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My note-management solution

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Since beginning to work from home as a developer, I've wanted a clean, efficient, and reliable way to syncronize my notes and files without relying on specific companies or services (such as dropbox, evernote, or google drive/docs). This proved to be a little harder than I expected. Getting perfect syncronization across macOS, windows, linux and android was difficult, and staying away from 3rd-party syncing services was also a pain. I knew I wanted to keep my notes in a markdown format so I started doing some research and found a few useful forum threads that helped me out. Below is a solution that solves 90% of my use-case. The last piece of my puzzle is managing my ToDo list which currently is still best managed via Evernote for me.

Update:
I'm using Orgzly for todos now. A little bit of a learning curve for creating custom searches, but very powerful and has all the useful standard todo features.

Things that are important to me:

  • Open-source and no vendor lock-in (so if a company dies it doesn't mess me up)
  • Cross-platform (Mac, windows, linux)
  • Automatic syncing
  • Search
  • Legible and styled (so Markdown)
  • Zettelkasten (linking and citing between notes) method built in
  • Export as pdfs or .docx files
  • Dark-mode
  • Very feature rich (tons of customization and nice-to have features)

Contents of this page:

Desktop Editor

Zettlr
Lightweight feature-rich app with search + tons of customization that won't mess me up if it disappears tomorrow. I can also edit markdown files straight from directory with other applications (like VSCode) if necessary.

Pros:
✅ Open-source and no vendor lock-in (so if their company dies it doesn't mess me up)
✅ Cross-platform (Mac, windows, linux)
✅ Search
✅ Legible and styled (so Markdown)
✅ Zettelkasten (linking and citing between notes) method built in
✅ Export as pdfs or .docx files
✅ Dark-mode
✅ Very feature rich (tons of customization and nice-to have features)

Cons:

  • No syncing built in (I've added it)
  • No mobile app
  • Tough to manage Todo lists

Mobile Editor

Markor

Update: now using Obsidian

Syncing:

Syncthing

Simple open-source syncing tool that securely and quickly shared folders between configured machines via P2P.

Pros:
✅ Cross-platform (all computers and phone)
✅ Open source
✅ Secure
✅ P2P (between my devices)
✅ Fast
✅ Bi-directional
✅ Lightweight

Cons:

  • Sometimes difficult to untangle syncing errors
  • Takes a little bit of setting up

Backup

Git + Gitwatch + Automator
Using git for backup storage/ versioning. Using gitwatch for monitoring and automatic committing. Using automator to run a bash script on startup that initializes gitwatch (on my mac).

Pros:
✅ Open source (not tied to Zettlr)
✅ Automatic with gitwatch running to monitor changes

Cons:

Script to start gitwatch on boot and kill ScriptMonitor (to make it lightweight)

#!/bin/bash
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

# start gitwatch on notes/ for automatic commit on change + kill scriptmonitor after 1 min

gitwatch -r origin /Users/Kyle/git/notes/ & sleep 60; killall ScriptMonitor
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