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by trulyrandom 2789 days ago
Looks interesting. It's good to see another note app that also has an open source backend.

I'm personally using StandardNotes (https://standardnotes.org) for note taking, which has been great. If you don't need the collaborative functionality of MonoCorpus, it's worth checking out.

4 comments

I was an avid user of StandardNotes (particularly a fan of the minimalism), but I've since been really taken by Joplin[0] and end up evangelizing for it whenever I can.

Joplin's FOSS, syncs using a number of methods, support E2E (I'm no crypto expert, but they use AES in OCB mode which seems appropriate), and supports things like LaTeX out of the box. Oh, and it has nice things like mobile apps and web snip extensions for browsers.

Collaboration is apparently on the radar, but doesn't currently exist in a meaningful way.

[0] https://joplin.cozic.net/

EDIT: I had cast some vague arm-chair dispersions on StandardNote's crypto claims which I've removed in light of the comment below regarding a security audit. Apologies for not informing myself on the matter!

Standard Notes’ cryptography was audited by a third party security firm: https://listed.standardnotes.org/@sn/821/announcing-our-secu...
That's actually awesome, was not aware.
Applications advertising use of AES is generally a good red flag that they're rolling some sort of custom, broken crypto. Fortunately, neither seems to be the case with joplin.
I mostly was noting that they were using a recognised authenticated AES mode instead of a custom alternative which you rightly identify as almost certainly being broken crypto :P
No, I mean when an application advertises AES, then they often roll their own protocol, which is broken until proven otherwise (taught by experience). Applications advertising use of an existing protocol (e.g. "Uses [signal/noise/whatever protocol] for end-to-end encryption") are less likely to be broken than those rolling their own.
For the record, I'm using SJCL [0] for encryption based on the parameters they suggest, and whenever random numbers are needed I use cryptographically secure ones, so overall I think it should be reasonably secure. I would welcome any third-party audit though. There's some more info about E2EE in Joplin there - https://joplin.cozic.net/spec/

[0] http://bitwiseshiftleft.github.io/sjcl/

For those of you who don't want to store their files on the cloud, try Texts ( http://texts.io ) which natively stores its files in Markdown. It's really awesome and has beaten Sublime as my primary .md editor. Even image embed works in the way you would expect, and the keyboard shortcuts map closely to markdown syntax (for example, Typing "## " will automatically switch formatting to a 2nd level header).
I've recently found an open-source editor named Zettlr, started using it and would recommend.

https://www.zettlr.com/

I'm using boostnote [1] for my note taking. What I like about it is, that I can add checkboxes through markdown which I can check while not in markdown mode. Very handy.

Kinda crazy how many note apps are getting built, all basically looking the same.

[1] https://boostnote.io/

My biggest problem with standard notes is the lack of support for inline images. I use it a lot when I am listening to online lectures (Quickly take a screenshot, crop and paste).