Standard Notes – A notes app with a focus on longevity, portability, and privacy

Excellent effort! However, it also introduces a _major_ security hole:

The Electron Desktop App simply loads an index.html which points at remote JavaScript. That's crazy dangerous - if that endpoint gets compromised, nothing keeps the attacker from running `rm -rf /` on every user's machine.

I'm a member of the Electron maintainers group and fully realize that this is partly on us for not educating better. Remote code should never run with full privileges - consider using a `webview` instead, which can be sandboxed.

This is a really cool project. I love the spirit of this. I would also mention nvALT has a similar philosophy in terms of file format and supports Markdown and fast searching of notes. Sadly it is closed source and Mac only so it does not have the same overall philosophy (despite the note output being very portable).

I feel this will work for a lot of people, especially less technical users. I have settled on Org and or Markdown, to Dropbox if required sync. Emacs and or any other text editor will just works. That said just taking notes in a consistent place and in a consistent format gets you 80% of the way there. Grep and find still work. I almost always end up back there :)

Org is its own little world, but I know that I can always edit an Org file on any computer with my preferred editor.

I like this trend of back to basics in computing (even if it is running in a web browser on my desktop), its goals are nice.

edit:nvalt is open source. Mac only and as others pointed out not updated too regular but I know people who love it.

Zim[0] (open source) has a lot of these features. It saves your notes as plain markdown files, but has a WYSIWYG editor. You can link between notes. Add pictures, formatting, etc.

There is also a huge number of extensions, back when I was doing math stuff I used the LaTeX one pretty often. Another useful one is the calculator extension, which can evaluate simple expressions like 3 * 5 =.

Since it's just plain markdown files, you can save to Dropbox, git, NFS, or anything else really. There's even a built-in plugin to automatically commit to git periodically (useful for standalone notebooks, since you don't really want to be opening git manually).

I've yet to find anything better, although I do wish it had better support for "anonymous" notes. That is, notes that I don't really feel like organizing or naming.

[0] http://www.zim-wiki.org/index.html

Related, here's a post by the author [1] about Evernote which sheds light on why he went about making this. Interesting read.

[1] https://medium.com/@mobitar/evernote-is-what-happens-when-yo...

With a lot of notes and lists in Google Keep, I always wonder when Google will kill it like Reader. So, I'm really behind projects like this focusing on openness and durability. I hope it's a success!

I do academic research as a grad student and it's very reassuring to know that if my office doesn't burn down or get ransacked, that my pen-and-paper research notebooks will be there for reference to see what I did on a past project. It was an exceptionally cool experience when visiting the NRAO[1] Archives[2] to pick up and read 70+ year old research notebooks from pioneering astronomers. It seems like it would take a great deal of vigilance to make digital notes endure for that long.

However, digital notes are useful, especially for brain dumping something quickly, so I've settled on vimwiki[3] in a git repository. They're just markdown utf-8 textfiles in a folder hierarchy, and I figure vim and vimscript extensions are pretty darn future proof. It's also useful when traveling and being given a guest Linux work station to use that it doesn't require admin privileges to get working: just git clone the vimwiki repo into ~/.vim and clone the notes repo.

[1] https://www.nrao.edu

[2] https://www.nrao.edu/archives/

[3] https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

Quiver is another awesome note taking app, native and superfast on macOS:

http://happenapps.com https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/wiki/Getting-Started

What's wrong with good old notepad.exe and *.txt files? Notepad (nano, ed, other lightweight editors) has a quality that this doesn't: unstructured text. When writing I don't want to think about metadata, I just want to write, not think about titles, tags, etc. One could probably infer a title based on the first line. I think forcing structured data input is the wrong approach and it is better to use NLP or other methods of inference.

On a technical level, this seems to be a desktop web app which is overkill for a simple text editor. Compare its performance to notepad.exe which ran fine on machines from decades ago.

I use my own notepad app - ScratchPad[1] - to solve a similar problem with a slightly different emphasis.

I wasn't concerned with privacy, but very concerned with longevity, portability, and history. My app auto-saves every few seconds, and records a log of the diff. The log tracks the entire edit history of the file, so you can follow the evolution of the document, undo changes, whatever.

Logged revisions also effectively ends up as a text collapsing function - just keep the first line or so of a block of text and delete the remainder, and then when you want to open up that block of text again, just scroll back in the history.

I've been using it for years on Windows and Linux. I haven't yet had a need to port it to OS X. I keep my notes in Dropbox for distribution and so I can access them on my phone. If the text file is edited out of sync with the log, the next time the file is opened inside scratchpad, it simply records a diff between the new state and the expected state from the log.

The format is just plain text. No fancy formatting. It's set up to use Dina, as that's my default font on all my systems.

[1] https://github.com/barrkel/scratch

Reminds me of Simple Note, which I've been using ever since Evernote became slow and bloated (https://simplenote.com/).

I like the broad idea, and I appreciate their making this open, but this design leaves me cold. It's basically a Notational Velocity with central servers and one of those clumsy toggle-to-preview Markdown interfaces.

Between stuff like this and Workflowy, I think there'd be a market for a cloud-based version of org-mode with nice, non-Emacsy front ends that supported the key org-mode capabilities.

> What I write is important to me. I want to be able to read it fifty years from now. A hundred years from now. So where do I go? Apple Notes? Google? Other private, short-lived, growth-oriented companies? No. What we need is something that focuses on durability and not growth.

I know HN is for the tech crowd, but can I suggest something so simple it sounds stupid? If you want to read your notes 50 years from now use a pen and paper. Go ahead, downvote away. Yes, you won't be able to index them and search them and yadda yadda yadda but you're writing _notes_, not full-fledged documents.

What is a note? "A brief record of facts, topics, or thoughts, written down as an aid to memory." according to Google.

I keep a small Moleskine notebook and a pen with me to write down notes and ideas. James Altucher uses a waiter's pad. It works just fine. I know it's a radical thing to say but technology isn't always the solution to our problems.

I have settled on Google Keep for my note-taking, for ease of use and durability. I like that Standard Notes is similar, but adds privacy and the option for self-hosting. Being open source and extensible is a bonus!

For ones like me that never heard about AppImage before (shame on me), you just need to "chmod a+x file.AppImage", then execute as a normal (./) [0].

[0] http://appimage.org/

Love it so far! I'm going to play around with hosting my own server, looks like the current one is here? https://github.com/standardfile/ruby-server/tree/master

A couple things that could be useful: 1. Add version tags to the git repo, that way I don't have to wonder what's changed between deploys 2. Official standard notes docker image or dockerfile in repo 3. CloudFormation or Terraform template link in the README would really sweet.

Actually... If I can finish up the work I'm actually supposed to be doing I can send you some of this stuff later...

Noticed you're using AWS. Everything looks great, but now that you're getting serious traffic you may want to pre-emptively sign up for business support (if you haven't already), I noticed they give you a free month for the "self-starter" startup pack: https://aws.amazon.com/activate/self-starters/ . I used to work for AWS Support, I'm not affiliated any more, but there is a huge difference in response times, also the chat and phone call options are much faster, and you can really ask about anything not just specific problems (architecture guidance, best practices).

Seems like this project doesn't offer much at moment except cool name.

I use flat files in markdown since 2010 with Sublime Text with extensions: MarkdownEditing, Table Editor

All power of Sublime Text, Super fast full text search, Full index of all header sections in all files trough Cmd+Shift+R, Full index of all file names trough Cmd+P

---------------------------------------

$ cd ~/Dropbox/Notes && cloc .

Language | files | blank | comment | code

Markdown | 773 | 21229 | 10 | 67758

---------------------------------------

All that within Dropbox directory, accessible anywhere.

There was interesting attempts before... http://www.acuriousmix.com/2014/09/03/designing-a-personal-k... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759

I've had serious difficulty[1][2][3] with Apple's Notes.app over the past 18 months. So much so that I've written some JXA (Javascript for Automation) code to extract all of my notes to self-contained HTML files.

Now that I have 923 notes in HTML files on my hard drive, I can do whatever I want with them. My current plan is to import them into OneNote because they have good app coverage across platforms and they just released what looks like a pretty solid API that lets you import and export notes.

Maybe I (or somebody else) can write an importer for Standard Notes to make it easy to switch from Apple Notes?

[1] Notes not syncing across devices

[2] Search not working at all on Mac

[3] Moving subfolders of notes in the app makes the notes completely disappear

This is incredible. I was going to pay a developer to create something like this because I wanted its exact features so badly. A note-taking system that works cross platform with local-encryption. I'm too happy right now!

A screenshot or two would be really helpful.

Very nice. Now all I need is the same thing but for all my photos so my kids can dig through them in 30-50 years time, like I can do with my parents' photos...

I like this idea. It's remarkable how bad the Apple Notes apps are. I'm trying to get started with Standard Notes but running into trouble. Both Standard File servers are down: https://n3.standardnotes.org https://n1.standardnotes.co.uk

I love the idea of this, but I'm not a big fan of Electron apps. Simplenote has worked amazingly for me for a few years now and has a nice native application (yes, I know you can't host your own server)

I want to use this! The UX is giving me some difficulty. First I wondered how to add a tag to a note and eventually discovered that dragging the tag on from the sidebar worked. But now how do I remove the tag?

Of course, my question is: why this over Org?

I don't do a ton of notetaking, so it's not super relevant to me (I'm actually largely on pen and paper). But I am curious why this might (or might not) be better.

I use Dropbox Paper for my note taking, it has nice formatting options - although I am acutely aware that Dropbox could drop it at any moment, so something like this suddenly becomes very attractive.

Very cool. I left Evernote last month after many years of pro use. I was spinning around and around but ended-up just (last weekend) going with Notes sitting on my personal NextCloud install. Downside currently is the lack of image support, but that fact that I'm hosting it makes up for that. There is also an Android app.

https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/notes

https://github.com/stefan-niedermann/nextcloud-notes

Looked at the other options out there and really just wanted to build off my increasing NextCloud footprint on my own server.

Great product. Embedded images and the ability to clip a website like ever note clipper are the two features that I am looking forward to.

For note taking and simple task management, I have cycled through pen and paper, plain text files, taskwarrior [1], hnb [2], ToDoList[3] et cetera. Always looking for the perfect solution. I think it doesn't exist as a standalone environment, but as a combination of (synced) app and some pen and paper.

[1] https://taskwarrior.org/

[2] https://linux.die.net/man/1/hnb

[3] http://abstractspoon.weebly.com/

What I use for making notes is my CatWiki program ( https://github.com/cabalamat/catwiki ).

This stores articles in a wiki in Markdown format as files on a local filesystem, enabling:

- portability. Any ascii text editor can read the files. One goal of the system is that I can still read the files if the software isn't set up (e.g. if installing on a new box).

- longevity. Python, Flask and Markdown are not going away any time soon. Even if they do, the files can still be read.

- privacy. The files are never transmitted across the network. This is also a disadvantage, of course :-).

I use gist together with https://gistlist.ksdev.pl/gists which allows me to tag them. There are number of apps that can allow me offline editing and management such as ruby gem gist.

The main benefit is that, as it uses gist, you can use number of markup languages - I have notes in rST, mardkown, textille or as pure <inser_language> scripts with comments.

The other main benefit is that I am not locked in and notes are versioned.

Besides, you don't need any installs for this. I seriously don't get why people still make note apps.

Is it possible to use the application without connecting to a Standard File server? The page mentions the ability to use Dropbox "for added redundancy and peace of mind". But is it possible to use Dropbox as the only storage point? I would prefer to use Dropbox over their server or hosting my own.

It seems to me the applications act as clients that allow you to interact with your data. If so, why should it matter where the data is being fetched/stored? Why is it necessary to interact with a Standard File server?

I applaud the authors here on the intent, especially for the aspects of longevity, portability, and privacy. However, the app itself has a bit of a ways to go. I downloaded, and ran it, and then noticed my (Win7) machine run like 4 procs for the single app. I like the concept of electron-based apps, really I do; they're just so heavy (machine-resource-wise anyway).

Also, it so closely resembles Laverna in UX; not exactly of course, but close enough. I don't want to sound so negative, because I honestly do aprreciate the authors for their work here (and again for their noble intent, which I greatly appreciate)...and perhaps I'm a curmudgeon, but apps like this one and laverna annoy me in the way that its more work getting at the actual data, if - for example, I wish to sync it via other ways (instead of self-hosting, etc.). I try a bunch of these note apps every so often, and I always go back to zim wiki. Yes, zim wiki. Maybe zim wiki is not perfect, its UI is not the most sophisticated, mobile is not its forte, and any sync of its files does depend on another platform/service running (e.g. dropbox, etc.), etc....But at least it is based on a conventional text file (with a small DB for indexing/search)...and as such, I can really access/edit the data now and in the future. I dislike having to think in terms of old school files, but apps nowadays are not wholly reliable; databases get corrupted, internet connections go down, a code defect makes the data in the db inaccessible or not-so-easy to access, etc...Bringing me back always to zim.

Again, don't mean to be negative, and I applaud the authors for their work...but I'm heading back to zim wiki.

I'm on a macbook, and neither the desktop or web application (under chrome at least) seems to recognize tab. Granted, I want my tab to be a configurable number of spaces, but currently it does nothing. Also, there doesn't seem to be any sign of auto indent.

Is tab support and auto indent planned? Or is this editor essentially a sort of demo placeholder, with a goal of a different, feature-full editor implementing the standard note synchronization bits?

There is also a standard file server software.

https://standardfile.org/

I'll give it a try as soon as there is an Android app. I'll run my own server. I've seen that it's a very simple Rails 5 application. It requires MySQL but by a quick inspection of the code it looks like that any db will do. I'm using PostgreSQL on my server and I'll try to make it run with it.

Always like seeing what people are building for note taking. I've left Evernote for the system provided by the Synology guys. It works really well. Having something you control soup to nuts though would be best. I always worry about using any of these systems and how long I'll be able to 'have' my data.

Perhaps I am missing something - but I am not able to find any support for keyboard shortcuts…!

I tested on OS X (& briefly on the WEB), and expected CMD-N to generate a new note, TAB to change focus between tags, notes and the actual note, ESC to dismiss dialogs (the "Server" dialog) etc.

It looks as if it's 100% mouse-only driven at the moment - but otherwise it would be really nice to use it to store my notes on my own server AND be able to access across iOS, Mac Win etc - so I think there is great potential, but simply so not understand that keyboard shortcuts have not been thought into the application now it's a hacker-tool :-)

A good place to get inspiration for a web solution using keyboard shortcuts 100% is JIRA. just try to hit "." - it's just brilliant (I quickly got very addicted :-)

There are a few elements missing that I would really love to see. Mostly native image upload support and embedding. Live Markdown preview WYSIWYG editor.

http://texts.io/ Came close.

I really hope that this project will develop into something better.

The self hosted back-end has a lot of moving parts. Why was the decision made to use code instead of say a text file on EC2 via a simple web server? cf https://github.com/standardfile/ruby-server/wiki/Deploying-a...

Also how easy is it to use the editor API? Could you for instance create an outliner editor?

Why was the choice made to take up 2/3 screen with tags, filename leaving only 1/3 screen for a note. Vim user, so it appears awkward to view RHS of screen coming from a culturally LHS language, English?

Standard notes looks extremely interesting. You've done an AWESOME job thus far.

I've had a brief play with the Web based version on my Android phone. It was a bit of a struggle, but that was to be expected as it wasn't designed for that.

Initial feedback on tags

1) I found it hard to see which tags were associated with a note. Clicking each tag to see what changes is a bit cumbersome and the search didn't seem to pick up the tags? I would suggest an additional horizontal bar underneath the body which shows which tags are assigned to a note.

2) In the list view of the notes, the tags should be visible too. I realise it can be a bit of a struggle in terms of real estate, but it can be done.

I wrote the above before I noticed your comment, so these might be fixed in the future[0]:

> I just noticed today that that isn't working as intended.

> Will be releasing a revamped tags UI very soon that should make all this easier.

If you have a wire frame / sketch or something which you can post so I can see what you are envisioning for the revised UI that would be great.

I've got a UI design in mind which would improve the UX of the app without adding additional complexity.

After you've add your tag improvements I might fork and have a go at implementing what I have in mind.

Initial feedback on note list

3) Needs to have sorting, just like mail client, by date etc..

4) Option to specify date/time format, currently MM/DD/Y hh:mm AM/PM

I'm a big fan of YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM (Time in 24 hours). If you want to have it standard choose that ;)

My initial feedback, is just that, initial. It is the first few things I noticed and does not detract from the AWESOME work you've done so far.

Keep up it up!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13424055

I've been using Writer+ on Android that I have setup to Resilio sync to my Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi has a script I wrote that runs GIT every minute to check for changes and commit them if so.

I also Resilio sync this to any desktop I need and use a Markdown editor called "MarkdownPad" on Windows.

With this setup I have version control running all the time from a 'server' I control and have the ability to view and edit my notes on my phone and desktop using a format that is never going away.

Just thought I would post this in case someone wanted to try the same thing.