I've given up with trying to find The One True Note Taking Tool, so have ended up writing my own thing that I tinker with now and again to tune it to exactly what I need.
It's essentially a simple web server that sits on top of a bunch of markdown files.
The frontend renders the markdown using markdown-it and supports KaTeX for simple inline mathy things, along with the extended markdown stuff like tables etc. I've even made it so that you can drag and drop files (including images) into the edit box and it will upload them to the server and render the correct markdown syntax so they can be rendered when you look at the note.
Alongside the files, the data is also stored in a SQLite database file with some metadata, and I'm using the Full Text Search (FTS5) engine to support search which seems to work ok.
If the database gets corrupted it can just be rebuilt, it's really just there to augment the notes. If I stop developing it or want to move on, the notes are there as text files.
It works well enough in a mobile browser, although admittedly a bit rubbish if you need offline access.
Works well enough for me. I might open source it one day but I think I'd need to clean up the code a bit first :)
This sounds a lot like a tool I built for myself [1], sans the database. I agree that Markdown + Katex with a local server seems like the right move for most technical people. Lots of things like encryption, backups, and basic text search can be done via other Unix tools. I also agree that the big win is owning your data long-term, even if you get tired of maintaining the software.
Same here: I'm taking a lot of notes and find SimpleNote/Notepad++/NV work for me for note taking but not for note management. And I also build several tools to manage it. For now I use very simple full-text search (qgrep) and fzf (with my own modifications) to perform search-as-you-type to find notes/source code.
qgrep is good for really quick index and it has incremental indexing that works for my byt i'm hitting some problems as it works good for code search but not so good for notes. However i don't feel like using anything that start a server. I just don't think I have that many notes.
I did something similar for a few years... then my web app was hacked. I realized what a big liability it was to have such precious stuff inside an app with such limited security. Since then I’ve learned to make do with simpler tools. Omni Outliner is my favorite!
I have a similar tool I've been using for years now. It is built on sqlite and uses the fts extension to provide full-text search.
Some nice features I've added over the years: bookmarklet and automatic page-screenshotting, tags (and smart auto-tagging), everything markdown supports, file upload and attach, media embed (YouTube link becomes player, eg). Oh, I can also attach email reminders and make to-do lists (with little checkboxes and everything). It started out very simple and has grown over time. Sqlite is a great foundation for projects like this. Strongly recommend.
It's essentially a simple web server that sits on top of a bunch of markdown files.
The frontend renders the markdown using markdown-it and supports KaTeX for simple inline mathy things, along with the extended markdown stuff like tables etc. I've even made it so that you can drag and drop files (including images) into the edit box and it will upload them to the server and render the correct markdown syntax so they can be rendered when you look at the note.
Alongside the files, the data is also stored in a SQLite database file with some metadata, and I'm using the Full Text Search (FTS5) engine to support search which seems to work ok.
If the database gets corrupted it can just be rebuilt, it's really just there to augment the notes. If I stop developing it or want to move on, the notes are there as text files.
It works well enough in a mobile browser, although admittedly a bit rubbish if you need offline access.
Works well enough for me. I might open source it one day but I think I'd need to clean up the code a bit first :)
EDIT: the core of the tool was mostly inspired by this article https://golang.org/doc/articles/wiki/