Every thread here is somebody three weeks into a new system telling us it changed their life. I want the boring version: the thing you have used continuously for two years or more, through at least one phone change and at least one moment where you nearly left. Tell us what it is, what you gave up to keep it, and the one thing about it that still annoys you.
The built-in notes app on my phone, four years, and I feel faintly embarrassed admitting it in this room. Gave up: linking, tags that mean anything, structure of any kind. Still annoys me: search is mediocre and it gets slow past a few thousand notes. I keep it because it opens in half a second, and that turns out to be the only feature I use every single day.
Plain markdown files in a synced folder, six years. Gave up: pretty rendering, mobile editing that doesn't feel like a compromise, and any kind of database view. Still annoys me: mobile, badly. Editing markdown on a phone is bad in every app I've tried, and I have tried a lot of them. I keep it because I've watched four friends migrate off things in that time and I have never had to.
Six years and the only complaint is mobile. That's about the most useful data point in this whole thread.
Three years in one of the big all-in-one workspace apps, and the honest cost is speed. It's slow, it needs the network more than it admits, and I've lost text to a sync hiccup twice. I stay because two other people write in it with me, and that turns out not to be a small thing.
Collaboration is the one thing the plain-file crowd genuinely cannot match and we should stop pretending otherwise in these threads.
Paper notebook, one per year, seven years. Gave up search entirely. Still annoys me that I can't grep it and never will. Kept it because I remember things I write by hand and I do not remember things I type, and after seven years I've stopped arguing with my own brain about it.
Two and a half years on an open source local-first one. Nearly left when a version bump changed the file layout under me. Stayed because the files were still text and I could fix it myself in twenty minutes, which is the entire argument for local-first compressed into one sentence.
@plaintext_paz · last mo. · 3 replies
Eleven years, same folder, three different apps on top of it over that period. That's the trick nobody says out loud: you don't have to be loyal to the app, you have to be loyal to the format. I've changed editors three times and never once migrated a note.
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@eleven_tabs · last mo.
This is the actual answer to the entire genre of question, and it doesn't get upvoted because it isn't an app name.
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@attic_server · last mo.
Format over app. Writing that down. In a text file.
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