I’ve used a lot of note taking apps over the years. I like to keep my notes available on multiple devices, and ensure that they are backed up in multiple places so that I don’t lose them. I try to type everything that I post on any of my websites in a separate program first, and to copy and manage them when I’m ready to post.
One of the problems that I’ve found with most apps on the market is that they are made only for Mac and Apple products. While I use a Mac as my main computer, I use Android for phone, and I can’t guarantee that I’ll always stick with this platform. Note taking apps like Bear and Ulysses look nice, but I’m hesitant to buy an app that isn’t future proofed a bit knowing how fickle I am with technology.
Evernote used to be my main solution for this, but the price increase, controversial privacy policy updates, and inability to support some of the features that I want natively have ruled it out as my day to day note app.
Honestly though, it’s still top of my list for all but a few features. I greatly enjoyed the OCR feature, which allowed me to scan and save lots of old useful documents and to be able to search them when needed. Being able to pull up an invoice from a few months prior while talking to an unhelpful mechanic was an opportunity for me to realize how useful it would be to have all of my documents available to search and display at any time. Eventually I want to set something up with a document scanner and a tool like Paperless, but right now that requires more setup and management than I want to put into it right now.
Markdown is the main reason that I stopped regularly using Evernote. I could survive without it as it’s not a requirement for me, but the high support across a variety of platforms, including WordPress where I post most of my content, makes it useful. Evernote doesn’t work with code snippets, and while there are alternative Evernote clients like Alternote and Marxico, I still need to set them up through Evernote, and they’re not always well supported. Plus, I lose the ability to use them on my phone.
Hint: If Boostnote's feature set is too bare-bones for you at the moment, consider Inkdrop, which isn't open source but does support end-to-end encrypted sync (including to mobile), better shortcuts in the desktop version, syntax highlighting and gives you the first 60 days for free. Boostnote's key features: Based on markdown. Boostnote is a free and efficient text editor that allows you to write content in text format, as well as write program codes in several programming languages. It supports 100 different languages, and the best thing is that you can associate programming code snippets. Boost Note automatically stores all changes for every document. If you find a broken document, you can easily roll back to one of the previous versions in one click. $ electron9 /usr/bin/boostnote otaj commented on 2020-10-14 10:16. Hi, it seems that for some reason, boostnote is starting for me with electron 10 (current version), however, what works is running it with electron9. Clone1612 commented on 2020-08-09 13:05.
Apr 12, 2021 Boostnote free download »» Warning! The download link takes you to the official download website of the developer, or on an external site that has developer's permission to provide the program for downloads.
While hunting around a few months ago, I found Boostnote, an open source, markdown driven note taking app that promises to “Boost Happiness, Productivity, and Creativity”.
Cool Features
The cloud syncing is useful, but the mobile app only has preference for Dropbox for now. Basically since you can set where your notes are saved, selecting a folder in a synced service lets you keep them backed up safely.
You can also choose keyboard shortcuts based on vim or emacs if you are used to using either of those command line editors.
Importing text and markdown files is as easy as dragging them into the app. You can even import from Evernote with ever2boost, though it’s a command line tool that requires a bit of setup. Notes can be printed to PDFs if you want to share them in that format. They can also be exported as text, markdown, or HTML files.
Speaking of HTML, there is a setting to control the level of sanitization for HTML, which is nice to keep from accidentally breaking documents with pasted code or content.
The main plus for me is the code snippet feature. I can create shareable code snippets in their own files with a high level of syntax highlighting support. I can also toss bits of code into normal markdown notes, which will translate to display properly when I paste into WordPress. Considering how often I like to do that, it’s probably the first feature that is missing from Evernote that I’d want to start using that again.
Drawbacks
The app is not perfect. Like every note app, there are features that another app has that I wish that it had, and there are features that it has that if I could transport into another app I might start using that one.
An example is storage methods on the mobile app. Since you can set up a folder in a cloud sync service to allow you to access the same notes on mobile, I’d like to be able to set that as my default and have it cache data, so that I don’t need to reload all notes every time I want to use it on mobile, or not accidentally forget to switch and have it stored in mobile only.
There is no spellcheck in Boostnote. Coupled with a bug that currently exists in Gutenberg where spellcheck does not run on pasted content, I have to manually move through all of my content to ensure that it is not misspelled.
One thing that Evernote and Marxico have are the ability to work via a web interface. This would necessarily be more difficult in a self-hosted app like Boostnote, but it’d be a nice feature for someone wanting to manage a secure hosted environment, so I could access and edit notes on devices that I don’t have synced with my data.
There are some quirks to Boostnote that I’m hoping will get updated soon, like the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to jump to the beginning of the line that you are typing on as opposed to the start of the row. I can’t say I would have a workaround for this without line breaks or carriage returns, but I can hold out hope. When you copy a link into Boostnote it grabs the meta title for that link and creates markdown for you, but then it doesn’t update the cursor position.
I will again point out that this is an open source project, and I am lucky to get so much for free already. I just like the idea that I could submit issues on Github and potentially have someone who knows more about this than I do work up a solution.
Where I’m Ending Up
The thing is, there are so many different note taking apps. In addition to the ones that I mentioned above, here’s just a quick sampling that I found while writing this:
If Evernote handled code better, I’d probably pay to switch back. If Marxico had desktop (and preferably mobile as well) apps, likewise. Right now Boostnote isn’t perfect, but it’s the place that I get most of my writing done.
I’m going to check out some of the new apps that I found while writing this post. Do you have a note taking app that you swear by? What features should I be looking for?
Recently, my schedule has become quite busy, with various responsibilities competing for my time and focus. I find myself trying to hold onto as much context about these responsibilities as I can, but I can’t seem to remember all of the necessary information. After some careful reflection, I’ve found that I need to take more notes in both my personal and professional life.
How does taking notes help? Switching from one focal point to another can be hard, especially if you don’t have anything to reference. For me, keeping notes and to-do lists has been a great way to off-load some of the context that I’ve been trying to hold in my head all at once.
In a previous post, I talked about how I’d been using the Markdown file format as a quick, efficient way to take notes. However, after reading my post again, I noticed a few things that I’d change now that I have more experience using apps to take notes. Here’s how I’ve refined my thinking.
What Makes a Good Note-Taking App?
In my experience, a great note-taking app has to meet these three criteria:
- It has to have a fast and efficient editing experience.
- It needs organization and search capabilities.
- It should be adaptable to change.
Boostnote Tutorial
1. Fast and efficient editing
A note-taking application should make it easy to manipulate text on the screen. As a Vim user, I’ve grown accustomed to Vim keybindings for navigation and editing, and I feel that my productivity is limited when I’m using an application that doesn’t support macros or offer a command mode.
Boostnote App
I’m not saying that a great note-taking app has to have Vim keybindings. But it should have other text-editing features that modern text editors provide: syntax highlighting, auto-formatting, live-preview mode, etc.
2. Organization and search capabilities
Creating/editing notes is a good first step, but a great note-taking app also needs to provide a way to find the notes you’ve already written. Most modern note-taking applications utilize folders and tags to help organize your notes, but these features don’t come standard with most text editors unless you define your own format for adding tags and structure your filesystem accordingly.
You can also search on the command line with tools such as grep, The Silver Searcher, or ripgrep, but not everyone is comfortable on the command line. It’s also nice to know that all of your notes live in one place instead of being tucked into random files spread throughout your hard drive.
3. Adaptable to change
Boostnote Next
Unfortunately, we don’t always write notes for ourselves. We sometimes have to share notes with others, and it’s no surprise that there are people who don’t like the Markdown format. Sometimes, the people who could benefit from notes you took prefer Word documents or PDFs. They’ll most likely ignore any Markdown files you send them, but they will be much more likely to read your notes if you send them as PDFs.
Since Markdown is such a well-established format, it should be easy to convert your notes to a variety of file formats for easier consumption. Any great note-taking app should allow you to do this. Once again, you could also use a tool like pandoc to convert your notes to multiple file formats, but a note-taking app should provide this functionality by default.
Why Boostnote Is a Great Note-taking Application
Having thought about what I wanted in a note-taking app, I looked around to see what was available. I thought about how I had used VS Code and Bear in the past, but neither of them fully satisfied my criteria. I needed a tool that had the organization and search features of Bear combined with the great editing experience of VS Code. That’s when I came across Boostnote.
Does it have a fast and efficient editing experience?
When I first heard about Boostnote, I thought its claim to be “The intuitive and stylish note taking tool for developers” was rather bold. If it’s “for developers,” it had better have Vim or Emacs keybindings, or else there will be some disappointed developers. It turns out that Boostnote does support both, and these keybindings are available from the settings menu.
You can also adjust the editor syntax theme with a large set of built-in themes, update the font size, and update the number of spaces to indent (or use tabs if you’re into that sort of thing). It also has support for saving snippets of code—similar to a gist.
Boostnote provides a live-preview option like VS Code and Bear, and it also offers support for auto-formatting Markdown tables and embedding images with drag/drop actions.
It’s also possible to embed video links in your notes using an iframe like so:
Does it have organization and search capabilities?
Boostnote provides folders and tagging for better organization of your notes. It also supports check-boxes and includes a progress bar to track completion of all your tasks for a given note. You can search within specific folders or through all of your notes, and if you remember that you added a sentence to a note at some point but don’t remember which note it was in, you can simply search for some of the keywords from that sentence to find it quickly.
Is it adaptable to change?
One of the things that I liked most about Bear was that it had the ability to export notes as PDF files (not available in the free version). After taking notes during long meetings, I would convert my notes to a PDF and share them with my team. This was a super-valuable feature, and I love that Boostnote has support for this, as well. Currently, they only support PDF export using the “Print to PDF” option, but there are feature requests to make it an available option for export.
Boostnote has satisfied all of my requirements, and I’m really enjoying it. As I use it more often (and take more notes in general), I’ll most likely update my criteria for determining a great note-taking app. In the meantime, Boostnote has earned its spot in my toolbox.
If you want to try Boostnote for yourself, you can download it for free for OSX, Windows, and Linux.
Boostnote Tutorial
What are some of your criteria for a great note-taking app? Let me know!