I tried to move my notes out of Emacs. I failed. Again
Every so often I get Emacs Fatigue and try to move my notes to another app. This time I tried Bear, which is solid and simple, but it made me feel trapped because my notes were inside an app. I realized Denote handles Markdown natively, so I exported from Bear and converted everything back to Denote with a script. I've come crawling back to Emacs again.
So yes, I've done that thing where I quit using Emacs only to come crawling back later. I know better, but knowing better doesn't stop me.
- rmunn
The two things about Emacs I would love if I used it (tried twice, bounced HARD off the keyboard controls both times. I hate modifer+key control schemes — give me modal editing any day — and I don't even have RSI!) are magit and org-mode. I've never tried magit so I don't know if lazygit is a decent substitute. But for org-mode in Neovim, there's https://github.com/nvim-neorg/neorg. I'm sure it's only a partial, half-broken implementation of the real org-mode, but it covers the parts that I need most, structured note taking.
If you're a diehard modal-editing aficionado like me and think that Emacs is a great IDE but it's a shame about its editor (and its keyboard scheme), maybe give neorg a try. Might well make you shift away from notes.txt files.
And yes, I know I could just use `evil` in Emacs. Maybe someday I'll overcome my decades of learned resistance to running Emacs, but every time I see the Emacs control scheme, I wince and I'm reminded why I don't use it. Having some key combos be "hold down the Control key while you press two keys" (like `C-x C-s` to save a file) while other key combos are "hold down the Control key while you press one key, then release it before pressing the second key" (like `C-x s` to save all files) is just not going to fit into my brain. Maybe that's intuitive for some people, but it just doesn't work for me. And so I bounce off Emacs before ever giving it a real chance.
- quibono
I’m using both Obsidian and Emacs and yet my biggest issue is actually… knowing what to note down and when. I don’t know if others have a system for this. I also don’t want to end up with some over-the-top note-everything system - then again surely there is some middle ground here.
- CTOSian
Same happened with me, but with vim (I know emacs org mode is epic, but too much for me), I moved a quite large markdown file (I have even disk catalogues from .. ancient years) to a lot of platforms : SQLite, treeline, treeview, cherryTree plus more I don't remember now.. back to vim (with some Plugins like tablemode and folds)
after all, it's a text file anyway that can be opened with any darn platform out there..
- Grombobulous
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.
- ghusto
> It syncs flawlessly (for free)
Sync is a paid feature, not sure why he said this?