Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool

[nunodonato]

Wait, dont downvote me yet because there are thousand of note taking tools :) I have some very specific needs.

I really miss using Evernote back in the day, its exactly organized like how I want it. BUT, its too expensive for my needs (almost 10USD a month)

What I am looking for is something really simple, I want to take notes and archive them for later reference. This is mostly to act as a second brain for storage of stuff (guidelines, instructions, photos of business cards with contact details etc)

I need a tool that is smart, maybe AI powered, so I can search and find easily what I need (search for text inside images). I know Evernote does this but, again... too expensive for the usage I'm aiming for.

Is there anything out there I might have missed? I'm so close to start building my own, but I don't want another side project :P

[tbalci]

I migrated off from Evernote and OneNote completely to Obsidian. I would not advocate for Obsidian (or any specific application) here, but rather advocate for having your notes in plain text files - e.g. Markdown. This will ensure that whatever application you use on whatever operating system, you will have your notes easily accessible. It also gives you the flexibility to choose how you want to sync your files - OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, whatever you name it. This kind of gives a level of data sovereignty as well.

[wduquette → tbalci]

Agreed. I’m currently using Obsidian as well, but I’ve got many notes I was able to transfer seamlessly from another app precisely because they were Markdown.

[gtirloni → tbalci]

Relevant for OP's requirement of AI: https://github.com/khoj-ai/khoj

[yokoprime]

I would recommend you look into Obsidian. It's literally made to be a second brain. There's some really good AI plugins, I use the "copilot" plugin which uses your own Open AI API key. You can sync using Syncthing, iCloud or pay for Obsidian Sync. For personal use Obsidian is free.

[runjake]

It doesn't meet the poster's needs, but Simplenote is still a thing for people who want text-only notes, Markdown, and easy access to plain text files.

It got acquired by Automattic a few years back.

https://simplenote.com/

[rubymamis]

Give my note-taking app a try[1]. It has a Notion-like block editor, but with a user interface similar to Apple Notes. So it's both flexible and easy to use. And it's also local-first, saved in a portable format (plain text) and extremely performant.

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

[nunodonato → rubymamis]

Looks nice. Willing to give it a try, but it wasn't clear what kind of search it does... this is really important for me: on one side searching for text inside images, and the other being able to do smart searches (not just matching words)

[rubymamis → nunodonato]

Both of these features aren't implemented yet, but definitely on the roadmap. Currently, a simple (but fast) exact match search is in place.

[paradox242]

I took the same journey. I wanted something simple to use but that did note taking well, that stored files locally, and did not use proprietary formats. This lead me to Obsidian, and I have not looked back since.

[llinn]

No doubt Vim - simplest note taking tool

I'm even making ai-based note taking app, but personally i still use Vim.

[bartvk → llinn]

They want to store pictures as well, and search text inside those pictures.

[whatamidoingyo]

One of the benefits of running a blog, is discovering cool tools that the creators want to write about.

One such tool is ERA, which is a privacy-first note-taking app.

https://blog.javascripttoday.com/blog/the-privacy-first-note...

After receiving this guest post, I checked the tool out, and was quite surprised. It's really nice!

Direct link: https://era.sh/

[muzani]

I expect this kind of tool will be built into Google/Apple/Microsoft ecosystem within a year with at least GPT-4o level capabilities. So I'd say... procrastinate on building something like this?

Though I feel like it's not too hard to do something that searches a folder, uploads all the images to GPT-4o and returns the results. It won't just search text inside images, it can do things like identify which images have a product with sugar in them.

[realsarm]

I use https://nouswise.com/. I no longer need separate apps for note-taking, writing, researching, organizing, cloud pdf reader and constantly switch between them.

[creer]

Why this (fairly general) obsession to include search in specific note taking tools. Search should (obviously) include both the notes but other documents (calendar, saved research papers, email...)

So shouldn't this search be a separate package than the note-taking?

And then you include photos of business cards in the note taking function?!?!?! By this time aren't bound to leave very few candidates and then only monolithic ones kinda by definition?

[nunodonato → creer]

its knowledge storage. for me works wonderfully well :) I have lots of papers, cards, letters, brochures.. I just want to take a picture and be done with it, but being sure I can recall it later when I need to. Why would I want to use different apps if the use-case is the same? store and recall.

[johannesrexx]

[Mindforger](https://www.mindforger.com/) is a free, open source cross-platform notes organizer. You write in Markdown and there is some LLM integration. Also a Kanban board.

[vunderba]

The issue here is the automatic OCR for images. There's just not a lot of super good locally hosted solutions for this. Tesseract can be hit or miss depending on how lossy your images are.

AI and good OCR likely means you're gonna be paying for some kind of SaaS offering.

[user68858788]

I’ve been using Workflowy for over a decade. It’s mostly just an infinitely nested bullet point list and has only basic features. Organization is up to you.

It’s cross platform and has a good search.

My only gripe is that pasting from a separate bullet point list doesn’t always work well.

[Tomte → user68858788]

My two gripes: it‘s not E2E encrypted, so don‘t put very private information there, and some keyboard shortcuts don‘t work on Windows (and never will, unless they let us configure custom shortcuts someday).

[gtirloni]

You want an AI-powered "simple" note taking app for less than $10/month?

[muzani → gtirloni]

For comparison, ChatGPT provides full AI access to GPT-4, which they sell at $10/1M tokens. They charge $20 monthly for this, as do similar AI wrappers.

But an AI based text search is $0.02/1M tokens. For 1000x1000 images, GPT-4o charges $0.003825 per image.

I think what OP is asking for is perfectly financially reasonable these days.

[nunodonato → gtirloni]

Yes? I don't want any AI generative stuff, just embeddings search which is quite cheap

[al_borland]

I you’re in the Apple ecosystem, the built-in Notes app does this.

[nunodonato → al_borland]

I'm not :/

[markus_zhang]

I think if there is a way to add tags to documents it would aid finding whatever you want. You might not need AI for that.

[steven_noble]

Personally, I find it hard to beat Vim.

But if you are looking for a free and flexible GUI alternative, maybe give Joplin a go?

[steven_noble → steven_noble]

and/or Zotero

[hnaccter]

Logseq can do most, if not all, of what you’re asking either natively or through the plugin infra it has.

[interbased]

I use the Notes app on Mac OS but I’ve heard good things about Joplin.

[slipwalker]

i have been very impressed with trillium notes https://github.com/zadam/trilium

[AstmmetryAware]

Obsidian is amazing. Joplin is a close second.

[leed25d]

I like Joplin