Hello! I’m still not satisfied with my note taking app. I tried dozen of them, read tons of lists on random blogs on the internet, without any success. I’ll try to ask you then.

I’m looking for a note taking app with just this 3 features:

  • richtext/WYSIWYG (i don’t want to write plain text and then press a button to see it rendered)
  • it has to support CHECKBOXES! Most of the apps I tried does not support them, or supported them only if all the note was a checklist. I don’t want a checklist, I want a note where I can put some checkbox inside!
  • FOSS and active

The one I’m currently using is obsidian, but it’s not FOSS and it feels very overcomplicated for a simple note apps.

Any suggestion is welcome!

EDIT: forgot to mention, I’m talking about Android XD

    • tubbadu@lemmy.kde.socialOP
      1·
      10 months ago

      I just downloaded it, the UI is pretty neat, but it is not actually richtext, just plaintext with the “view” button to view the formatted output (readonly). Is there a setting I missed to change this behavior?

      thanks for the suggestion!

  • Plume (She/Her)@beehaw.org
    0·
    10 months ago

    I know someone else already mentioned it but I’m going to do the same. Notesnook. I have been using it for around six months now.

    I have been looking for the perfect note taking up for a long time. I have some of the same concern as you and Standard Notes looked like a promising app for me but it also looked really overpriced and kind of over complicated.

    Notesnook pretty much had everything I wanted. The most important thing for me is that it is completely cross-platform. It has perfect feature parity no matter where you are, no matter if you’re on the web app, the iOS app or the Android app, the Mac app, whatever. It has everything on all apps.

    It’s important to me because some apps are primarily developed for one platform and you can tell that while you pay the same price on another, you’re still a second class citizen. And you also get some apps which are in general scattered around feature-wise. So some client gets some features and other don’t. It’s weird. I mean look at the whole Proton suite between iOS and Android.

    It can sync with its own service, it works well enough, and it’s end to an encrypted which I love.

    And it’s fully open source! Which is the cherry on top.

    My only gripe with it is its editor. It supports markdown but it’s not really markdown. It’s a rich text editor with markdown support for formatting which is very different. The results are sensibly the same but more often than not if you copy and paste something that is already formatted from a markdown editor into the app, it won’t format it. You will get # and * everywhere but they won’t do what they’re meant to be doing. Because it’s made to interpret Markdown as you type it.

    I wish we could get an actual simple, rock solid Markdown editor. But other than that? Notesnook is the nest Note taking app I’ve used and I’ve tried plenty.

    • tubbadu@lemmy.kde.socialOP
      1·
      10 months ago

      Thanks for the detailed answer! I downloaded it and the UI is very nice, but sadly the notes seem to be stored in an internal db, so I can only see them using the app itself. I’d rather an app that saves the files as plain text, so that I can sync them however I want and open them with whatever app I want

      It’s however the best one I tried so far, so I’ll probably settle with this! thanks for the suggestion!

    • tubbadu@lemmy.kde.socialOP
      0·
      10 months ago

      I downloaded the fdroid app but… I’m not able to use checkboxes. If I type

      - something

      it is not converted into a bullet list

      - [ ] something
[ ] something
[] something

      are not converted to checklists
      and if I click on the checklist icon in the toolbar LATER appears instead of a checkbox… am I missing something?

      • geophysicist@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        10 months ago

        In the block, the first word should be TODO Then when you click off it, it adds a checkbox at the start

        Everything is already a bullet list, that’s the logseq design, so if you also want numbering then use the command key / and search for numbering

        Hope that helps!

          • Dhrystone@infosec.pub
            1·
            10 months ago

            It’s a fairly normal start, and “must not force you to use an account” wasn’t listed in your set of requirements. The account is because the app supports completely free syncing across multiple mobile and desktop platforms. Just use any throwaway google account or create a new one just for the purpose. No subscription and it is FOSS.

      • Xerø@infosec.pub
        1·
        10 months ago

        I have no idea. I wanted a standalone alternative to Google Keep on one of my lesser used devices and this did the job.

        Bought the license and it does what I need, plus it synchs to my encrypted storage on pCloud.