I use Joplin. They have a sync server you can host for yourself.

Nextcloud notes, it gets the job done 👍

Trillium. It works well via browser and reasonably on a mobile browser.

Obsidian is excellent but I can’t install any applications on my work computer and the web hosted version was buggy and slow. If I didn’t have IT blocking me I’d be using Obsidian again.

Oh I’m ashamed of this one, but notability on a second hand iPad for handwritten and otherwise notion. I’m sorry but nothing has its polish, goodnotes just isn’t good enough and doesn’t have enough setting to make it good either. I refuse to use one note. In regards to notion it’s the sharing and collaboration features that are killer.

Emacs. Org. Mode.

Use Orgzly Revived for mobile sharing.

I currently have some notes in Nextcloud notes which I quite like. I don’t need anything too fancy. Markdown is nice to have, but not required if there is some ui way to make checkboxes. If I remember correctly, in the nextcloud notes app you have to set the folder that it uses. Which makes shared notes impractical, if not impossible.

Because of this, I still have several notes shared with my wife in Google keep for things like shopping lists. I’m tempted to test out the shopping list function in home assistant, but not sure if it will fit the needs. Would be nice to find something that covers all my use cases in one app.

I use obsidian but I wish there was an open source notes platform that could do what I want:

1. Excalidraw support ( or similar ) with PDF import and annotation support ( this is achieved by a plugin on obsidian )
2. Vim mode
3. Markdown for everything

I have tried so many notetaking tools and the closest I ever got was using xournalpp for PDF annotation and drawing, then writing plain markdown in helix / neovim, with a live markdown rendering pane on the side. Was just too clunky though.

Joplin on a docker macvlan thru NGNIX proximanager via some proxied website name from cloud flare. My phone goes to the mynotes.website.com name, it gets proxied to my IP, the traffic hits my NGNIX server, then it tosses it to Joplin. Lol it works.

Orgzly + Syncthing

I use Logseq in my PC and my phone and I unse Syncthing to sync the notes accross my devices.

Obsidian with syncthing works offline.

It depends on the notes, for me:

I’ve had an oddly long-running obsession with Tiddlywiki!

It has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s VERY flexible. My favorite part being that by default it’s just a single, portable, HTML file. No special app required besides a browser, no accounts, and you can just sync it like any other file. (Syncthing, Nextcloud, and friends)

There’s also an app called Tiddloid for Android to make managing and saving a little easier, but they open in any browser.

I have a Tiddlywiki that I use like one might use Obsidian, where I just stash stuff I’ll want to remember and maybe link between similar ideas.

And then I’m currently trying to use it to make a solution to sketch out my Savage Worlds RPG campaigns. It gets a little tricky but you can make templates, script buttons, and that kind of thing. If you’re already comfortable with web stuff you’ll probably catch on WAY better than I have.

You can also host it as a website, or on your server or whatever, to use it like any other wiki. There’s also plugins to use Markdown instead of “wikitext.”

There’s also an excellent guide to learning it at https://groktiddlywiki.com/read/ . It’s basically an online workbook using Tiddlywiki itself!

The community is also super helpful. I do wish it had a little more out of the box, but something about a customizable, portable, digital “notebook” that doesn’t require an account or hopefully-supported-in-5-years application is SUPER appealing to me. It’s quite underrated.

Also just for fun I wanted to share my favorite example someone’s been working on for quite some time now, a heavily customized D&D wiki

https://intrinsical.github.io/wiki/index.html

Tiddlywiki can be a bit dense and the documentation is slowly improving, but there’s so much potential!

A Textbook

Nextcloud. But only because I already have it. I wouldn’t set it up just for that.

I use Obsidian with the obsidian-live sync docker container to sync data between devices instantaneously. It is not open source but they store plaintext markdown notes and its extendable with plenty of open source plugins.