this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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Hey y'all. I've been testing a bunch of Note taking solutions and nothing seems to check off what I want and need.

I want a simple interface (both for list view and note editor/view), preferably similar to Google Keep, but a regular list is fine as well.

Key features:

A. being able to drag and drop re-order checkbox lists.

e.g.

  • [ ] item 1
  • [ ] item 2
  • [x] item 4
  • [x] item 3

I'd like to be able to just drag and drop the above to sort things correctly.

B. E2EE at rest.

C. CTRL+F inside the note view/edit!!

Honestly, the only functionality I truly want is A. But most of the solutions I found are either proprietary or can't do it.

Self hosted options I've tried:

  • Joplin (can't do A; UX is not great)
  • Standard notes (A + C is gated by their self hosted premium subscription; I don't mind paying for my apps, but the prices are ridiculous)
  • Silverbullet.md (can't do A)
  • Quillpad (very similar to Google Keep and can do A, but has terrible file syncing, not E2EE)

Notesnook looks almost as insane as Standard Notes to self host (mimicing AWS stack locally is nuts). Has anyone tried Notesnook yet? I don't want to spend another afternoon setting something heavy up only to find that the feature I want is gated by a heavy $.

Any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Woops! I am looking to use the notes app on both Android and Web/Desktop Linux. Preferably an open source solution.

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[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 3 points 9 months ago

Others have mentioned Syncthing as a sync solution. I'd like to add a couple points:

Syncthing can work fine even for solutions that are intended to use their own sync, provided it's a single-user setup. You're not likely to make simultaneous changes on 2 devices, so collisions are unlikely.

Also for using Syncthing, I recommend Syncthing-Fork for Android - it moves sync conditions into the folder/job rather than global. Very useful when you have jobs you want always syncing, and jobs you want to only sync on wifi and power.

If using iOS there's an ST client called Möbius Sync ($5), developed by a company the financially supports Syncthing.

For Windows, get SyncTrayzor - it makes running and managing ST easier.