Sync has to never lose data due to conflicts, the desktop version needs to not be entirely keyboard shortcut driven and not take a week to learn.
I've tried pretty much all the notes apps, none are 100% perfect, but Google Keep is hard to compete with.
I suspect it would not be too hard to make a great one, because you could use SyncThing and plain text as the backend, and I've thought about doing one myself, but the effort of maintaining a cross platform app by myself is more stress than I want to add.
There are currently 3 kind of note taking apps as per me
1) Simple Basic (Just fulfills note creation) Nothing Advance features (Like keep)
2) Advance Extremely feature rich (But lacks the basic features the ui rapid note taking)
3)Extendable Apps
4) Apps with ingenious features like networked note taking tagging, graphical trees, backlinking (Like roam, reflect, capacities) Full featured apps exist for desktop while their android counterparts are limited, all features reside in their desktop app and on android app you can only view no create no sync etc
If you combine all (Next to impossible)
I am better with notepad on windows and vim on linux and keep on android
- cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Android)
- can take notes and To Do lists
- stores data in a "local" area, whose location I have some control over (e.g. webdav, SMB/CIFS, NextCloud, etc.)
- the reason for the above is so we can SYNCHRONIZE our data between devices, but in a self-hosted manner
That's it! I'm even willing to pay for it! ;-). Thanks!
p.s. If anyone already knows of such an animal, I'm all ears! The closest I've got going is Joplin right now, but it's limited in some areas for me.
We’re not in your head, you have to communicate your plans.
A new note-taking app could sell my notes, lock me out via Cloudflare, use robot detection that doesn’t work, leave critical bugs unfixed, pull some kind of business-source-license bait-and-switch, enshittify in some other creative way, or just go away overnight without notice.