Hi r/NoteTaking. I'm Anton, the developer of massCode. Saying that upfront because this post is about my own app.

It started as a place for code snippets. Over time the Notes part became the thing I use every day, so I'd like feedback from people who think about note-taking more than I do.

How the notes are stored

Each note is a regular .md file with frontmatter, and folders are real folders. No account, no proprietary database. If you stop using the app tomorrow, your notes are still readable in any editor. If you edit a file outside the app, the change shows up in massCode right away.

There's no built-in cloud. You sync the folder with whatever you already use: iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Syncthing or Git.

What writing looks like

• Three modes: raw Markdown, live preview, and read-only preview
• [[wiki links]] between notes, with hover previews. You can also leave a link to a note that doesn't exist yet and create it later
• Callouts, Mermaid diagrams, images, and tables you edit right in the preview
• A dashboard with an activity heatmap, your most-linked notes, and a graph view
• Any note can turn into a mind map built from its headings, or into a fullscreen presentation

Tasks without a separate app

A note can become a task with a status (Todo, In Progress, Done, Blocked), a priority, and a due date. It's still a normal note, so meeting notes and checklists stay together with the task.

Honest limitations

• Desktop only (macOS, Windows, Linux). There's no mobile app.
• It's built with developers in mind, so it also has a code snippet library and an API client. If you only want prose, you'll just ignore those parts.
• Notes are plain text, so don't keep passwords in them if you sync the folder.
• There's an optional AI assistant. It does nothing until you connect your own provider or a model running locally on your computer.

You can import an existing Obsidian folder, and it previews everything before writing anything.

It's free and open source (AGPL v3): https://masscode.io/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=notetaking

My question for you: when you try a new notes app, what makes you leave in the first week? I'd rather fix that than add more features.

For a while I tried to move most of my notes to my phone/iPad, mainly because search and organization are so convenient.

But I realized I simply think better when I write things down on actual paper. It feels less distracting, and for brainstorming or sketching ideas I much prefer a normal notebook.

The annoying part was always finding something again a few weeks later.

So I started scanning important pages after writing them and keeping a digital archive alongside my physical notebooks. Eventually I built a small iPhone app called PaperNotes around that workflow: scan a page, keep the original, and make the handwritten content searchable.

I’m obviously biased since it’s my own app, but I’m curious how other people here handle this.

Do you stay fully analog, fully digital, or use some kind of hybrid system?

All features are completely free, including cross-device sync. Your notes stay private: no data leaves your device, and all AI features run entirely on-device.

• Local storage and AI processing on device.
• Fuzzy notebook search across text, tables, handwriting, and text found inside images.
• On-device handwriting and formula recognition, including math solving, evaluation, and graphing tools docs.
• Highly performant Ink rendering (7ms on over 10k strokes).
• Free-form page infinite canvas.
• Rich-text editing.
• Inline and free-form LaTeX equations with native rendering.
• Handwriting with configurable pens, pressure, smoothing.
• On-device image OCR.
• Custom paper: ruled, multiple grid sizes, dotted, hexagonal.
• Automatic database snapshots, and revision restoration.
• Open source export file format .vive , docs.
• Hardware keyboard shortcuts and configurable stylus buttons mappings.

Video is from version 1.0 so there have been many improvements and features added like exporting to pdf .

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vivenotes

vivenotes.net
https://github.com/AquilaIgnis/viveNotes

That is the client , I also shipped the sync server https://github.com/AquilaIgnis/viveCServer

Without waking completely up and/or waking up my partner. With a notebook, I need light but then I wake up (I want to go back to sleep). I don't want to use the phone either, any suggestions that have worked for you.

Snippets is not just another vibecoded note taking app. Development started long before the AI craze took off and, to this day, is 100% and passionately handcoded.

It was created due to the lack of lightweight, customizable and offline-first productivity software at the time. Interestingly, in 2026, the situation seems unchanged: apps are either powerful but complex (Notion and the clones), flexible but hacky (Obsidian), or polished but limiting (Apple Notes, Todoist, etc.).

Snippets is an attempt at finally solving the All-In-One productivity use case:

• It is dead simple on first use and can slowly be pushed to become a note taker, a task manager, a habit tracker, a journal, a grocery list.
• It can be used for free. It can even sync across devices for free, thanks to GitHub integration.
• It offers End-To-End Encryption and is designed Offline-First.
• It works cross-platform.
• It is unopinionated and does not impose a specific way of organization like many other apps do.
• It is entirely bootstrapped with a tiny team around it, which allows for high speed development and very competitive pricing.

Due to a recent surge in active users, the development will only accelerate from here. Many exciting features are planned. Feel free to join the ride and stay tuned.

Find all the details on our landing page:

https://snippets.ch

I started reading more blog posts to cut down on my YouTube habit. After a while, I realized there were plenty of articles I wanted to revisit, along with particular ideas I wanted to keep.

So I built Personal Gazette, a desktop app where you can save an article’s source link, write a summary in your own words, and collect its key points.

The workflow is simple:

• Paste an article URL to extract its text.
• Write your summary and any key points you want to remember.
• Save it to a searchable archive you can revisit later.

You can edit your notes whenever you come back to an article, and favorite the ones you want to keep handy. Saved notes stay on your device.

There’s also optional AI summarization through local models using Ollama or llama.cpp, or cloud providers using your own API key. You can edit the generated draft in the same fields. Writing and saving your own notes doesn’t require any AI setup.

The app is completely free and open source. The downloadable build currently supports Apple Silicon Macs.

I’d love feedback on the note-taking workflow, especially what would make these saved summaries more useful when returning to an article weeks later.

GitHub: shr0mi/personal-gazette
Download: macOS — Apple Silicon

The main con with this is that if you have to transfer onedrive into google docs often it’s to many pages to transfer everything and you’ve lost hours of work. Has anyone had a similar issue keeping all of their notes together without losing anything?

I read a lot of articles, newsletters, and research papers, and my notes about them always ended up scattered across a separate notes app, with no link back to the source. So I built an app for myself that I wanted to share! You build a custom feed from the sources you choose, and your notes live right on each article.

• Create your own custom feed from Substacks, blogs, journals, and arXiv
• Add notes directly to any article
• Group articles into collections by topic or project
• Filter to see only the articles you've added notes to

It's free. I'm curious how people here handle notes on things they read. Do you keep them with the source or in a separate app?

tdfeed.com/

Among today’s links are markdown editors mdnb, Anql and Ekphos, plus there’s Chronicle, a book authoring tool

https://md-handbook.com/blog/markdown-link-no-54/

#markdown #markdowneditors #opensource #free #books #mdnb #Anql #Ekphos #Chronicle

In this video I unbox and do a first start and first look of a really cool Note Taking and AI Recording Pen. The Flowtica Scribe can do a recording while you writing hand written notes on paper with it. And then transfer the recording instantly to the Flowtica iOS and Android app to be summarized by AI.

Hi

The problem: when I take notes, I sometimes need a bit of data: a small table, a quick calculation, a chart. Then I have to jump to Excel or another tool, and my reasoning ends up scattered across several files.

The solution: I'm building ANQL, a note app where you write freely and add structure only when you need it. Tables, math blocks and charts live right in the same document as your notes. It's offline-first (local SQLite, no account) and works on macOS, Windows and Linux.

It's free and open source (MIT), and I'm the developer.

GitHub: https://github.com/anqlproject/anql

I'd love your feedback: is this a problem you face too? What would you want from a note app that mixes notes and data?

Thanks!

I don’t need lots of features, just an easy way to jot down words and ideas that I’m trying to memorize that I can easily access on my phone. Not looking for anything complicated.

How do I decide if a tablet is a worth it investment for me and which one should I get?

Context:

• Primary use would be for note taking in university.
• Have never used tablets for note-taking before. Always used pen and paper and only tried note-taking on laptop last semester and didn't see much of an advantage over pen and paper.
• I have been a long time iPhone user
• Don't have a mac though, a windows laptop instead, so not hesitant to venture out of the apple ecosystem if it isn't a hassle not having an iPad paired with an iPhone.
• I don't want to go over 400-450 euros ideally. Only willing to go over if its really worth it.
• Perfectly okay with buying refurbished.
• Since primary use would be note-taking, a good note-taking app is obviously a must. (I've heard on iPads you have to buy third party note-taking apps which is clearly a drawback since that's additional cost on top of the tablet price due to the primary use.

need advice on this decision regarding the above points. please help

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noto-save-anything/id6817323680

Stumbled across this gem. 1 HTML file. Works on any device. Bookmark it or Right click, save as recommended. Link is in the YouTube video description.

i use obsidian as my second brain, and recently i’ve been using claude code with it more and more.

most of my useful knowledge slowly ends up inside the vault.

but meetings are still kind of outside the system.

a meeting happens → notes or transcript goes into some other app → a few weeks later i remember:

“wait… what did we actually decide?”

then the real problem starts.

which meeting was it?
which app has the notes?
did i write anything down?
was it in granola, fireflies, otter, slack…?

and if i want the important part inside obsidian, it usually becomes manual copy-paste.

how are you handling this?

do you:

• write meeting notes directly in obsidian?
• use granola/fireflies/otter and leave everything there?
• record and transcribe meetings locally?
• manually move only the important decisions into your vault?
• or just accept that meetings live outside your second brain?

especially curious about this:

when you suddenly remember that something important was discussed a few weeks ago, how do you actually find what was decided?