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.

The breakthrough on this for me is just using plaintext files. Talk about liberation. You can get as simple or as complicated as you want with those and also sync them anywhere, to basically anything, now and in the indefinite future.

I'm working on Totem [0], feel free to give it a try! I try to post about it in the "What are you working on" thread monthly but haven't mustered the courage to do a "launch" yet.

It's cross-platform, Rust core with native UIs (Rust UI for Desktop, I'm using Iced [1]). I built it due to similar problems, and because I got tired of waiting on nvUltra [2].

Totem is meant to be more of a team/collaboration app in truth, but it turns out that realtime sync is also immensely helpful when working by yourself on multiple devices.

Everything is stored in SQLite and Markdown as well, but in a bit of an obscure location in a thin wrapper format (I might build in an escape hatch later on). The reason to do it this way is largely because allowing people to externally edit Markdown in a live sync context is tricky and I didn't want to make it super easy to screw yourself over.

[0] https://thinktotem.com

[1] https://iced.rs/

[2] https://nvultra.com/

P.S.: With consideration to the time that I am posting this...the iOS/iPadOS offering is currently restricted to a few countries. If you're not in those countries and are interested, let me know and I can add you to Testflight, or you can use the web version.

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 just started using Obsidian with Word-Smith plugin [1]. And when I say "just started", I literally mean a few days ago, so I can't really give a verdict yet. Sync is handled by Dropbox.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLq91cDWx0s

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 use obsidian and use a third party plugin for sync and sync it to my NextCloud server.