Dear Standard Notes, I owe you an apology

Dear Standard Notes,

I feel like I owe you an apology. I recently wrote a long rant about how you fall short as a note app in even the most basic ways. I was annoyed at the time, probably hungry too. And although many of these points still stand, I feel like I didn’t appreciate you for what you are and measured you by the wrong standards. Please give me another chance.

Appreciating Standard Notes for what it is

Standard Notes is one thing above all else: a secure and encrypted cross-platform note app. It’s easy to compare it to other apps that are less secure or less cross-platform and complain that feature A or B is missing, but those apps are not first and foremost secure and encrypted cross-platform note apps. If you want a great native experience that’s fully integrated in the Apple ecosystem, of course Ulysses is a way better option than Standard Notes. But it’s not cross platform nor E2EE. And yes, Joplin has great features and organization options, but it’s not an encrypted app at the core and it doesn’t provide Standard Notes’s peace of mind that no one will ever access my notes, even though I myself can access them anytime, anywhere.

While trying out those other options, I realized more and more that it’s exactly that peace of mind that counts most for me and that there’s no other app that can level with Standard Notes. So I came crawling back.

It gives a peace of mind, knowing that no one will ever access my notes, even though I myself can access them anytime, anywhere

Rowing with the oars you’ve got

In Dutch there’s the saying “rowing with the oars you’ve got”, meaning: working with what you’ve got. With my new mindset – convinced that I could make it work between us – many of the things that seemed impossible before turned out to be possible when I just tried to row with the oars that Standard Notes gave me. Here’s what I changed the second time round:

1. Keep it simple. One of the mistakes I made the first time was that I installed every single extension that Standard Notes offers. This made the app very messy and bloated and definitely contributed to the ‘sluggish and buggy’ experience I had. Of course there’s no unified experience when you work with 5 different markdown editors. Upon coming back, having cancelled my premium account, I had to start with 0 extensions and I realized I really enjoyed the simplicity of just the plaintext editor. Now I’m back at premium, but I only have a few extensions installed: the Focus theme, the Markdown Pro and Spreadsheet editors and the Quick tags and Action bar components.
2. Use only one editor. Standard Notes offers many different editors and they all function in different ways, which can make the editing experience very inconsistent when switching between editors. This time I only use Markdown Pro and I’m positively surprised by the consistent editing experience. The editor looks beautiful and even supports many keyboard shortcuts for text editing, making typing a breeze.
3. Be creative with tags. One of my complaints was the lack of organization possibilities. I like to separate folders from tags; using folders to organize my notes by ‘type’ (journal, notes, work log, quotes, etc.) and tags to organize them by topic. Now Standard Notes does offer a ‘folders’ extension, but it’s just tags in disguise and it’s messy and I don’t like it. However with a little creativity, simple, one-dimensional tags can be separated by prepending certain characters. I started ‘type’-tags with an @ (separating subtypes with a .) to distinguish them from ‘topic’-tags and now they’re nicely sorted first and there’s really nothing I lack.

Things SN does better

Now working with Standard Notes isn’t just ‘rowing with the oars’, there are actually a few things it offers that others note apps don’t. I already mentioned the instant and reliable sync, broad cross-platform support and of course encryption, but there’s more:

1. Spreadsheets: One additional unexpected feature that I ended up using all the time is the Secure Spreadsheets editor. I keep a lot of simple spreadsheets; from time sheets to personal and company finances, and I love being able to do all of that within Standard Notes. Of course it’s not Excel and it doesn’t do a lot of fancy stuff, but all the basic stuff you’d expect from a spreadsheet is there and works great. With spreadsheets included, there’s really no reason left for me to use any other software for my personal and company administration.
2. Full note history: Already saved me many minutes of work over the past week. Plus it offers a sense of freedom while writing and editing knowing that no change is irreversible.
3. Blogging: I have always tried to make my text collection as complete as possible, preferably including all the texts I’ve ever published. That never really worked out, because it was just too much of a chore to collect the latest docx-files, convert them to markdown and publish them to my blog. Most of my articles were either somewhere in a docx-file or on my blog or in my text collection. And even if they were in several places, those were usually different versions of the texts. Now SN’s integrated blogging service takes away a big part of this chore. Collecting the latest version and posting it to my blog is now just one action. Also, I really like the simple layout of listed.to.

Philosophy

After diving deeper into Standard Notes, I came across their blog and subreddit and that got me even more excited about the app. First there is the really, really cool blog post about ‘being a quiet software company’ in which Mo Bitar, the founder, explains how the company works and why development might seem slow and quiet. Then there’s the subreddit, which doesn’t only host a very committed user community, but is also regularly updated by Mo. Just like the blog post, the subreddit shows the honest and unique character of the company. No empty boasting or salesmen talk, just a very committed developer who wants to make a great app, but also runs into challenges doing so.

Wish list

Like I said, many of my former complaints still stand. I’ll no longer hold it against Standard Notes, but I’d be an even happier user if at least these three wishes would eventually be granted:

1. Batch editing. I didn’t mind re-tagging a few hundred notes as @thoughts by hand in exchange for peace of mind, but it would have saved me an hour of my life if it would simply be possible to select and tag multiple notes at once. Drag-and-dropping notes to tags would also be really nice.
2. Keyboard shortcuts. Once again, I don’t mind having to click ‘search’ or ‘new note’ with my mouse when I compare it to all the good stuff Standard Notes offers. But it would be a lot easier if there would just be a keyboard shortcut for those actions.
3. Better search. In-note search should be editor-independent and available on mobile. Period.

A love story

So, dear Standard Notes, we got off to a rough start. Blinded by misguided expectations, I didn’t see how great you already are. But I feel like things are better now. Looking back through all the thoughts and pieces of text I have collected of the years, I realize my text collection is my brain. And I wouldn’t trust my brain to anyone but you.