I read your 'About me' section, and how you are a privacy enthusiast.
How does this hold up with storing notes in Git (which usually means syncing to github etc.)? I mean of course you can self-host to keep your notes privately, but does this support encrypted notes?
I imagine git history works poorly if notes are encrypted.
Both are extremely useful secrets oriented git tools with support for things like PGP encryption. Both will encrypt with multiple keys too, making sharing relatively easy. The android pass app even manages SSH keys for pushing and pulling. There may be good inspiration in those repos, or even code you can borrow.
Also, thanks so much for making this: it is elegant and lovely. Keep it up!
I started going down this route [0], but I very quickly realised the additional overhead of the tooling was not very user friendly. In the end, I'm trying to write a custom git remote which will encrypt everything, similar to how keybase works.
Internally, the idea is to just encrypt all the git objects, one per file, and store those in a git repo. It could also be stored in S3, as storing it in a repo doesn't help, but Git Repos have the least vendor lock-in.
I used it for quite some time, but a couple of things have made me stop using it as of late.
Firstly, its just not very nice to look at, especially compared to something like Notion. I want something thats a joy to work in.
Secondly, the mobile experience kinda sucks. I used to use it to maintain a list of when i've taken my medication. Upon opening the app, i first have to wait to make sure my notes are fully synced from anything I changed on my laptop. Then once ive updated the note, I have to wait for the notes to be synced before i close it. If you close the app before syncing completes, it wont work.
Also all sorts of UX issues in the app, primary one I can think of is the keyboard going over the top of the text you are trying to write.
In general, a lot of the time I dont really have the need to have a see both a markdown-rendered window, and the text window. I end up closing the markdown-render window so I have more screen area to see what im writing. But then it just doesn't look good?
Im not trying to hate on Joplin, I really want to enjoy it. I even wrote a plugin for it. Does anyone have any similar thoughts?
I tried to use Joplin for a while, and stopped largely due to the same reasons as you.
I switched to Obisidan, which also stores all its notes locally in Markdown, offers all the features you want and a robust plugin ecosystem, has a (beta) mobile client, and is pretty.
The one thing it doesn't have that I really want is "WYSIWYG" markdown editing, a la Typora (but it's on the roadmap!).
I’ve been using a theme in Obsidian that’s _pretty much_ WYSIWYG, but albeit not _quite_ at Typora/Notion levels. If you’re working in that paragraph it’ll show syntax but hide it once that paragraph loses focus.
To me this felt like the best of both worlds since I can actually jump into an existing piece of formatted text and easily modify it or “jump out of” formatted modes like ‘code’ which was a bit of a pain in Notion.
