this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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If you're looking for a free alternative, check out how to use Markdown files. Obsidian is a popular (but not open-source) program. The beautiful of .md is that it's plain text and can be easily imported into a variety of applications, including a simple text editor like Notepad. Here's a good overview video.
Yes, Obsidian is great. The app itself is proprietary but the files are portable plain text. I feel like that makes it pretty future proof. If it ever shuts down or enshittifies, there will be alternatives.
Or logseq which is open source.
Or joplin. Or a meriad of other apps
Logseq has worked best for me and my ADHD so far.
Last I checked, Joplin does not use a folder structure that is easy to port over. Their files are all id's instead of usable file names, so without Joplin, you won't be finding anything.
They are still plaintext .MD files though.
Joplin requires you to migrate each notebook individually so it's fiddly if you have lots of notebooks in lots of folders.
But one you've done it you're free!
Well worth the effort. I downgraded to free Evernote after the last price hike and stopped using it... Now I can delete the app entirely.
I don't use Evernote, so I don't have a great feel for its capabilities, but my impression from the skims I've done in the past is that if someone is using Evernote, their workflow may not adapt directly to Markdown.
It has the ability to have paper documents (handwritten things, business cards, etc) scanned in and the system is aware of it, can use the business cards as contacts.
It's got to-do lists. Markdown doesn't really have a concept of that. Org-mode does, but that's not really a standardized format like Markdown is.
It has calendar integration.
It has embedded images. From samples, Evernote seems to bill this as people using this for things like hand sketches. There are ways to embed images in some variants of Markdown, but Markdown (and associated software) isn't really primarily aimed at mixed-media documents, and I would guess that part of the selling point of Evernote is that there's a low bar to adding them.
It supports embedding things like Excel documents.
All that being said, I like Markdown, and for my own notes, I tend to use org-mode for things that aren't gonna be distributed, and Markdown for things that are. But while I use them -- and for my use cases, they do some things better, like having tables that recompute values in org-mode, and I can easily use source control on them -- I don't think that they'd be a great drop-in replacement for many people who use Evernote. They'd have to use a different workflow.
Markdown is great if you spend a lot of time typing text on a computer. But if you spend time jotting notes by with some sort of stylus input mechanism or on paper, interspersing them with text, putting other non-text documents with it, I don't know if it's the best approach.
I'd add that I'd like to see a couple changes to Markdown, and would like to see a "Markdown Advanced" that tries to be more like org-mode.
As it is:
becomes
EDIT: Okay, just noticed that in lemmy's Markdown variant, the auto-renumbering apparently doesn't occur, while it does on Reddit.
As it is:
produces
The Fallout series
"Markdown Advanced"
What I'd like to also have is a "Markdown Advanced". Today, I use org-mode as a marked-up text format that can do a lot of useful things (to-do lists as a first-order concept, calendar-integrated deadlines, inline spreadsheets that can update when values update, etc). Markdown can't do that. But org-mode was developed for emacs, and while I understand that vim and probably some other editors have partial implementations, it was not standardized. I think that for org-mode, that's probably a good thing -- it lets the format be easily-extended. But it kills org-mode for document interchange -- it's only useful for stuff that you plan to keep to yourself, where you can ensure that you're using the same program to read and write it. I'd like to see a marked-up text format that has these features and has a frozen, fully-specified, syntax, so that many programs can read and write it.
Another option here is GitHub. I keep my markdown notes in a repo that I just clone from there to my various machines... And then I get to edit them in vim. 😂
It looks great, but I’m not sure if it’s a good fit for storing and searching documents. Do you think that might work?
You can have non-markdown files in your vault, but I'm not sure how readily you can search them by default; there may be plugins that support that use case though.