 All right, we are live I should welcome to the homelab show episode 109 open source text editors. I see my friend Jason Slagle has already thrown his opinion in here. He thinks Jed is the best editor. That's subjective. This is this is a comes on a lot of personal preference. But we want to do here is cover a few of them offer some options. This is one of those things that gets greatly debated. But for good reason, he comes on to how your personal style is and how you may want to handle it. But I think that's why it's always a fun subject. Yep. Definitely. All right, let's quickly get an ad read out of the way. We do have to thank our sponsor, the show, Linode, they've been sponsored a show since the beginning, and you probably have a lot of different things you need to edit. So I think this is related. You'll have to edit and create all these notes and these different tools. And then that's how you're going to build your server over on Linode. If you don't want to host it at home, hosting it at Linode is an easy place to do that. They have a lot of really cool templates to get you started. So even if you're not sure really what you're doing, you can just go to their app store and get things deployed pretty quickly, then come back and take them apart and learn it. It's one of the reasons we really like the Linode platform. It's really, it's just pretty cool. If you're listening to the show, you have downloaded it from Linode. That's where we host all of our stuff. We thank them for being a sponsor. Use offer code, the home app show. You'll find that in the description and get started with Linode today. Awesome. Oh, Jed, Jason says, I haven't used Jed for 15 plus years, but I just like to cause strife. Yes. Yeah, as well. Throw something in the chat room when you can. There's going to be some Vim and Emacs people in here. Those are less the ones we're going to be talking about today, but there's definitely going to be those opinions on there. Well, speaking of opinions and opinionated people, I feel the need to plug my new SystemD video. Oh, yes. SystemD Timers. Yep. It just came out today. I don't know how long ago it was on the podcast and I said that was coming out, but I finally finished editing it and now it's out. So if you want to see a visual version of SystemD Timers being explained, there you go. Yeah. And one, I just, you know, me and Jay got a good discussion about this when he first dove into the topic and the SystemD Timer system is not as well documented as it could be. Also the impetus for the video is Jason says, I'm going to document it. If there's no documentation, I shall create the documentation. I will give a visual walkthrough of the whole thing and some of it took me a long time to find because I mean, the documentation is out there, but you have to have a little piece of this documentation and that documentation and this blog post and that it's like, there's so many things, but I think that SystemD Timers are just like I've probably said before, it's just a feature. And I think more people should at least know about because it gives you more flexibility, but you know, if people don't know how to do it, then they're not going to use it. Well, one of the things that I think me and Jay both do the same thing here. I'm going to have Sync Thing is you'll find it in the show notes. I've talked about it. We've done an episode about it. There's some older videos and I plan to make some newer ones because it has even more features than when I first covered it, but Sync Thing is my go-to for synchronizing all my notes between all my systems and backing them up essentially, which people always ask what you're using back up on like real time is the best thing because I could type a note, hit save, and that can be the last bit of data that goes on that system before it just doesn't turn on anymore. And that note may be really critical to what I'm doing. Maybe some Docker information for some special config I did. I'd hate to lose it. So Sync Thing has been my go-to for real time synchronization. Also most of what we're talking about is in markdown and that's also why it's convenient. Kind of the criteria, I think, because this is what allows me and Jbolts just kind of bounced between different editors and not really think much about it. Our notes are in markdown. We're just talking about different front ends to edit the same base file. I like, well, Joplin is kind of an exception. We're going to talk about, but I like things that save in normal formats, but there is a certain advantage you have with Joplin on our list here where it can do markdown but can also encrypt everything. So I have some love for Joplin, even though I'm not using it right now. But which one do we want to start talking about? Well, I think we could probably start on the text editor. Oh, apparently I'm getting a phone call. I forgot to turn off the phone. Anyway, that was a weird interruption. So when we're talking about Vim and text editors and things, I just wanted to mention that was my system for a long time. And one thing I liked about that was you could basically have your notes are your text editor being Vim. I mean, you don't need a GUI for that, obviously, because it doesn't have one by default. So you could, on a non-X11, I said X11, Xorg system, you could basically have your notes on practically anything. Just open up Vim, whether it's your desktop, your server. It doesn't matter. Same editor, same notes. But then later on, we started going down this rabbit hole where you got me into Joplin. How long ago was that now? I've been six, nine months. It's been a while, since I started using it. I've never done a video on Joplin, but I started using it because there's some things I really like about it. So I went that direction because I realized that my solution just wasn't as flexible as I would like. I write everything in Markdown and put it in Git. And then I could go to GitLab and view the files in there. There's an error in Markdown. I would see it because it parses that right in the main screen in GitLab. But that's not a very efficient way to do it. So I started on Joplin. Then I tried Obsidian and Zettler, am I saying that right? Is the more recent one we tried? Yeah, Zettler. That's the one I'm using right now. I like that one. So we went down this rabbit hole and we keep bouncing ideas back and forth when it comes to note taking. And that led to the podcast today. So now that I've mentioned the Vim thing, because I know there's going to be people that say, hey, Nano or Emacs or something like that. That's a whole other discussion because the main point right now is talking about note taking apps that are note taking apps, not text editors, but actually have features for taking notes. If you're in a meeting or you just want to document your home lab or something like that, you can have backlinks. I mean, you get a lot more flexibility not that you can't get that in Vim because I'm sure someone is writing right now that there's a Vim plugin that gives you all this. And I'm sure there is. But I really wanted to try Joplin and then the others. And so we did. And I'll admit there's definitely, if you're in the Emacs or Vim crowd, you're probably not even watching this. Maybe you are. But those are like our friend Phil, for example, lives inside of Vim. He's got it extremely customized to the way he works and the way he does development. And I get it and there's those people that are willing to put the time and effort into those and they're not bad. There's not a bad environment to use those. I always recommend at least you have knowledge of Vim. Because Nano is not 100% everywhere. It's most, most everywhere, but not quite everywhere. Your Vim knowledge is going to be really handy to ever have to edit a text file on a server that you may not have the control over to load something on. But you can pretty much guarantee if you type VI, you're going to get in there and or VIM for the Vim version. You're going to be able to get in there and start editing things. We're more talking about the way me and Jay have to keep a lot of notes for the things we do, not just for shows, but, you know, when we're producing our content and videos, we outline this, we create a little to-do list, and we're doing this all in Markdown and using an application for that is pretty handy. Yep. And there's one additional app I wanted to mention that wasn't on our list, but somehow I'm reminding, I can't even talk today. I'm reminded of this. Oh my God. It's called Simple Note. It's something that I've been using before Joplin and it isn't something that I felt I wanted to continue to use, but I wanted to throw this out there because it's probably the simplest of the ones we're going to mention. And the downside is it has virtually no features. It's very, very simple. It syncs. You have your notes in there. You have like one list of notes. So it's very light on features, but if you don't want all these features and you want something more simplistic, then Simple Note might be a contender. I'll just throw that in there because it's the easiest or simplest one, hence the name of all the ones we're going to mention. And I think we could probably start with Joplin. Let's start with Joplin. So I've been using Joplin for most of the six or nine months or however long it was that we've been down this rabbit hole. And it's what I'm still using now, but I'm not really sure if I'm going to stick with it, because one thing that I feel like these note taking apps can sometimes miss is the fact that some people have ADHD and they can't take their eyes off the new shiny. So if there's something in the interface that's spinning or moving, it's like I'm writing, I'm like, oh my God, I can't, I just look over on the, you know, toward the left where the synchronization wheel is spinning. And I'm like, really, like, it's just going to randomly have all these things all over the screen. And that's something in Joplin you can fix by creating a keyboard shortcut to hide the sidebar, which isn't obvious at first, which fixes most of it. But then sometimes Joplin will freeze in the middle of a paragraph or have some kind of weird quirk doesn't happen a lot, but it happens every now and then enough to annoy me. But other than that, I like it. Now, some of the things I like about it, especially stepping up from simple note, you can have different notebooks. So you can have a work notebook, a personal one. You can have them by project if you have multiple projects you're working on documentation and things like that. There's also plugins, not as many as others that we're going to go over, but there's definitely plugins in Joplin to extend it, but nothing that I've found was really transformative to really, you know, change the experience. But I think Joplin, let me know if you agree with this, is more akin to Evernote, which I think is having trouble. I don't remember. Yeah, I think Evernote is going in the world of defunct. Now, one of the things about Joplin that makes it different than the other ones, you can have Joplin just using standard markdown on the back end, but it has some neat options if you want to extend far beyond that. You can actually choose different back ends for Joplin to connect to, which includes S3 or even an open source self-hostable, or you can have them host it, Joplin server on the back end. Now, the reason you would do that, and I mentioned in the beginning, sync thing to synchronize all the files, if you're using the Joplin server and you have the Joplin server publicly available or using the one that they host, it goes further to synchronize between all of your devices, and it does include a Android and Apple iOS app that you can load on your phones. That's something that's kind of neat. It also can go a step further. If me and Jay are on the same server, we can share a note between each other and do real time editing of that note. So if you're an organization wanting to share things like there's some really cool scalability features of Joplin that I think are just super slick, and before you go, well, that seems like a privacy concern time of sharing my notes and having them in a back end. Well, this is where Joplin also has a really cool feature where you can set a master password and it encrypts before it leaves all of the data. So as long as each one of your Joplin instances, whether it's on your phone or your desktop, your Mac, your Linux, your Windows, because it's cross platform, you put that master password in there and it will allow encrypt all the data that's going there, which I think is just really cool from like a privacy insecurity where I don't have to worry about what's in the company that's hosting it. They're hosting is really inexpensive for Joplin. I think it's, I feel a lot since I looked, is it like 15 or 20 bucks a year? It was really minimal. Really cheap. Yeah, I can't remember what I paid for it, but it wasn't much. Yeah, but this also solves the problem of what if someone were to grab the data that, you know, off of your drive, they go, oh, cool. This folder that says, here's my Joplin notes. I'm going to get all their secret spicy notes where they have all their details and maybe passwords for databases or something in there and some type of script. And it's nothing but garbage because it's all encrypted. So I think that's a really cool feature of Joplin is to be able to do that. It's the only one of the ones we're going to talk about is it has that extensible feature. But it's definitely like I used it for a while. The quirkiness about it, I think Jamie have, besides the little saving thing, it has a harder time, the stupid double pasting thing when you hit press enter. It always wants you to do a shift enter. Well, I haven't had that problem, but I know what you're talking about. I've had it before and I've had other problems where it'll paste perfectly and look fine. And then I continue editing the note and then I come back to it later and all the line breaks are gone. And it's just one wall of text. And that's happened a number of times. And then another thing, I don't know if you've run into this, you sent me a screenshot of your settings for recording because I was curious. And I decided to create a note comparing our settings and then I just dragged your image, your screenshot over to Joplin and put it in the document. And then when I go back into it, the picture's gone. So I'm like, okay, those are some things that just really can't happen in a note taking up which is really hard for me to excuse. But I don't know if you have you run in any of those things before? So I don't ever really save too many photos in there but the other weird quirk is even though you're doing Control Shift V for example to paste an unformatted text into Joplin sometimes it still formats the text but doesn't. And I say but doesn't because all you have to do is close the note and reopen it and all that formatting that you Control Shift V that shouldn't have existed disappears and it goes back to normal. So there's been some just weird quirks that I kind of find annoying. Now, well, the weird thing is it's recognizing that I Control Shift V the data in there. And it doesn't do it every time. That's the part it seems to be dependent on what you're copying it from. And they're kind of minor. So if you're doing a lot of copying and stuff like that it can be a pain. If you're just freeform and typing a lot and or pulling from a terminal it's not a big deal but when you're pulling from websites that's when I have some of the quirkiness with it. And they do have a plugin that I believe to help facilitate some of that but I find that to be a little bit annoying. So that's one of the reasons I stopped using Joplin was some of that. Now, I also got aggravated with doing the Shift Enter a lot to make sure it does it. There's a checkbox that's supposed to not do that. Yeah, it's just strange why it doesn't do it consistently. Like you said, you can close and open a note and they're like, hey, wait, all my line breaks are gone. Yeah, that's kind of annoying. Now, all the data is there. I didn't lose data. I just lost line breaks. And I can't reproduce it consistently to file a bug report because it just happens and I look over and I'm like, there it is. But I don't know how I got here because you can open Joplin even when you're encrypting the backend, there's a way you can take any specific file and say, hey, I want this one to be unencrypted. So you can actually use it as a normal markdown editor with other files on your system. And because all the data, I look at it, it's a markdown file. It's human readable. And you look at it, you're like, oh yeah, the line, I can confirm line breaks are missing. I just don't have a way to repeat getting that same thing happening there. So yeah, there's definitely some little quirkiness with it that made me move over to another one. Yeah, I feel like these issues wouldn't be so hard for them to address. I mean, it's not like we're asking for a complete code rewrite or anything. It's just, you know, fix the issues when it comes to saving. Jason Slagle said in the chat room and this makes sense to me that he says, so it's rendering RTF, but not actually saving it the rich text format. That sounds about right. And I almost wonder if my issue where it was losing line breaks might have been because I, you know, started the note by pasting into it before I added to it. And maybe that's it because I pasted it in. It's confused about the formatting. It might just be the same problem. But if Joplin fixed these issues and had a sidebar that you could properly collapse a lot easier than you can now and more, I think what it also needs is a distraction free writing mode, which is really important. You want to like just kill the entire interface and just be able to type. I think that would be good too, but they are continually making changes because I see updates at least once a month. So I feel like they can get there, but like you, I'm looking at other solutions to see where I want to land. Now something of note, and you're right about the kind of distraction because if you have it at the bottom, it synchronizes on a schedule. And this is a challenge when you're using like the encrypted backend because all the files are encrypted. So it actually has to sync, not just save on change because the way Joplin works, it can be expecting other changes from other instances of Joplin because you have that shared way of doing things. This is not something that is in the other editors. They're just looking at the file and you can set a delay or to leave it at default because it does this by default. It'll auto save the file as you edit it. It usually waits like I think three seconds after you're adding that way. It's not like doing it as you type. And what it does is like Zettler, when we're talking about next, it's going to just put a little asterisk here there was a change. And then after three seconds, the asterisk goes away to go, the change has been saved. So if you're just typing away, it pauses the saving. Once you're done typing, after a few seconds, you watch the asterisk just go away and that means it's been committed. And real time saving is huge for all these because that's something I don't, I don't want to click save or forget or if I suddenly experience a power outage or something silly, you know, these are, I don't, man, when you're setting up like a bunch of codes or encrypting something or creating a bunch of database passwords, you're like, I really don't want to lose that information when I'm building these. I want this stuff to save right away. I want it to be synced as fast as possible. I have a mental, maybe it's because of working on old computers for so long that we're not as reliable in the past. Yeah. I'm still wondering why we even have a save button in 2023 on any app because I think, you know, kind of, I mean, an undo button can come up. That's fine. But, you know, save icon really, like why wouldn't we want to as long as we have a undo button or something if we make a mistake. But anyway, that's another tangent I can get into on another episode. Absolutely. Now, actually, before we'll do some of the last, let's bring up one because I threw it in here because the Linux experiment does have a video where they talk about this and it's called Next Cloud. It's a plugin for Next Cloud called Collectives to do markdown editing. Have you used that, Jay? I have not. Okay. It is a plugin for Next Cloud. I've seen a video on it. I have not set that up. And that one does look kind of clever in terms of being able to extend Next Cloud. So if you're already using Next Cloud, and I've been trying to use it more to dive deeper into it, but if you're already using Next Cloud, this is an add-on for Next Cloud that allows you to do really easy markdown editing. You're probably going, but doesn't it already have a markdown editor? It's terrible. I've tried the one that's default built in. No, it's so primitive. I'm surprised that it doesn't have more advanced features. I think it's cool, but yeah. Are you talking about the Next Cloud Notes app, or is there another markdown? There's a Notes app in Next Cloud that I didn't find very good. And I only watched a video. I did not actually install it, but I was reading up, watching it early this morning on it. And the Linux experiment that YouTube channel, which many of you probably follow, he's got a lot of great videos talking about different Linux apps, he covered that. And I thought it was kind of cool looking. It's nice because it's an extension or a plugin, I guess you would call it, for Next Cloud that gives you better markdown editing capabilities. I'll throw it out there. If people want to test it, I threw a link to it in the show notes. So if you look at the show notes or the description of this video, you're going to find that one. Yep. It's pretty cool. Like I said, it's just another option out there that I want to put on people's radar. But the one that I've been using, and it sounds like Jay's been experimenting with is the Zettler. Is that how we say it? I wonder, I think is Zettler or Zettler? Z-T-T-L-R.com. Yeah, I think that's based on a word in another language if I'm not mistaken. Probably should have looked that up before I started. But I've been using that for a little bit. I probably have the least amount of time on this one versus Obsidian, another one I'll talk about. But it is a good one. And I just loaded it on this computer right now. They have an app image, so it's super easy. You can get a Debian package, an app image, or if you're running one of the proprietary operating systems, they have packages for that too. I find Zettler maybe simple to a fault in a way, because it doesn't seem to have plugins as far as I can tell. And it seems to me like it's more of a markdown editor than it is a note-taking app. So I almost feel like it's in a different category, but you could absolutely use it as the same thing. And it's going to have some of the features that note-taking apps have. It's just lighter on features, but not as light a simple note. Yeah, the simplicity of it actually what attracts me to it, it's very distraction-free. And I'm so easily distracted. Proved by me typing while we're doing this and replying to comments. The Zettler interface, other than switching it to dark mode, it didn't require too much customization on my part. I like the way they give you nice tree views and the way you can choose different books. So I've now created different groupings. Now from a structure standpoint, there's no database involved in this. All you're doing is taking a folders. And for each one you create, it's just a folder. And then there's a whole series of markdown files that are named the same as they're named in Zettler. So you point Zettler at its directory for notes. And it says, that's where I live. OK, pull everything out of here. So you can actually, and this is actually kind of cool, you can go in here and create your own everything from there. And Zettler goes, OK, I'm just reading a directory. So you can actually bounce between different editors. And Zettler is just reading from that directory and provided you're following the same structure. It will populate and edit those files. That's something I like about there. And tell me what you think of this, Jay. If you load it as an app image, they actually, I don't think I see this with all the app images properly. The app image is restricted to just the documents directory from a permission standpoint. And I've seen this pulled up as a problem that someone asked. And the people said, no, it's a document editor. So we gave it the minimum amount of privilege so it can't wander around your network or wander around your directory structure. It locks itself to only that level of permission from an app image standpoint, which I think is kind of cool. Yeah, I guess it seems a little restrictive if you have two different root level folders in your home directory you want to use other than just documents. Yes. But I'm wondering if it's using the XDG format where you, the environment variable or if it's hard coding documents, I wouldn't know. I hope hopefully not the latter. But I guess I don't care so much, but at the same time, I think it should be restricted to your home directory would make more sense. Yes. One folder in your home directory, I think that's just a little bit too far. But here's the thing, that's the app image. You can still use the Debian package, Fedora package, and that's not there. It's only the app image they seem to have the restrictions on, but I thought it was worth noting. So if you apt-get install it, that problem isn't there. So if you install the Debian package. So there's a way around it, so to speak. I was reading the form because I was a little confused when I couldn't traverse, when I first loaded it as an app image and I go, and then actually I think I still have it on one system as an app image that I also loaded on my Mac. And as long as you're using as I am syncing or whatever your synchronization tool of choice is and pointing it at the markdown directory, everything works perfectly fine. It does have conflict resolution. So if I simultaneously edit two different, the same file on two different systems and have conversion conflicts, it will prompt you for the version conflicts when they try to sync. I believe it's got some, like, hey, this version in that you've loaded is different. Which one do you want? And it gives you an opportunity to deal with that. Joplin does it a little better because of the way they use it more like a database on the backend. That makes sense. So when I use Zettler on my computer right now, the app image, I can go outside of my documents directory. What point does it restrict you? Because maybe they fixed it. Um, when I tried moving it to another directory and it just wouldn't. And when I looked into GitHub, unless they fixed it recently, that was a, it was an issue in GitHub. And it was a reply from them that said, we've restricted it to that because it shouldn't have full unrestricted. I said, oh, that's interesting. Like, well, maybe there's a change. And there was a debate because many people were like, you Jay, I said, I think it should be restricted to home. It may, maybe they made a change. Cause that was when I first loaded it. I found that to be unusual. Yeah, or it could be that I just haven't run into it yet. I didn't try saving anything yet, but I go to my home directory. I can navigate through all the folders in there, which you wouldn't have a restriction. They won't even let you do that either. So. Yeah. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. We'll invest offline. We will investigate that further. We'll investigate it. Not sure what, not sure why I ran into that. Well, maybe I got a newer version or something. Now you wanted to mention, is there anything more we have on, I think it's all we really have on Zettler. I don't have anything else on that. Yeah. It's so basic. That's part of it too. It's not only Java where I can talk a lot more about it because it has all these extra features. Zettler is just a straight up, pretty clean, marked on editor. It's cross-platform. I think it's great. Now, obsidian is not open source, but there's a lot of people that have, matter of fact, if you watch the Linux experiments video where he mentions obsidian, there's a ton of people commenting because he said it was open source, be there's a lot of some people will assume because they are cross-platform. They are probably open source as well, but that's not necessarily true. And I will say this, and this was actually mentioned earlier in the chat. There's almost like a cult following of users when it comes to both obsidian and what was the other one? It's a notion that people go crazy talking about those. And there's so many people that go on videos of how it changed their life. It just feels weird to me. It's just a text editor, folks. It's not a life-changing experience to use this, but I don't know why people have kind of, there's a bunch of YouTubers kind of promoting it, like this will change your life. This will reorganize you and rewire your brain in a new way. And I don't feel that passionately about any text editor. Is it a red pill solution or a blue pill solution? Anyway, sure. But go on with the obsidian here though. I think it's a bunch of these because they are very popular. I won't deny their popularity. So yeah, first of all, the fact that obsidian is not open source is the reason why I'm not using it. My mentality is open source first. If something doesn't exist that solves the goal that's open source, then I'll consider something proprietary. But as long as there's a, at least mostly comparable solution that's open source, I'm gonna go with that, which is why I'm still using Joplin and not obsidian. Even though I'm having some issues with Joplin, I'm kind of just trying to figure out, can I solve those issues? If I can, I'll stick with it. I might actually try obsidian as a full-time thing again if that doesn't work out. But that's just like you said, the thing to get out of the way is not open source. The company has some points on their website about why it's not open source. All of it is just silly to me, but either way, it's just in my opinion, can't compete when an open source solution exists. However, if I was to take that out of the conversation completely and just compare features to features, I feel like obsidian and Joplin are pretty much equal. Not that they are equal in their feature sets, they're the pros and cons way out to be the same, in my opinion. There's gonna be some things I don't like about obsidian that I think Joplin does better and vice versa. So I don't feel like one is better than the other, but I do feel that obsidian's interface is a lot cleaner. So if you like cleaner interface, obsidian is definitely a win. I also think obsidian is a win when it comes to plugins because I could be wrong but I think it has the most or at least the most interesting ones. Yeah, I would say it's less about the most plugins, it's about the most value add plugins. Yeah, just because there's a lot of them doesn't mean they're all useful. Or some of them could be defunct for all we know because someone sort of moved on to a better project or something. So feature set wise, I think obsidian is great. And if the open source thing doesn't matter to you, then definitely try it out and compare it to Joplin. I haven't tried Notion, so I don't know how that compares. So I feel like Joplin and obsidian are neck and neck. I will say though that if obsidian became open source, I would switch to it immediately because that would be like the one, like any other pro it has is probably gonna put it above Joplin at this point. I think they're both great. I think if you want a simpler interface, go with obsidian. Another thing about obsidian is that it seems to have fewer features than Joplin at first. Once you add extensions, you can make it have a lot more features than Joplin. But I think at the very beginning, it's not quite zettler when it's in its simplicity, but it's gonna be in between that and Joplin. But when it comes to just core features. So even the way that it handles icons and the notebooks is better in Joplin. But then again, pros and cons kind of way out in my opinion. So it depends on what's more important to you, open source or do you care? Well, that could help you make that decision. But if Joplin fixes those few quirks, then I probably wouldn't even have any reason to look elsewhere. Yeah. And that's Joplin's very actively developed. So it might be something I come back to later, take another look at. I do like that it has a phone app, but to the same extent, I just don't use my phone much for notes. Even when I'm out and about, I just, I'm not huge on it. It's a sometimes thing. I just don't like typing on my phone. Even though it has voice to text, I just kind of don't. I frequently, if I'm, you know, I'm about to go to a hacking conference and that was weak. I'll have my laptop with me. And if I find something interesting, I will type it all out and I'm completely happy to do so. Like I'm like, oh, type up all the things. Hey, that's interesting. Let me bookmark this. Let me make some notes here. I'm just so much happier on a keyboard. I've never, I don't even like replying to emails on phone. It's like phones, the tool of last resort for me. But I know for some people, it's the opposite. They just love doing everything from the phone and they more to power to you. Joplin may be the solution for you because of the, you know, it just does nice synchronization on the phones, but of note. I did learn, I did learn something interesting thinking about notes. If you have a massive, and I have this thing I've been running for years called my brain doodle. And my brain doodle is, I think it's, I don't know if it's 70, 80, maybe more pages. I don't even know how big it is. It's just a massive text file I keep. Joplin, if you load it up on the phone, want it with a little pause on my phone loading up my brain doodles, but it always drops me at the bottom of them. And the search is terrible on the phone. So if I want, they're all like quotes or any little random thing phrasing or when I'm debating someone online, I usually have the statistics and I'll put them in my brain doodle that way. That's always quickly reply to people. I don't memorize all these things. My brain doodle has my more concise response to something searching for that concise response on Joplin, terrible. It's a terrible experience. Last time I looked at it on the phone, Joplin in general doesn't have the best search. It feels Zettler searches really well. Joplin searches okay. Yeah, I would agree with that for sure. Yeah, it's not the worst, but not the best. Yeah, but hey, it's underactive development and that is the status of it here in September of 2023. There's somebody watching this video right now in 2024 going, man, I remember when all those problems used to exist. Or it could be that the problems are exactly the same. I mean, that happens too. We still have a save icon in 2023, so. And Jason says the obsidian search is quite good. So that's good. Yep. I'll let the, maybe I'll poke at it and see if it can handle my brain doodle file. I see some discussion about using these and then it's kind of the goal is to have these be a second brain. I know the limitations of what I can or cannot memorize and what I can recall. That's why I've always had it. I've never really can focused on it being my second brain but in some ways it is. You know, I know I had a quote on something or a clever response to something that maybe half a paragraph. Could I retype it from memory? Maybe. Could I copy and paste it out of my brain doodle? Absolutely. I just gotta find that key word that got me there, so. That's important. You have to be able to find your notes. Yep. Let's see. Oh, level one has a video. I'm not sure if I'm gonna say this right. Zettel Casten? Maybe. Yeah. Okay, I'll have to check that out because Wendell's talked a lot about this. Wendell has got a whole series on Clebrae and managing all of your books and knowledge through the web interface. They got several tutorials on that over on level one. So just look up Clebrae in level one text and you'll find some of the videos on that as a topic. They also have some other, just Wendell keeps really good notes within his books. I mean, he bookmarks a lot of different paragraphs, so it's definitely a pretty neat thing. So maybe that'll be a topic for a future one. Maybe that'll be a reason to bring Wendell on here. Oh, there you go. That'd be a great thing to do. He's awesome and I think it was a lot of fun the last time, so. Yeah, oh yeah. When we chat with Wendell on the backend of the world, he's a fascinating creator for sure and just a wealth of technical knowledge. He really is. All right, do we have anything else, Jay? Not on my end. Well, in case you didn't notice, I do have a bit of a cold that I picked up at the vintage computer festival. So we'll leave that here and we don't have a topic picked out just yet for next week, but we do plan on being back next week for this. So thank you everyone for joining a home lab show, episode 109, open source text centers. Check the description for some of the links to the tools we talked about. And I will add the, I don't know how to say it, but it's Zettel Kastin one. That one, not one we really covered, but it looks like something interesting because I clicked on a link to it and I said, okay, I might want to read more about that. Maybe that'll be a next episode. So thanks everyone for joining us. Appreciate it. Thank you.