I’ve had an odd amount of difficulty finding a “perfect” notes app.
For me, mobile and desktop apps plus easy family sharing of individual notes are important.
Apple Notes is really the best I’ve got.
The other solutions I’ve found mother cost too much or have some odd dealbreaker features, or they’re over-complicated, or they’re ugly.
Zoho Notebook is on the ugly side but it’s cheap and has apps on all platforms.
Craft is pretty good but if you hit the need for the paid tier it’s a bit pricey.
I think it’s possible that vibecoding an Apple Notes clone is actually the best solution for me.
A lot of people like Obsidian but I think it’s a bit crazy, and I think it’s unacceptable how difficult it is to self-host the sync functionality, especially since again the paid tier is too expensive.
my deepest darkest secret is that i secretly really like macOS Stickies.app to jot things down with just enough WYSIWYG markup to capture an idea (before I immediately shuffle the idea somewhere else, e.g. emacs).
the application itself is relatively hideous, and I kinda see that as a feature (because the app is not particularly fit-for-use for just about anything else besides a quick "tmp" buffer with RTF).
I've settled on markdown with optional linking semantics. I've bounced around between the various popular apps, but having plain text files at the end of the day is important to me. I was quite happy with logseq and abandoned them as soon as they decided to invest in a database first model. Fortunately all of my notes were mostly just markdown and migration is relatively easy. In the era of LLMs I'm not really using a dedicated notes front end. I've got a notes system which includes the ability to add things to Family Apple Notes and Apple Reminders under various categories. My "LLM Assistants" can read my Apple Notes and Reminders so that's the way I stay in sync on most devices I own.
I went from notes.txt in vim to notes.org in emacs for a while (didn't use much org stuff beyond bullet points), back to vim with the same notes.org file but I basically treat it like notes.txt again. Synced with SyncThing, so I could edit it on my phone but in practice I don't think I ever do.
It is 2026... You can't complain about other people's software anymore. Spend about 30 minutes vibe coding your perfect app and you'll never go back. I've basically done that, remade every utility on my phone, on my computer, hyper customized everything that bothered me about all those other software. All local and connected to my private server for sync and backup. And I barely know how to code... I even included in every one of my apps a button that sends me to a session in my custom made ai agent app to change/update/debug any complaints I have about my own apps, on the spot. "Hey codex, that button doesn't do exactly what I wanted quite as fast as I wanted please make it better and faster" wait 5 minutes - done. It's the future... Take advantage of it
I’ve had an odd amount of difficulty finding a “perfect” notes app.
For me, mobile and desktop apps plus easy family sharing of individual notes are important.
Apple Notes is really the best I’ve got.
The other solutions I’ve found mother cost too much or have some odd dealbreaker features, or they’re over-complicated, or they’re ugly.
Zoho Notebook is on the ugly side but it’s cheap and has apps on all platforms.
Craft is pretty good but if you hit the need for the paid tier it’s a bit pricey.
I think it’s possible that vibecoding an Apple Notes clone is actually the best solution for me.
A lot of people like Obsidian but I think it’s a bit crazy, and I think it’s unacceptable how difficult it is to self-host the sync functionality, especially since again the paid tier is too expensive.
I use obsidian and use a third party plugin for sync and sync it to my NextCloud server.
my deepest darkest secret is that i secretly really like macOS Stickies.app to jot things down with just enough WYSIWYG markup to capture an idea (before I immediately shuffle the idea somewhere else, e.g. emacs).
the application itself is relatively hideous, and I kinda see that as a feature (because the app is not particularly fit-for-use for just about anything else besides a quick "tmp" buffer with RTF).
I've settled on markdown with optional linking semantics. I've bounced around between the various popular apps, but having plain text files at the end of the day is important to me. I was quite happy with logseq and abandoned them as soon as they decided to invest in a database first model. Fortunately all of my notes were mostly just markdown and migration is relatively easy. In the era of LLMs I'm not really using a dedicated notes front end. I've got a notes system which includes the ability to add things to Family Apple Notes and Apple Reminders under various categories. My "LLM Assistants" can read my Apple Notes and Reminders so that's the way I stay in sync on most devices I own.
I went from notes.txt in vim to notes.org in emacs for a while (didn't use much org stuff beyond bullet points), back to vim with the same notes.org file but I basically treat it like notes.txt again. Synced with SyncThing, so I could edit it on my phone but in practice I don't think I ever do.
It is 2026... You can't complain about other people's software anymore. Spend about 30 minutes vibe coding your perfect app and you'll never go back. I've basically done that, remade every utility on my phone, on my computer, hyper customized everything that bothered me about all those other software. All local and connected to my private server for sync and backup. And I barely know how to code... I even included in every one of my apps a button that sends me to a session in my custom made ai agent app to change/update/debug any complaints I have about my own apps, on the spot. "Hey codex, that button doesn't do exactly what I wanted quite as fast as I wanted please make it better and faster" wait 5 minutes - done. It's the future... Take advantage of it
[humor]
The rub of using emacs is that you really can't complain about anybody else's software, because it's 100% your fault :grin:.