Sharing some interesting and somewhat newish (most of them) notes apps besides the standard Obsidian, NotePlan and Apple Notes.
Do you know any other?
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I was thinking, earlier, about how wonderful it is that people like me can love Raycast (and think it’s massive value and a no-brainer) and others (who value different things) have got a few other alternatives that are better (and probably free or cheaper) than raycast.
It’s like going to a restaurant where you’ve got lots of good choices that fit your preferences and budget.
That’s the modern world at work!
I had the opposite reaction when I saw your list of apps. There are too many for me to get my head around them. And - since marketing skills are more important than coding skills for selling - I don’t know how to tell what’s good and what’s not.
I was trying to untangle my reaction, and I guess one of the “features” of a product is how long you reckon it will hang around. One of the costs of product is making sure you can switch. So with launcher apps like Raycast I feel like they’re an established product and I can easily switch. With a new-name note or outliner, … I’ve been hurt several times with their predecessors.
(Btw: I imagine if you did a list for todo apps you’d have a sqazillion apps, and half of them would have been coded by podcasters!),
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I find I’m no longer interested in this field. It has been flooded with apps. Also, Reflect I would avoid as they have deprecated their first product. Probably shows the market is no longer financially viable for newer apps.
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Something I keep turning over from the other side, as someone who’s actually built and shipped a small app: free vs paid doesn’t really touch the actual barrier here. The cost isn’t money, it’s time. When a category has fifteen credible options, like this thread, “just try it” isn’t a small ask anymore, it’s fifteen separate evaluations competing for the same hour. A free trial doesn’t fix that, if anything it just moves the tax from your wallet to your calendar.
The “will this still exist in two years” question is a real cost too, not paranoia, once you’ve actually spent the time. A few signals I trust as a user (and think about as someone who runs a small subscription app myself): a one-time-purchase model with no ongoing revenue is often the riskier bet long term, not the safer one, there’s no recurring reason for the dev to keep maintaining it. Changelog frequency matters more than feature count. And a solo dev who actually shows up in threads like this one to answer questions is a better signal than any marketing copy.
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Although this is increasingly less valid, the Reflection app mentioned above being a case in point.
On a personal level I’d rather pay a one-off fee and use the app for a couple of years and the developer stops, than a subscription doing the same thing. Subscriptions are no guarantee but require more investment as Tana Outliner is another example. There are also issues of subscriptions going up exponentially as any Bending Spoon acquisition demonstrates.
The likelihood is as AI improves disgruntled users will start coding their own simple apps to avoid this cost.
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I don’t buy the literal version of that, most people won’t want to become their own dev team even with AI doing the heavy lifting. But I like it more as a jumping-off point than as a prediction. It points at a more interesting question: if the cost of building something that fits you exactly keeps dropping, the question isn’t “will everyone code their own apps,” it’s what setting up a computer even means once “install an app” and “describe what you want and have it built” take roughly the same effort. Right now setup means picking software off a shelf and adapting your workflow to fit it. That could flip. Makes me wonder if there’s real room for something that sits above all of this, less an app store, more a way to actually configure a machine around how one specific person thinks, generated rather than selected. Not sure it’s buildable without just becoming another framework to learn, but it’s a fun one to chew on. Thanks for that inspiration, @svsmailus
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Probably, but my concern is who controls and has access to the data. The new context aware semantic data is a different animal and carries huge risk IMO.
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I tried ZenNotes and Octarine.
Mind says Octarine but heart says ZenNotes.
Fair, and probably a good reason this deserves its own thread rather than a tangent here, since the OP was after notes app recommendations. Happy to keep going if someone starts one.
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That is an interesting analysis.
But I think it might be more fair to reframe “vibe coding” as natural language programming.
AI-assisted coding does not eliminate the need to think in computational terms. It simply lets the user “code” in English (or whatever other language) rather than in Javascript or Python etc.
So AI-assisted coding frees the user from having to deal with the syntax of classic programming language - that saves lots of time and minutiae, but the user still needs to think like a programmer.
In many ways this is simply the next level beyond high-level languages replacing assembly language or operating systems replacing low-level BIOS calls.
Would you say that someone programming in Javascript or Python is not doing “real” programming because he is not coding at a bare-bones assembly language level? Vibe coding similarly takes the abstraction up a notch.
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I’m actually vacillating between nvim and emacs. I’ve toyed with both before, but looking to move most of my notes into one of them. Still undecided!
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Fair point on the abstraction-level framing, and I don’t disagree with it as a claim about programming. But that wasn’t quite my question. I was thinking less about whether it counts as “real” programming and more about what happens to the whole concept of “setting up a computer” once that gap closes. Feels like a good topic for its own thread though, this one is about notes apps and I already derailed it once today.
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I just want old school NVAlt that synchs with Dropbox.
I had a boss decades ago who made me learn Vim to update and write tech notes and FAQs for support staff.
Later boss in same job made me learn emacs.
In both cases I composed in BBedit and published via their text editor of choice.
Don’t forget Drafts, loved by many as a capture method as well as notes because it’s on lots of devices (watch, iOS, Mac).
And Bear.
I know people get riled about subscription costs, but developers have ongoing support costs, as well as costs for implementing new features and infrastructure and employees. I used to pay a lot more for new releases that were at most every year.
I want developers to be able to keep products I love and use alive, without metaphorically killing themselves.
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Emacs, because you can use the (n)Vim modal editing framework (with the Evil package) and have the best of both worlds.
And Emacs org-mode is an astonishingly capable task management and general writing studio. Oh, and one of the greatest cat-vacuuming tools ever created…
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My switch is not mainly due to subscriptions, although that does play some part. It’s more to do with AI implementations and hardware costs. My m1 mac has limited life and I doubt I will buy a new mac that has AI built in nor pay the exorbitant costs (IMO) that now requires monthly payments. As much as I like computers, Apple’s pricing is not what I’m willing to pay. First iPhone and now macs. I’m not angry, just pragmatic and the glorious days that made me love iphone/mac have long gone IMO that I don’t mind moving on.
To this end, I’m moving to software that will work in other OSes. I have a few years to slowly migrate and commandline has some really good software. 
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Ha – I should have known there would be a cat package…!
But I meant cat-vacuuming or yak shaving or gnu-gargling or llama-loofering or bikeshedding or frog-frolicking or…
You can spend a lot of time configuring Emacs instead of actually working with it, but it is fun…
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. . . or cat-waxing. Cat-vacuuming and cat-waxing take a great deal of time and energy for many, possibly most writers.
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