I’ve had an odd amount of difficulty finding a “perfect” notes app.
For me, mobile and desktop apps plus easy family sharing of individual notes are important.
Apple Notes is really the best I’ve got.
The other solutions I’ve found mother cost too much or have some odd dealbreaker features, or they’re over-complicated, or they’re ugly.
Zoho Notebook is on the ugly side but it’s cheap and has apps on all platforms.
Craft is pretty good but if you hit the need for the paid tier it’s a bit pricey.
I think it’s possible that vibecoding an Apple Notes clone is actually the best solution for me.
A lot of people like Obsidian but I think it’s a bit crazy, and I think it’s unacceptable how difficult it is to self-host the sync functionality, especially since again the paid tier is too expensive.
I went from notes.txt in vim to notes.org in emacs for a while (didn't use much org stuff beyond bullet points), back to vim with the same notes.org file but I basically treat it like notes.txt again. Synced with SyncThing, so I could edit it on my phone but in practice I don't think I ever do.
It is 2026... You can't complain about other people's software anymore. Spend about 30 minutes vibe coding your perfect app and you'll never go back. I've basically done that, remade every utility on my phone, on my computer, hyper customized everything that bothered me about all those other software. All local and connected to my private server for sync and backup. And I barely know how to code... I even included in every one of my apps a button that sends me to a session in my custom made ai agent app to change/update/debug any complaints I have about my own apps, on the spot. "Hey codex, that button doesn't do exactly what I wanted quite as fast as I wanted please make it better and faster" wait 5 minutes - done. It's the future... Take advantage of it
I’ve had an odd amount of difficulty finding a “perfect” notes app.
For me, mobile and desktop apps plus easy family sharing of individual notes are important.
Apple Notes is really the best I’ve got.
The other solutions I’ve found mother cost too much or have some odd dealbreaker features, or they’re over-complicated, or they’re ugly.
Zoho Notebook is on the ugly side but it’s cheap and has apps on all platforms.
Craft is pretty good but if you hit the need for the paid tier it’s a bit pricey.
I think it’s possible that vibecoding an Apple Notes clone is actually the best solution for me.
A lot of people like Obsidian but I think it’s a bit crazy, and I think it’s unacceptable how difficult it is to self-host the sync functionality, especially since again the paid tier is too expensive.
I went from notes.txt in vim to notes.org in emacs for a while (didn't use much org stuff beyond bullet points), back to vim with the same notes.org file but I basically treat it like notes.txt again. Synced with SyncThing, so I could edit it on my phone but in practice I don't think I ever do.
It is 2026... You can't complain about other people's software anymore. Spend about 30 minutes vibe coding your perfect app and you'll never go back. I've basically done that, remade every utility on my phone, on my computer, hyper customized everything that bothered me about all those other software. All local and connected to my private server for sync and backup. And I barely know how to code... I even included in every one of my apps a button that sends me to a session in my custom made ai agent app to change/update/debug any complaints I have about my own apps, on the spot. "Hey codex, that button doesn't do exactly what I wanted quite as fast as I wanted please make it better and faster" wait 5 minutes - done. It's the future... Take advantage of it