Since Evernote's recent pricing changes, I don't want to trust important personal data to their company any more, and I've been hunting for an alternative. Unfortunately there're not a whole lot of note-taking apps that'll fit the bill. Here're my major requirements:
- I'm definitely not trusting my notes to another proprietary app or format. An open source application would be preferred, but I'm willing to pay for a commercial app - more importantly, my actual data must be stored in an open format. Individual plain-text files with Markdown formatting would be ideal, but anything that'll keep working if the particular app goes under will be enough. (However I am willing to trust my notes to Dropbox for sync, since any files I sync through Dropbox stay accessible as normal files and will stick around locally if Dropbox dies.)
- I use Evernote's tags incessantly, so any replacement will need to support tagging. Ideally, tags would just appear in the notes' bodies as #hashtags since that arrangement will be the easiest to access across various platforms and apps. Letterspace handles tags this way, but it doesn't do a whole lot else (very few configurable options, available on Apple platforms only, etc.)
- I should be able to access my notes on mobile and on desktop. As I run macOS and Android primarily, this is a little tricky, since nice Mac apps usually end up only on iOS and not on Android. (For instance, Letterspace!) If notes are stored as plain Markdown then the app isn't necessarily required on all platforms since generic Markdown apps are not hard to come by, but it'd still be better to have the actual app work across platforms.
- The actual note editor should be decent. Evernote's is completely awful, so it isn't actually hard to do better. Most importantly, in Evernote you end up with hidden HTML lying around that make all your notes look slightly different from each other, so I want to be able to see and fix the formatting instructions rather than be stuck with invisible junk making all my notes look weird. The best editor I've seen with this in mind is Bear's, which uses Markdown and basically renders it inline so you don't need a separate preview. That'd be ideal. An editor with less fancy rendering, like StackEdit's, would also be okay.
I think that covers it. Thoughts?
Update: StackExchange just pointed out that this question is a possible duplicate. That question's top answer is Google Keep, which doesn't even have an API (seriously, Google?). To make this question obviously different, I'll re-emphasise that the most important thing for me is to keep my data open, ideally in the form of plain Markdown files.
mysqldumpwith locking all tables (for a consistent dump) is quite easy IMHO. As for sync, I've never tried to sync two MySQL databases. If you rather meant apps: there are clients for different OSes which directly talk to the server.mysqldumpis reasonably straightforward, yes, but it's necessary to perform an explicit data dump to produce a backup-able file rather than the default storage being in a backup-able format. Could be set up as a cron job, I suppose.