Last week, When I was browsing /g/, I stumbled on a thread about taking notes. This wasn't the first time I had seen people discuss this issue (mostly on other websites like YouTube). When I happened upon such things, it always struck me as odd and obnoxious.
My annoyance with them mainly comes from their names (and sometimes their length). With titles like "Obsidian As A Second Brain", "Hack your brain with Obsidian" or "You're not stupid: How to learn difficult things with Obsidian", it's pretty easy to judge who the audience for these videos (and the userbase of these apps) are: People who need to take notes to convince themselves that they are working/learning instead of actually doing action of working/learning.
Now, I can respect someone documenting actually doing something. Here's one of my favorite blog posts about a guy learning a functional (a paradigm I actively dislike) programming language I've never even heard of. But none of these note-taking freaks do anything other than procrastinating! Perfecting their "note-taking" setup to be just perfect. This is not exclusive to the note-taking people but, at the very least, when you spend time being a tinkertranny on something else, like your console emulator, shell, Vim/Emacs, DE/WM setup etc. you actually gain some productivity. You just need to be productive enough to offset the time spent being a tinkertranny.
For me, notes are used for very simple things. I had been using Google Keep to take/sync all my notes. It's on the of the few Google applications that I deliberately installed on my old phone, even when I bought a new one, I also did did the same. I was pretty happy with it, only problem being Google itself. It didn't have many features (like version control), but due to the fact it required no hassle to setup or sync, I was happy with it.
However after, I lurked that note-taking thread on /g/ I mentioned earlier, an emotion of needing to debloat myself overtook me. Especially this post:
$ echo "buy milk" >> notes.txt
$ cat notes.txt
I needed a way to take plain text and markdown notes, without using proprietary software with convoluted things I will never use and sync it between my phone and my computer. The actual note-taking part was very easy to decide: Neovim. I would be lying if I said, I didn't look for a solution that contained both note-taking and syncing but in the end, I decided to trust my gut instinct by going with Neovim. When it came to syncing, ultimately I decided on Syncthing. It's OSS, it's very lightweight, it's written in Go - a language I happen to like, it has version control, it syncs automatically. It has everything I wanted. I wanted a good mobile experience too, but we can't have everything we want now, can we? In the end, I settled on Markor. It's a bit bloated for my use case, but I couldn't find anything that looked pleasant and worked at the same time.