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I'm pulling my hair out trying to find a notebook program that lets me do nested note taking, and that has the ability to change the location of the notebooks. That seems really easy but, I've found virtually no good note taking programs that do this.

Here's a list of what I've tried so far and why it didn't work for me.

  • KeepNote : Very slow and unresponsive but it was pretty good aside from some formatting quirks. I was using this before but, the lag for doing ANYTHING was too high so I gave up using it.
  • GNote : Sticky note app, not what I needed
  • Tomboy : Esentially the same as GNote, doesn't let me change the location of the notes
  • RedNotebook : Very confusing and doesn't let me make notes that are nested more than two deep.
  • Basket : So far the best BUT won't let me change the location of the notebook, which makes it useless to me. If there is some way to do this I am missing I would love to hear it -> Change where basket saves notebooks?
  • Zim : Cool, and I'd use it but, it doesn't have the depth of features I need.
  • Notecase : The closest thing I have found, I like the fact it encrypts but, the file linking feature doesn't work all the time, and I need it.

Is there any alternatives besides these? Personally I'd prefer Basket but, it has some weird quirks. First, it only saves notebooks to ~/.kde/shae/baskets, and I don't want these notes touching my hard drive at all. I need them to go to an encrypted volume /media/truecrypt1.

Secondly, though it has fancy PGP encryption, it doesn't encrypt the entire basket tree, only the first basket and, while the PGP encryption is perfect for me, this seems like a huge flaw, as you have to encrypt EVERY note/basket attached to it by hand, meaning I have to type my 20+ character password every time. If I have to I might just run wine with OneNote, even though I do not like using Microsoft products.

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When you say "change the location of the notes", do you mean you want to synchronize notes between devices? –  speter Mar 22 '13 at 7:30
Could you expand on the "depth of features you need", since the head text only mentions nested notes and the ability to set the notebook location. I think you have covered most of the options, but it is possible there may be extensions covering the features you're wishing for. –  chronitis Mar 22 '13 at 16:22
The big thing I need is the ability to NOT save notebooks directly to my hard drive but, be able to save them to my truecrypt volume. I finally just gave up and started using notecase, it isn't half bad and it encrypts the whole notebook in PGP and let's me save them as a single file, .nce. It's a shame Basket has all these features but the ability to save to a single notebook file, encrypt the whole basket, or be able to change the location of saved baskets some how escapes it. It was really feature rich and perfect for what I needed but, you just can't win 'em all... –  redcodefinal Mar 22 '13 at 17:17
Zim's notebooks are very portable. It would be nice to know what are the "depth of features" you need. –  carnendil Apr 5 '13 at 19:42
I just needed something to keep a few very simple notes, so I was was searching for a "sticky note" app. I found Tomboy to be a great solution. Your list of rejects was quite helpful to me! –  mbmcavoy Oct 23 '13 at 4:01
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closed as primarily opinion-based by Braiam, guntbert, Warren Hill, Eric Carvalho, Seth Dec 14 '13 at 3:25


3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

If Basket does what you need except for saving the stuff in the wrong place, you could just create a symlink from where Basket wants to save stuff to where you want it:

ln -s /media/truecrypt1/baskets ~/.kde/share/baskets

I don't know exactly what encryption software you use, but assuming that it lets programs read and write from the file system as long as you're logged in and have unlocked it, this should do what you need in terms of moving the baskets.

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Will the files touch my hard drive at all before hitting my encrypted volume? –  redcodefinal May 25 '13 at 19:23
@redcodefinal: I guess that's really up to the internals of the OS, and I don't know the details there. But my guess is no, based on the fact that I currently do this with my home directory, redirecting it to a data partition, and even though my /home partition is quite small (~450 MB) I have no problems writing files that are several GB in size, suggesting that they are written directly to the symlinked destination. –  Tomas Lycken May 26 '13 at 0:51
That would be a perfect solution then! I always forget Linux has this awesome feature. As long as the notes don't touch my drive, it's a perfect solution! Thanks! –  redcodefinal May 26 '13 at 3:57
@redcodefinal: To be on the safe side, you could always test with some non-critical files and see how it's handled. –  Tomas Lycken May 26 '13 at 14:19
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May I suggest Tomboy? it's a pretty good note-taking program, in my opinion anyway!

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Not what I wanted. I needed all the notes in one place, in one file preferably. Making them separate text files would be a major pain. –  redcodefinal Apr 7 '13 at 0:09
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Have you tried Nitro. Its a very good note taking application you can find in the software centre.

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