Hey y’all. I’ve been testing a bunch of Note taking solutions and nothing seems to check off what I want and need.
I want a simple interface (both for list view and note editor/view), preferably similar to Google Keep, but a regular list is fine as well.
Key features:
A. being able to drag and drop re-order checkbox lists.
e.g.
- [ ] item 1
- [ ] item 2
- [x] item 4
- [x] item 3
I’d like to be able to just drag and drop the above to sort things correctly.
B. E2EE at rest.
C. CTRL+F inside the note view/edit!!
Honestly, the only functionality I truly want is A. But most of the solutions I found are either proprietary or can’t do it.
Self hosted options I’ve tried:
- Joplin (can’t do A; UX is not great)
- Standard notes (A + C is gated by their self hosted premium subscription; I don’t mind paying for my apps, but the prices are ridiculous)
- Silverbullet.md (can’t do A)
- Quillpad (very similar to Google Keep and can do A, but has terrible file syncing, not E2EE)
Notesnook looks almost as insane as Standard Notes to self host (mimicing AWS stack locally is nuts). Has anyone tried Notesnook yet? I don’t want to spend another afternoon setting something heavy up only to find that the feature I want is gated by a heavy $.
Any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
EDIT: Woops! I am looking to use the notes app on both Android and Web/Desktop Linux. Preferably an open source solution.



I have a similar setup with the same case haha recently built as well. Your use-case will be more than fine. My only suggestion, aside from try and get more RAM. If those hard-drives are in a redundant raid setup, and you don’t already have one, get a backup drive too. Especially if the price for the drive is decent. Last thing you want to do is to buy a replacement drive later when prices are jacked up or have to do the RMA process with only 3 drives running your data.