[ukuina]

> 1.1221 Sometimes the primary tool is not available. An “always-on” secondary should take its place.

> 1.1222 Sometimes log from different tools or locations need to be “merged”, “persisted”.

These two are the main reasons I've stuck with Google Docs: It's available everywhere, and everything's always in-sync. Google already has all my info of value, so the incremental trust necessary to the threshold of log visibility is minimal.

I'll add one more requirement: I don't want to leave an unencrypted on-disk footprint containing my notes. This means I can access the entirety of my notes on any machine and the only thing I have to worry about is keylogging/screenscraping.

Google Doc is lacking in many respects, though. Linkability is nonexistent. Docs longer than 100 pages really struggle with latency on mobile. Searchability is bad (!) because you have to open the doc first to see the matches from within.

Really wish there was a self-hosted alternative with sync and encrypted storage that didn't result in sync errors. I've tried DEVONthink, Obsidian, LogSeq, Google Keep, Notion, NotesNook, GoodNotes, Samsung Notes, Loop, OneNote, Apple Notes, Org Mode, plain text files, and probably a dozen others... I'd say NotesNook is the best so far, with DEVONthink a close second, but, nothing beats the reliability, omnipresence and privacy of Google Docs.

[zilti]

Syncthing + org-mode is the winning combo for me

[RMPR]

With org-roam and roam-ui you have a perfect visualization. It's a bit lacking on mobile, been trying logseq on and off but it's so buggy.

[seanwilson]

What about using Visual Studio Code with your notes in multiple Markdown files with automatic syncing to Google Drive via the desktop Google Drive app?

Searching multiple files, editing and organising files is quick and simple on desktop, and you can fallback to Google Doc on mobile when needed (Google Drive app lets you view .md files, there's no way to edit?). You can install extensions as well (like for doing inline maths) and if you already use Visual Studio Code for coding it's one less thing to learn.

I'm not familiar with Obsidian, which gets mention a lot. What does it improve on compared to the above if you don't need a mobile app or complex linking between Markdown files?

[jbiggley]

+1 for Obsidian or other platforms that support Markdown format natively. Being platform locked is terrible for knowledge management and Markdown has made me less concerned with future knowledge access in a post-Obsidian world. (Yes, I said it! There will be a post-Obsidian world.)

[wfhBrian]

A couple years ago I switched from Google Docs to Obsidian.

Unfortunately, as other have mentioned, Google Docs omits some seriously impactful features.

All it would've taken, at the time, was collapsible/foldable headings for me to stick with Docs.

But since then, I've grown to appreciate the millions other things Obsidian has to offer, like the ease of developing plugins which, to me, make Obsidian feel like it's an OS within my OS.

[MonaroVXR]

I'm using it and syncing my notes to GitHub, these are technical notes

[sesm]

If you don't need to sync with mobile, then adding your `notes` directory to IDE projects is a great solution. I've been doing that for a long time.

Eventually I switched to Obsidian for mobile support (syncing with free 'Remotely Save' plugin using S3). There are 2 other features of Obsidian that I came to appreciate over time:

1. Daily Notes

2. Calendar via Full Calendar plugin that uses your daily notes as one of event sources. So I can freely mix my Google Calendar 'official' meetings with my personal timeslot allocations for current day.

It is possible to have both of this features in IDE too, but with Obsidian they come for free.

[sebtron]

> It's available everywhere

Unless you are offline

[diggan]

Or somehow triggers their anti-spam system on service Y while you really care about service X, but they're all bundled under the same company Z, so being blocked on one service impacts your usage of all other services under the same company...

[vineyardmike]

I think apps generally work offline which satisfies the OPs requirement of eventually consistent merging.

[ssss11]

Joplin is great try it. I self host mine, it syncs between devices, encrypted notes.

[ukuina]

I did! The notes are stored in a local DB (SQLite, IIRC) that were not encrypted on disk while the app was running.

[layer8]

What didn’t work for you with OneNote? It supports AES encryption and inter-page linking.

[ukuina]

OneNote sync conflicts effectively destroyed a document for me, with changes splintered across both copies. All my Inking across the copies had unequal offsets making merging impossible. I had to transcribe everything to text manually and trash the document. This was back when the "new" OneNote was still "new".

The infinite document length paradigm also made it impossible to print and review notes; text would slice mid-height across pages.

I know people who swear by the desktop version of OneNote, though...

[inferense]

try acreom, free e2ee sync that works out of the box with a local-first setup.