Privacy @lemmy.ml FlihpFlorp @lemm.ee 10 mo. ago

OneNote Alternatives

First off wanted to say thank you for everyone who chimed in on my last post a while ago starting my privacy journey

Anyways with my classes starting up again I was looking for a OneNote alternative as I almost had a small oopsy daisy with trying to move my OneNote off of OneDrive and hey Microsoft I appreciate backing up files but I have proton drive for that

Anyways as for a one note alternative stuff I do have a few requirements and preferences:

I use a surface with a touchscreen and a fold back keyboard to use as a tablet and a pen for handwriting notes but I also like to type sometimes so something that has palm rejection and plays nice with with the touchscreen
I use it across multiple devices, mainly note taking on the aforementioned surface laptop but also view them on my home computer since I do some schoolwork on that because nice monitor and keyboard :) but I’m mostly just viewing on that computer - basically I would either like cloud saving to get that across devices OR the ability to save the files to proton drive
Not really a necessity but the ability to organize notes like one note where I can have a “book” > “category/chapter” > “page”

Really point 1 and 2 are my priority but if I had to choose I’d say point 1 with playing nice for the touch screen and pen takes priority but I also definitely wouldn’t mind having something that makes it easy to save with ideally a cloud save that does the work for me but I’m probably capable of setting the directory to save it to proton drive

29 comments

Few options come to mind but the top two are either Joplin or Obsidian.
- Obsidian is good but not sure how well it works on touchscreen.
  
  The issue I ran into with obsidian is that it saves the file with each keystroke. I wanted to store my notes in proton drive but the constant saving would cause it to error out. There is no adjustment on the save interval either. This is probably done to push people into paying for their cloud service. It felt like too much of a hassle and I’m not a huge note taker anyways so I get by with the notes app on my phone.
Obsidian for sure. Look at the Excalidraw plugin for handwriting/drawing. It's quite good.
- Obsidian is not just an alternative, it is better.
  
  Getting rid of all the formatting bullshit makes notetaking better. Honestly, I consider this to be the killer feature of Obsidian -- no styles. No fonts. No font sizes. No weird/unpredictable line breaks or fights with bullets. No jimmying about images trying to get them in the right places. OneNote needs a plaintext mode to even hope to compete.
  
  The linking is nice. I am very skeptical that the knowledge graph is useful, but I won't be mad at people who like it.
  
  Once you're used to the mathtex syntax, it's a fine way to do formula entry. And with the right extension, the way it handles tables is just fine.
  
  The only thing OneNote does that Obsidian doesn't is nested notes. I really wish Obsidian let you define an "index" note for a folder that would let you mimic the nested note feature of OneNote. And that it would let you manually re-order notes to be in whatever order you want (maybe achieved by a TOC on the index note or some such). Maybe there's an extension that does that? OP seems to want the same functionality. I work around it by just making an "!TOC" file that sits in roots rather than relying on actual file hierarchy.
  
  Is Obsidian open source?
  
  You said there’s no nesting, is that the equivalent to pages in one note since that is somewhat important to me
- Thanks. I’m assuming there’s just like an extension page for excalidraw in obsidian like there would be a web browser
  
  Yep, it's in the community apps store for free, though highly recommend throwing some money at the dev if you find it to be useful. I'm just barely scratching the service and it's pretty dang good.
+1 for Obsidian
- I think I’m going to go with obsidian
  
  Stupid question where can I download it
  
  obsidian.md
Of the top of my head, maybe either

Logseq (should be rather like Obsidian but open source)

Xournal++, I do not know if it has the organising features or cross note search
- I was gonna check out obsidian since that seems to be popular and open source isn’t a necessity for me but thanks for the option
  
  And for xournal yeah the cross note is something I would definitely rather have but thank :)
  
  I tried both Obsidian and Logseq and… Obsidian is just a pleasure
I switched to Joplin and it's been okay, lots of plugins but I've stuck to just vanilla thus far. The built in syncing plus encryption built-in makes for easy setup so I didn't need to setup rclone.
I've used StandardNotes for years. They are great, very privacy friendly and lots of good features. I've also used Obsidian like others have mentioned but I didn't use 95% of the features on either standard notes or Obsidian -- now days I just use a general markdown files and store them in a git repo -- low complexity and I like the simplicity of it. 100% recommend.
- I’ll give it standard notes shot. Does it have the ability to hand write notes. It also has its own cloud saves and a manual local save if I’m reading that right so that sounds perfect for proton drive since someone else said obsidian has a weird autosave

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