What does HackerNews think of notesnook?

These guys also tried to submit PRs on the Notesnook[0] repository. The PRs are really good but there's no way to talk to the actual developer working behind those PRs. They have a single central account named "gitstart" and all PRs that any of their user works on falls under that account. Of course, we couldn't accept PRs from them because they don't follow DCO[1] i.e., DCO requires that the committer MUST NOT be an organization.

I talked to them about this and they said they'd work on it etc. etc. Not sure if anything has changed in that regard or not.

[0] https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook

[1] https://developercertificate.org/

or Notesnook[1], which is also open-source, and E2E. I find it better and more reliable than SN.

[1] https://notesnook.com [2] https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook

Unless I'm missing something very obvious, the source repository https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook only includes the client apps and not the server, and the parent organization "streetwriters" doesn't seem to have any other repositories for the server. How are you supposed to run your own instance without that?

There's also a lot of marketing-speak in the repository documentation and little to no documentation on how to actually deploy it. Overall this leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

Compare this for example to Bookstack, which gets right to the point for how to install and deploy, with no marketing nonsense. https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack

I have been using Notesnook[0] for over a year (mostly because its encrypted and private) and it has helped me tremendously. Obsidian is too text-editor-esque for me. I haven't tried Logseq or Dendron though.

I actually like how Notesnook forces you to keep your organization at 2 levels. Restricting at first it helped me simplify my workflow a lot and finding things is a breeze since I know it can't be more than 2 levels deep. For some reason I can't wrap my head around interlinking; hierarchy based organization is good enough for me.

Taking notes doesn't need anything else.

Aside: the recent news about Notesnook going open source[1] has gotten me really excited. This might actually turn out to be a notes app I stick to. Let's see where the winds blow...

[0] https://notesnook.com/

[1] https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook

Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits.

With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don't mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but:

1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can't even try out many of their editors.

2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am not sure how having 3 kinds of rich text editors is helpful but they have them.

3. They don't allow any form of account recovery. Which sounds really epic on paper but once you forget your password, you lose all your data.

4. The feature parity between their different apps across platforms is abysmal. The android app is notoriously feature lacking compared to the Web version. (They did put out an update which hopefully changes things).

5. In my extensive usage of the app, conflicts are very normal. I have no issue with that but there's no way to resolve them without creating duplicate copies of the note which clutters up the UI.

5. the UX is poor. No right click on notes, no distraction free mode, no way to collapse the huge notes list.

6. Search and organization seems like an after thought. The only way to organize is via tags. Tags are nice and all but there's not much you can do with them.

7. Their pricing seems absurd.

8. The development seems to be going no where. They are active but many of the above issues are still not addressed.

But as I said, it's not all bad. Most people won't notice the above in their initial usage. They have a solid app with okay features.

If you are a new user looking for encrypted notes and all that hosh posh or just an alternative to SN, you should also give Notesnook[1][2] a try; it solves all of the above issues in a sensible way. Do note that I am the dev so I am obviously biased. It's not perfect but I think it is a better alternative.

[1]https://notesnook.com/

[2]https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook/ (it's not open source but the repo has some good FAQ that you might be interested in reading).