I think plain text is a pretty bad medium for note taking, at least with regards to how my brain functions. I want pictures and audio and bookmarks to websites and embed pdfs into it. I don't want to have to worry about where i'm storing the media relative to my notes files, they should just be a part of it as soon as I drop it into it. And sometimes i want to rearrange bits spatially. Dragging each part around the 'canvas' to help make sense of everything in a way so the scattered thoughts in my head can be considered and potentially organized in a way that makes sense. I know that this also falls more into "brainstorming" but that is largely what my notes are used for. Plain text just doesn't really fulfill my needs.
I think Curio [1] is probably the closest thing to what I want in my head, though one of those HUGE downsides to software like this (and why plaintext is vastly preferred by the HN crowd) is that it's not at all portable or even necessarily decipherable. If Zengobi disappears or I lose access to their software then I'm just out of luck, which has made me hesitant to even try using it and why despite my feelings about it, a great deal of notes I've written are simply in plain text.
If anyone has suggestions for solutions that are like this, I'm all ears.
Onenote does all those things. clunkily in the case of free arrangement, but hold ALT and it will do it.
In my crazy moments, I imagine porting Onenote's files to a linux program for read/writing Onenote pre-Windows 10 local files.
Then I remember there's almost no way I'm up to finishing that task, even if the file format is open, and I never get past the quagmire of 'what IS desktop linux, is it a .deb, a .rpm, must I use C or C++ i wanna use F#, GTK or QT and strange licenses and and'...then i fire back up my Windows pc and jot down my thoughts, embedded images, files, audio and all right in one file, and decide not to start yet another software project.
Onenote is just about irreplaceable for the following use cases, but open source stuff is close.
roam and notion dont even get on my list
1. notes are stored in an offline file
notewiki and wikidpad falls short here.
4. viewable images inline
cherrytree iirc falls short here? or maybe not but it deserves to be on the list ranked better than 'cloud notes'
5. tables
it is below here where joplin falls short afaik
7. ink and touch features
it is below here where xournal++ falls short though they have a ticket open to eventually use a newer file format that would support this use case...and then i plan to switch if at all practical
2. embed files right in the same file so i only have to sync / backup one file, not any linked files all over the disk
3. image / audio embeds that display/play the media inline
Thanks for this. I'm aware of OneNote being pretty flexible but have never really committed to using it for any length of time to really see if it's what I want or not. It seems to have similar pitfalls that Curio does, though the plus side being that Microsoft is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon and tend to be pretty good about supporting its Office suite well.
Xournal++ [1] I had never heard of. It doesn't seem like it's what I'm personally looking for but what an interesting project and definitely one worth looking at!
The problem isn’t with plaintext, but with lazy development and lock-in dark patterns.
If you look at org-mode, it can do a lot of these things (perhaps even all of them on the GUI emacs), while keeping it plain-text. It, of course, needs the necessary elisp to properly display such a rich plain-text file, but things are still pretty accessible in a normal text editor.
Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see org-babel, which is more powerful than jupyter notebooks, but still uses plain text (as opposed to JSON). Databases (as the source of truth) are not a prerequisite to rich, multimedia files.
No matter how badly I want org-mode to be the solution here (and it admittedly covers a lot of people’s needs) there is nothing about plain text files that will enable me to move objects and rich media around in 2D space. Of course in org-mode you could handle metadata of blobs of data and include things like coordinates but plain text doesn’t really have any concept of 2D space. Any sort of rich media you want to embed other than images require a different view like web view or pdf tools but doesn’t naturally embed inside of the text file. Would it be impossible to do? Probably not, it’s emacs. But org-mode as it is right now certainly doesn’t cover most of these requirements.
I think Curio [1] is probably the closest thing to what I want in my head, though one of those HUGE downsides to software like this (and why plaintext is vastly preferred by the HN crowd) is that it's not at all portable or even necessarily decipherable. If Zengobi disappears or I lose access to their software then I'm just out of luck, which has made me hesitant to even try using it and why despite my feelings about it, a great deal of notes I've written are simply in plain text.
If anyone has suggestions for solutions that are like this, I'm all ears.
[1] https://www.zengobi.com/curio/