I’ve started the hunt for a suitable new note taking program. My demands are simple: I want a stack of text documents with persistent offline access on my Linux and Android devices, Web access from elsewhere, and automated synchronization between them.
I’ve been using xfce4-notes-plugin, which has been adequate, is backed by plaintext, and is ridiculously light on resources — but it has no capacity synchronization. I wish Google hadn’t abandoned notebook, since that would provide a mechanism to build around without an extra entity I have to trust with my data, but its viability is long gone. In a similar vein, I’m getting a strong urge to find and punch the dropbox folks for using a goofy proprietary protocol instead of something I can trivially self host (hint).
Evernote, with the Nevernote Linux-compatible client, looked like a generally acceptable solution (persistent local copies mitigate the cloud trust issue) until I got a good look at Nevernote – a 55MB blob of crude, crudely-packaged Java code, which seems to function, but consumes 3-6% CPU and 3% memory to sit in the background empty on my i7M620/8GB system. I don’t care how snazzy it is, this is not a solution for a persistent tool.
Hacking something together with text-file-backed editors, rsync, and my web hosting is a last ditch option, since it really is all I want, but there must already be something light, functional, and not dripping with proprietary cruft floating around… right?
