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Onenote alternatives
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Not FOSS but I see so many YouTubers that DM talk about Obsidian for notes. I use it and love it myself, just not for DnD stuff.
Logseq and Joplin are FOSS and are often brought up. Joplins android app is garbage, if that matters to you.
Acreom isn't FOSS yet, but it's on the roadmap and I liked that one.
Notesnook is FOSS but has some features behind a paywall that might be deal breakers for some folks.
It doesn't look like any of those have the basic feature of placing things where you want inside a page like onenote does.
My big takeaway from this thread is that, wow, people actually use that feature. I use OneNote at work, and I absolutely loathe that if I click a bit too low, I end up outside my note.
It's basically the main feature of onenote that I use, being able to make technical notes and tables about circuits or cabling that I'm designing and drag them around to arrange it all is really nice.
Ah, I see. I think. I'm mostly troubleshooting through logs, packet captures, configurations, etc.
Yeah, that's my #1 reason to not use it. I've got a long list of reasons to dislike OneNote, but that's the big one.
Unfortunately I deal with sensitive data in my notes, so I'm restricted. Can't even sync my notebook off my local SSD.
Logseq has a "whiteboard" feature which is the closest I've seen.
OneNote has been the only tool Ive failed to find a close alternative to, which is a shame because I hate the new simplified versions of OneNote.
I will say though, the linking available on Obsidian and Logseq is fantastic for d&d notes and worth ditching OneNote anyway (for me it was at least).
I haven't used One Note but Obsidian lets you make canvases which you can freely place things on, kind of like a cork board.
Obsidian does… sorta. They call it “canvas”. But I think it’s more for visually connecting notes to other notes, not to connect different things within a given note.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm not sure what OneNote's feature does, but in Logseq you can make a whiteboard and embed other pages and text boxes.
I'm planning on switching from Joplin to Logseq
based on the stalled development and lack of support for mods on Joplin it seems like Logseq is the best path forward to getting a FOSS version of Obsidian and Onenote
Being platform agnostic was important to me, which is what lead me to Obsidian in the first place. Joplin stores the markdown files in a SQL db that requires additional steps to export or convert. I believe Logseq also does flat Markdown like Obsidian, but it just didn't click with me for some reason.