Note App Options
It’s been quite a while now that I have been wanting to find or come up with a solution for sharing notes between my android devices and my computer where it’s so much easier to look things up or write than with the small screen and virtual keyboard on my phone or tablet.
For me I wanted it to be computer first and have a way to sync with my devices. For me it would ideally not use the “cloud” because that means someone else controls it. When that becomes not profitable or boring they’d shut it down. Nothing’s worse than when you grow to like something then it goes away.
Yesterday I saw Zim mentioned as a personal wiki program. It does more than I need but I like it a lot. I like it’s interface because it doesn’t try to by pretty and it’s not electron. I repeat it’s not electron. It’s not a 100+ meg program that’s so bloated because it’s written in java script. My experience with them is that they’re slow. Really the whole electron thing is a rant for another day.
It’s going to be a learning curve to use the Zim program of course but that’s the case with anything new. I think once things become muscle memory efficiency will come.
Zim can run on windows too if I should choose to run windows enough to find it worthwhile to install it and python. As it stand now I only boot into windows if I have to so I won’t bother to install it.
Zim is not available for android as of now but I found that the Markor app can mostly read and use the Zim files.
Next up was to find a way to sync the files. I settled on Syncthing for that. That’s not on the cloud so they won’t take it away. They say that none of the data is ever stored anyplace but on your devices which is a big selling point for me. I’d read about it a while ago and even had installed it some time ago from the FreeBSD ports but just never used it until now. It wasn’t too difficult to set up. No worse than anything else that’s new to me so it a had a bit of a learning curve.
Markor seems good enough for me on android and will be easier when I get used to the layout and the icons. More importantly it has a dark mode! It also doesn’t have microscopic and super thin text that makes it difficult for me to see.
Time will tell whether I stick with this set up. It seems good enough for me now to do the things I want to do. It’ll be handy for those times when I see something when we’re out and about and something or think of something i want to look up or post about.
Another time when I think it will be really handy is when I am laying in bed at night on my tablet. That’s really when I think of the most ideas of things I want to check into but often times I am too tired then and the tablet screen is too small for stuff that’s too in depth. It’s just not ideal for those sorts of things.
It would be great to brainstorm ideas on there but no way in hell would I want to type anything too long and that annoying virtual keyboard. I learned to touch type as a kid so that’s what works best for me.
I don’t know for sure if this is what I will stick with. I always like to keep my options open.