> Another note app? [...snip...] dropbox, notion, google . . .

Unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, none of these (or any existing note-taking app that I've tried) hits the sweet spot for me. I've commented on several note-taking apps in the past -- quite enthusiastically -- and I'd really like to see more.

For some background, I live and die by my notes. Mainly due to spending about a decade developing against an obscure set of APIs that were poorly documented, and that Google proved somewhat worthless for, I ended up creating a rather large library of code snippets and documentation around corner cases with three specific APIs. Over time, I started documenting other things. We've all ran into that case where we search for a solution to a problem, find 70 different answers, 68 of which are somewhere between OK and awful, two of which fix the "corner-case". You fix it and move on only to encounter it again a few months/years down the road -- only this time, the bookmark is dead. So you spend an hour crafting ever-more-elaborate search queries[0] to surface something resembling those two, good, solutions. I've always got my note-editor open and the format is so quick to work with that I started documenting those, as well. Yeah, the best coarse of action would be for me to put this out on my blog, and I do put the really interesting (to me) ones out there, but I don't have time to do that every time I need to write a note.

I am also, routinely, put on projects for the purpose of analyzing an existing, large code-base and proposing improvements. This results in several-hundred printed pages of notes which serve as a map of the project. After proposing improvements, I'm usually one of the folks (or the only 'folk') involved in implementing them. Having a simple, low-overhead way of handling this sort of thing is critical.

For my particularly narrow circumstances[1], all of the note-keeping/note-taking tools out there are somewhere between tolerable and terrible. We use Confluence at my office -- I hate it. The WYSIWYG interface works as well as Word[2]. There's a Markdown plug-in, but the resulting document has the Markdown parts wrapped within the plug-in and it doesn't look right. I also have little control over how the Markdown is rendered other than some baked-in tempaltes. I like a well formatted document[3]; Markdown lets me communicate that formatting effortlessly and explicitly. It looks good in the console (often better than a non-Markdown text-file if you use a linter-enabled editor). I store my notes in a git repository, which I now sync via keybase.io's encrypted git. This lets me keep my notes on an encrypted volume, complete with semi-sensitive information (and git-secrets for passwords/IDs and such), and store it end-to-end encrypted somewhere else for when my drive inevitably fails, and I can keep a copy of my notes on every machine I use. Most importantly, though ... getting information out of my notes involves "grep -R 'expression' (star)", and it screams on an SSD. With the addition of a -B or -A, I rarely have to actually open the document to find the answer I need.

Generally speaking, I use VSCode on Linux with the (excellent) Markdown Enhanced Preview extension to take most of my notes, or 'vim'. One or both of these is open at all times on my development machines. I generally use VSCode because I like a live-preview of what I'm writing, despite not wanting a WYSIWYG editor. No. Please, God No[2-again!].

My ideal solution would be self-hosted (I'm open to cloud-hosted if it's end-to-end encrypted and reasonably priced), git-backed or at least offering a way for me to clone ... everything, Markdown+Highlight.js-baesd with templates that can be customized and applied per-document or per-task. There are a few out there that come close. I've tried several and am currently setting up Realms-Wiki in a set of docker containers -- as I write this -- it looks like it covers enough of what I need that it may just work. Collaborative editing would be a nice-to-have, but it's way more important to me to be able to just use 'git' rather than have fancy ether-pad like functionality[4]. Unfortunately, after looking over Slite, it doesn't look like it fits well for me. I couldn't find anything regarding Markdown support, which -- even if it had a perfect WYSIWYG interface, minimally means having to convert my existing library. It looks like the target audience is Confluence users who are as dissatisfied with the product as I am, but for different reasons.

I'm certainly not crapping on the effort - the product looks polished, slack integration is nice and I am a believer that there's a lot of room for improvement in this space. Had I been looking to "begin keeping a team notebook", I'd sign up and give it a shot based on what I've read from the site, but I'm not that guy, unfortunately. Best of luck, either way!

[0] I feel dread the moment I find the need to use "AllInText: " in my search query.

[1] And I'll be the first to admit that I'm really particular, and I'm probably not a good target to build a product against.

[2] No, I didn't want to bold the whole line, just the word. I didn't want to indent that whole paragraph, just the first line. Why is that one miserable bullet indented 1.5 times further than the rest and when I hit the "unindent" button, it becomes 0.5 times as indented as the rest. That should be a "Heading 1". No, just that. Not the rest of it. And why did you move everything down another line there, but not anywhere else? (/rant)

[3] I have several .css files for formatting Markdown in a variety of ways -- even being able to use it to print up a proper "proposal"-style document complete with a cover-page. My company has a gorgeous Word template for all of that. My Markdown .css creates output that's indistinguishable from that template. I hate Word this much.

[4] So now the target audience for my magically wanted product is ... a few people on Hacker News who take notes like me. See [1] (: