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Onenote alternatives (beehaw.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/foss@beehaw.org
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Hey all, I'm a Linux baby and just discovered all my Onenote notes for DnD aren't transferable to my new machine ๐Ÿ™ƒ

I've seen a few alternatives, specifically Joplin, mentioned, but what I'm looking for is an editor that lets me move notes all around or type in random places like Onenote. I found Spiral, but it's not my favorite, though it does have what I need so far, if at a very bare and basic level.

Can anyone recommend anything with the 'type anywhere' functionality? I'm not even wholly invested in it being FOSS, but this seemed like the best place to ask. Thanks y'all

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[โ€“] 2 points 2 years ago (9 children)

You can use the excalidraw plugin maybe? I guess I'm not understanding the placement work flow you're speaking of. All the options I listed are free so you can download and try them. Big feature of Obsidian is the plugin marketplace. But hey, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Basically in onenote you can drag any box of text, table, image, excel table, pdf embed, and so on and place it anywhere you want on the page. It's really nice for making notes because you can make a quick note in a box and just drag it around to arrange things.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 2 years ago (7 children)

    Ah, ok. Thanks for the explanation. I was wildly off in my visualization of how you were using it. The other poster in this thread is right, the Canvas function can do a lot of that. You'd have to try it to see if it actually fits your use case. Regarding the others mentioned, I'm not sure any of them can do it. But Obsidian canvas or you could also play with the Excalidraw plugin. Or just test it separately here and imagine that functionality within your notes app, that's what the plug in does.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 2 years ago* (6 children)

    Yeah I've tried Obsidian but it just has too much going on and feels very cluttered, but doesn't have features like automatic sync between devices.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Isn't that funny how different our experiences are? I liked Obsidian because it felt less cluttered than some of the others. But that might be the theme and fonts I set up, i'm not sure. I will agree with the sync. I'm fine paying for a service like that, but $8/mo paid annually is too much. I did end up paying for a year to see if it was worth it. And while it's flawless and fast, I can't justify that continued cost. Once my year is up I'll look at syncthing or the CouchDB plugin sync to see if that does what I want and performs well. Shouldn't be too hard as it's literally just folders full of plain text files...

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah we can have very different ideas of what works for us haha.

    Like I consider markdown editors cluttered and complex, because there's not a simple toolbar up top to format everything in rich text. It feels like a one step forward, 2 steps back kind of deal to me.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 2 years ago

    I showed my son Obsidian and a little explanation of how markdown works. Explaining the draw (to me at least) is that I can format text without taking my hands of the keyboard. A few hours later he tells me he discovered that there are shortcut buttons a the top of the screen to do bold, italics, underscore, etc and "you just need to click on them so it's a shortcut!"

    I do like markdown editors that do the live preview of the rendered text instead of the side-by-side view of Markdown on one and HTML on the other. Obsidian sort of just changes to rendered text as you type.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    To be fair to Obsidian, the default view is like three panes making it look busy, but you can toggle off both the left and right sidebar, leaving just the edit view which can be switched between edit and reading modes. Even the various toolbar icons need not be visible, and you could just use shortcuts to call them.

    I use Syncthing to sync my Obsidian notes between desktop, server, Android, iPad, and Android tablet - it happens seamlessly in the background complete with version control.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    With syncthing how well does obsidian handle edits on 2 devices at nearly the same time? Like if I make some edits on my phone while looking at a project and then before syncthing has synced the files, paste some images in on my desktop, does it handle that well?

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 2 years ago

    Syncthing warns you and asks you to choose which is newer. If you have versions set it should also keep older versions for any roll back. But I make a point to rather work in one device at a time. I actually sync all my devices to a Docker instance running Syncthing, so it works from a central point versus all devices syncing to all devices. That Docker version is on 24/7.

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