It was time to ditch Evernote YEARS ago. Obsidian is basically the best alternative.

Obsidian is a godsend. The sheer number of plugins gives you basically anything you could want.

It not being open-source is pretty much my only complaint lol

This is why you don’t buy in to subscriptions for every little thing.

Don’t go to Notability. They went full asshole at the top of this last semester. Changed the entire interface as people were starting their first week of class. They nuked features that made note taking for class nice. They clearly don’t respect their users and will most likely do the same thing again.

Standard Notes is fantastic, assuming that:

• you don’t need to collaborate in real-time with your notes (you can share them after the fact and there is a way to give multiple accounts edit access to the same note, but it looked complicated and I haven’t explored it)
• you primarily use a keyboard - mobile counts, even if you’re using speech to text or Scribble on iPad - rather than wanting a canvas to draw on.
• you’re not trying to upload documents and annotate them

StandardNotes has the following going for it:

• it’s FOSS
• it’s easily self-hostable
• it’s also offered as SaaS, and if you use that your notes are e2ee
• if you self-host you can still use the official mobile apps (but those are open source, too)
• it has a web app, mobile apps, desktop apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux
• there is a variety of editor plugins created by the community that can be used even if you use the free SaaS offering - check out https://github.com/jonhadfield/awesome-standard-notes for a list.

I’ve been using StandardNotes for a few years at this point (as a paid user on their 5 year plan, which no longer exists as far as I know) and have also developed an editor plugin for it.

I always felt that Evernote was a confusing mess line OneNote I would try to use it every couple years thinking it would different only to give up a little later and go back to Notepad++

plaintext .txt

I use the marksman language server with my neovim configuration. It makes a navigable wiki-ish system ^., especially when you set it up with completion.wiki.style = "file-path-stem" in the .marksman.toml ( see: here for what that does.

This, plus syncthing or git, works for syncing ^.

I like all these open source options. However, are there any for handwriting?

They shouldn’t have started using it in the first place, as it is a proprietary APP that spies on everything the user puts into it.

Standardnotes and Notesnook also good as well and they provide web app

Lots of mentions for Obsidian. I’ll throw in my favorite for the past few years that’s similar: Logseq! Check it out!

Joplin is very nice if, like me, you don’t like product lock-in. The notes are structured and organised, but under the hood its basically just markdown. So exporting your notes to something else is no fuss.

What happened to Evermote? 😂 I used it so much when u was in uni, so sad

Neither Joplin nor Obsidian do everything I want. Both have that feeling of pita open source app like Gimp. I still use Joplin but it isn’t anywhere near perfect.