notes

Anytype – An Everything App?

I moved from Evernote to Bear for my synced notebook needs back in 2020. Bear’s great support for Markdown was one of the reasons. At the time I said of Bear “It’s not perfect” and no, it’s not… so I started to question my use of it because honestly you should check your tools every now and then to see if they need replacing. Since I am using desktop Linux a bit more now I wanted to see about using Obsidian again, but using their sync solution is twice the cost of Bear’s, and self hosted syncing or using some other method involves yet another piece of software.

So when I found Anytype it looked pretty interesting! It’s local-first and peer-to-peer and all of the clients you use sync and data is encrypted on your own devices and only you have the key. Ah, speaking of the key… it’s not a password, it’s a “12 word mnemonic ‘Recovery’ phrase” which you better store somewhere… I’ve been using Anytype for a week and just today I launched it and it asked for the phrase, which I did not expect and had to copy/paste from where I store it. Anyway…

In my workflow I see Anytype taking the place of Notion. I’ve been using Notion for a few years now mainly for task management. Before that I used Monday.com and before that Asana. They all have their pros and cons… I use a free account because I don’t collaborate in a team, it’s just for me and my small hobby business.

And part of moving from Notion to “something else” is a goal to do more self hosting and rely less on companies (especially US-based companies) to have my data.

While I am liking Anytype, it is a powerful and complex beast. It has many capabilities, but it’s not super intuitive, and it can take some reading and experimenting to get how it works. It’s a little like a database, and since “everything is an object” it’s sort of like an object database? But it does have relations… It sort of reminds me of UserLand Frontier which had an object database, but also a scripting engine… I don’t think there’s a scripting engine available in Anytype though.

There are all sorts of “spaces” you can use to get started… think of these as empty / example databases. I’ve tried a few but ended up using them as examples and just built my own. But what about notes?

While I do plan to use Anytype as a simple database / datastore and for tasks (though it lacks notifications at this point) I don’t think it will replace my use of Bear for a synced digital notebook. Anytype has this whole “block” concept like Notion and you can’t easily just paste in a big chunk of Markdown text. It’s also a lot more work to fire up Anytype and add a new note, as there’s a bit of friction involved where Bear has none for me. The way Anytype handles Markdown is also… weird to me.

So for now I’ll probably stick to Bear for notes, and honestly I think I just need to reorganize some of the ways I use Bear to make notes a bit easier to work with and find. Also, I guess you cannot change the font size in Anytype which is a bit annoying. Still, I am finding it useful for some things… but not everything.

I’ve been using Evernote for years, and while Evernote has a ton of features, what I was really after was a way to have my notes available on my computers (multiple desktops and laptops) as well as on my mobile devices (phones and tablets) and the ability to log into evernote.com with a browser to see my notes was a nice bonus.

I avoided things like storing web clippings, rich media, or even images (beyond a simple sketch on occasion) within Evernote because I didn’t want to get too entrenched in their offering, in case I’d need to move in the future. Looks like a safe bet now.

Months ago I toyed with the idea of just using text files and a private GitHub repo to store my notes, but I didn’t really have a good way to do it on mobile. Part of the thinking around that was that I was using Markdown more and more for work projects and systems, so using Markdown in my notes made a lot of sense…

Enter Bear, which works on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Yeah, no Windows or Android, but I’m really not using those platforms much these days. On occasion I’d use the browser version of Evernote but honestly, if I am anywhere, my phone is probably with me. Also, there may be some options to get the note data from Bear via SQLite.

Bear comes in at about 1/4th the price of Evernote… I’m still not a fan of subscriptions, but it’s just the way things are now. Part of the cheaper price might be that there is no front-end web interface to the notes. Evernote kept going up in price and limiting the lower tiers. I think they completely did away with the tier I had and raised the price even more. For what I use it for, it’s just not worth it.

So far I’m loving Bear. It’s not perfect, but between Markdown, multiple themes, the clean interface, and other features, I like it. It does use tags instead of notebooks, but honestly I was able to transfer to that method very quickly. Tags also let you easily group notes that are in different “categories” into their own separate category. It’s nice. Oh, you can also link to other notes! That’s something I really wanted in Evernote. Now I’ve got it in Bear. You can also encrypt notes, which I haven’t played with yet, but seems like a nice feature.

If you’re sick of Evernote, and use a MacOS/iOS, and like Markdown, tags, themes, a clean interface, etc… Give Bear a look.