Up to now I’ve been using Simplenote, which has a Linux client (but also Android & iOS) & supports live collaboration on notes. However, Simplenote hasn’t had a meaningful update for a long time, & it’s recently been behaving strangely, e.g. notes undeleting themselves, line duplications & undeletions.
Can anyone recommend an alternative? Spinning up an ownCloud/nextcloud instance just to use Joplin feels a little overkill. I stumbled across turtl, but the project looks abandoned.
Joplin has multiple sync options. Other than Nextcloud, you can use OneDrive, Dropbox, and they have a subscription service as well.
Obsidian is another to look at, but you need to either pay for sync or bring your own sync (though I don’t know that you can sync to mobile without using their sync edit: see below comment by @fossisfun@lemmy.ml that explains how to do it).
I think it’s probably helpful to know if sync across platforms is important to you, and if so, whether you’re willing to pay for it. I’m not sure that there are really many alternatives to an app provided for free with free syncing - that costs money to provide and honestly I’d be a bit dubious about using a service like that.
You can select a local folder in Obsidian for Android and sync the folder with Syncthing. You can even revoke network permissions for Obsidian and it all works completely offline (Flatpak override: --unshare=network / GrapheneOS: don’t allow the network permission).
This is my current setup, even though Obsidian is not FOSS. I like that it stores standard Markdown files in a traditional filesystem hierarchy, instead of what Joplin does with using Markdown files as a database. This means that with Obsidian I can use any text editor or any other Markdown app to access and edit my notes, whereas with Joplin I would have to export them first to standard Markdown and then potentially rename and reorganise all the files and their attachments.
Unfortunately with iOS you are stuck with Obsidian Sync because Syncthing does not work because of the permission model. Otherwise I prefer Obsidian over Joplin for the above mentioned reasons and nice extension ecosystem. It’s easy to get your files out of Obsidian, no vendor lock-in
Git clone with something like Termux on Android ? Bit of hassle, but you can make a desktop shortcut with bash scripts to make it easier.
I just sync a directory called “Notes” everywhere and use whatever text editor is most comfortable on any given platform to edit Markdown documents. Helix on desktop, Markor (or, increasingly, Simple Text Editor) on Android. For checklists, same thing except I use todo.txt for the file format, and the todo script on the desktop and Simpletask on Android.
I have been looking for a self-hosted, concurrent collaborative web editor, as asking my wife to write Markdown is a bit much, and the syncing becomes more complex, but I haven’t settled on something.
Hedgedoc is a competent selfhostable alternative. V2.0 is around the corner.
Thanks, Hedgedoc looks like a neat project. It’s focused on Markdown, which is nice, and the preview is handy. The editor requires some knowledge of Markdown, and willingness to use it in some instances, which means it won’t be the best option for my wife. While she’s certainly capable of learning markdown, she has no willingness - it’s one of those areas where she just can’t be arsed to fuss with it. Embedding images, for example, and even seeing the markup while she’s editing is distracting for her.
Anyway, I need to find some WYSIWIG editor. If it saves and loads markdown, all the better, but it’s more important that the editor lool Word-ish, which is what she has to use at work.
Thanks for the pointer, though!
Obsidian is a brilliant note app, it’s free provided you setup your cloud sync solution (I use syncthing) as it just creates .md files that you can do whatever you want with
For note taking, Joplin is pretty good, in fact I went from Simplenote to Evernote (over kill and not free) to Joplin using Dropbox for the syncing (syncing is done by Joplin, so you don’t need a ‘syncing’ app) between my PCs, all Linux and my Android phone. Simple to set up and free. I do not use it as a Journal as that is extremely poor, but for notes, it’s perfect
