💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2021 › 202104 › 20210413-digital-note-taking.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:53:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
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One reason I find Gopher and Gemini attractive is that both protocols deal with plaintext. I prefer interoperability among my devices and systems, and there isn't much that's more universal than plaintext.
Most popular note-taking applications don't encourage interoperability--in fact, many of them use proprietary formats or disallow plaintext exports. This is done specifically to discourage using any platform other than their own. That puts the user in a bad position if he or she wants to migrate systems, the service shuts down, or data needs to be recovered independently.
I decided a few years ago to find as open a note-taking system as possible. My litmus test was simple: I should be able to construct all my notes in an intercompatible format using nothing but a generic text editor without an unreasonable amount of work. This meant that some more advanced features might be sacrificed, but I would cross that bridge when I came to it.
The first replacement I tried was Joplin. Joplin is feature-rich and available on many platforms, and its synchronization system can save data to the system as Markdown-formatted flat files--a big step in satisfying my litmus test. The application ultimately failed the test, however, when I realized that certain metadata for each note was saved in separate files, meaning that multiple files would have to be modified with the proper data when any one note was changed. That definitely counted as an unreasonable amount of work in a generic text editor. That, combined with a few other hangups, meant that Joplin would not satisfy my use case.
My second choice was Markor, an Android app that handles Markdown and todo.txt formats as well as plaintext. Some of my notes are in Markdown and some are in plaintext, mostly depending on whether they needed extra features such as links or inline graphics. I settled on an attachment system similar to my microblogging script, and so far I've been quite happy with it. This clearly passed my litmus test, since any generic text editor can write Markdown and todo.txt files.
As I've immersed myself more in Gopher- and Gemini space, I find that a number of people here use and highly recommend Joplin. Its feature set is quite attractive in many ways. I might take another shot at it someday.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]