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by sapeien 3440 days ago
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.
2 comments
Starwatcher2001 3440 days ago
That's pretty much what I do, except using UltraEdit as the editor. Virtually everything I've needed to make notes on over the last 22 years are in a folder hierarchy of flat text files. Over the years I've tried HTML, DOC, WRI (Word pad), but find TXT is the best for longevity.

All data is stored on several USB keys that are backed up in several places. Private files are stored in a truecrypt volume. Encryption and media are easily changed if that becomes necessary and technology changes.

My collection currently holds 1508 files from Feb 1995 to today, in around 100 categories. For searching, I use the old ZTree, usually finds what I want in seconds.

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brokenmachine 3439 days ago
I would like to do something similar but I would like markdown support and the ability to link to other documents/media.

Any ideas, hn experts?

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slipmagic 3440 days ago
Where there's demand for privacy and security, notepad falls short, as you cannot password-protect your notes. This is part of what Standard Notes addresses. If you don't need it, then that's fine. I use Dynalist for my notes.

[1] - https://dynalist.io

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DaiPlusPlus 3440 days ago
On Windows, there's EFS and NTFS ACLs for privacy (and BitLocker, of course). For portable encryption you can use 7-Zip with encrypted archives, and as a bonus: 7-Zip's archive manager lets you edit text files in-place (well, it does extract and recompress them when you're done, but the UX is such you don't need to mess around with file management yourself).
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