription) native sync that is supposed to work better than file sync. Another alternative is git sync. That’s basically file sync through git but great if you want to track your changes.
Obsidian with Syncthing
There’s a community plugin for self hosted live sync.
