 So my note-taking situation is and always has been kind of precarious simply because I've been kind of stuck in on Google keep for over 10 years now. I don't like being stuck in on Google keep I don't like Google keep whatsoever, but all my notes are there and getting them out and actually transferring to something different Has proven beyond me. I've Gone through many applications over the years trying to replace Google keep But none of them have the features that I'm looking for or they're just not very good And honestly when you're when you have all the notes in one place It's really hard to pack up and move to another application Especially when you're not sure that it's going to work long term So I've had a problem with notes for a very long time I've talked about it before on the channel and that's why I'm always looking for different note-taking solutions So today we're gonna be taking a look at another thing that I've been trying called beaver notes now beaver notes is a application available for Linux Mac and Windows and It is a very simple note-taking application, but it has some really good features as well So we're gonna take a look at beaver notes But before we do if you leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it would really help the channel So let's take a look at beaver notes. This right here is what you get and now obviously You're not gonna see this note right upon first launch This is a note that I've created and we're gonna go through this note here because there's some interested tidbits here but Overall look and feel is really nice very very simple You have a plus button over here at the top that allows you to create a new note or you can use the key binding you can Go here, which is where it will show you your last edited note or that note that you were editing And then you have a place where all of your notes are located and then you have an archive Which you can archive any note that you have and that just goes to this place here So that it's out of sight out of mind if you don't want to use it You also no matter what page you're in or at least these two pages Can search through your notes? Specifically what you're going to be searching through is your labels so you can search through the notes themselves You can just show the labels that you have in those notes And you can sort by created date last updated in alphabetical So you do have some options for how your notes are displayed, which is really nice But it's not so overly complicated. You're not gonna find any advanced search or anything like that here It's just very simple right out of the box So let's go ahead and go back to that note I was talking about earlier because there are some extra things here So first off they tout in one of their notes here that comes along with it Is that it has not markdown formatting and it does it does some things very very well when it comes to markdown So it's and it shows you those things in a nice very laid-out format here in this note, but unfortunately doesn't work exactly like they tell you You know, it's going to so really what you should be able to do is two asterisks for bold one asterisks for a tout But if we go back to the one that I have here and we scroll down just a little bit You can see that when I did the bold it did bold is fine But it also kept kept the next line bold as well, which is not great So let me actually show you this in action. Let me watch it not do it this time would be hilarious So if I do two asterisks for bold, this is bold This is bold and then do two asterisks again That should change that to bold which it does if I go down to another line here and say I want to do italics You can actually see that it kept it bold So and then it will keep actually keep bold as long as I type as long as I type and you can see that actually is keeping the italics too, which is not the way that Markdown works at all. So so if I if I just do one asterisks and then italics and Then close the asterisks. That's the way that it should work, right? But it keeps the asterisks for whatever reason you actually have to go all the way up here to the Formatting bar to turn bold and italics off Now I found this to be very hit or miss most of the times it functions like this, which is the wrong way sometimes if you just do bold and then you immediately go down to the next line after you've closed the bold and You know start typing again Sometimes it will work the proper way sometimes it won't so if you're you gonna if you're looking at this for a markdown editor So far I've not been impressed with that aspect of it So that that's really honestly guys though only negative I truly have about this is that the markdown is subpar other than also On that same vein it did not recognize the link So if if you want to leave a link or if you want to do a picture you can't do in the traditional markdown fashion which is kind of disappointing and Also just another thing that I noticed was that there's a lot of padding in between your list items here So this is one list There shouldn't be that much padding there that looks like three separate lists to be honest It does the same thing with numbers. So I kind of covered my negatives there I don't you want to have to talk about them later So if you're just going to use this as a note taking application You're not so worried much worried about the the markdown of it This application does a pretty good job of just taking notes so you can take your notes You have a whole formatting bar here so you can you know bold italic underlying all that stuff You can leave cold code blocks and there's block quotes What I'm curious about is why there's a code block and inline code. This is I believe this is like an HTML thing This is the markdown version why you have both is a little bit confusing They also have a focus mode. So if you wanted to get rid of all the other UI Stuff you can do so and then you know just focus on your writing then you can go back Which is nice you can search with it in the heading tree So if you have a whole bunch of headings if you're writing a very large document here You can actually see your table of contents, which is really nice so all that stuff is here and It works fairly well if the markdown work better We'd be gold because the UI is really good and it seems to be very simple and And it does have some other features that are really good Which we'll talk about here in a minute But the markdown and for me is kind of a deal breaker, but let's go ahead and talk about some of the other features So if we go back to our notes here, there are a couple of things that I want to cover So you can if you want to archive any note that you have so you just hit the archive and then it will just appear in The archive section, which is nice. Also, you can lock whatever note that you want so you can have encryption I call it encryption with a quotation marks around it You guys can actually see me, but I put some air quotes there because it's a I Don't know what it's actually using for encryption or if it's using encryption at all It has locks and it does call encryption if we look at the setting. So if we do control and then plus period actually Show you you can encrypt your Data with a password, which is nice. So if you want to import it back into Beaver notes Actually, you guys completely are just looking at me now and I'm apparently Whatever key binding there is completely duplicated. But anyways, I think go back to here You can encrypt the data with a password and then if you were to import it back into beaver notes You'd have to enter that password in order for that to work, which is nice So if you want to just keep all of your beaver notes contained, that's great Actually encrypting notes is a little weird. So let me show you this. So I have this note here I have it locked and if I want to view it, it's gonna ask me for my password now Everywhere on the world on the planet when you type in a password it doesn't show the password by default now You can in a lot of places hit a little eye icon and it will show you the password, right? We've all seen that But for whatever reason The password is not obfuscated at all. So I don't think that this is the most, you know Seriously encrypted you're never gonna see my notes ever kind of thing. Is it nice that it's there? Sure But I don't think that that's the most encrypted thing in the world. But maybe maybe I'm wrong Anyways, they also have the ability to bookmark notes. So if you hit bookmarks, it'll show up in a specific section Now this would be good for if you have a ton of notes and there are a few that you want to kind of keep at the top I'm pretty sure that that feature would become less good as you had more bookmark notes Because obviously then you just have to keep scrolling through them But if you have just a few that are bookmark, that'd be nice So there's those now. We should also talk a little bit about the settings. So if we go to The settings you would find first that you can't actually get to the settings without the key binding apparently I'm not I've been looking around here for a little I was like, you know I apparently have a key binding that is duplicated between beaver notes and obs And I wasn't going to press that key binding. I was just going to find the place in the Application that allows me to go to the settings and you'd think that it'd be under window or view Or edit a lot of times it's under edit or file. It's under none of those. It's also not under help The help is completely empty. So if you want to get to the settings you have to hit control and then period control and comma and that's now. I'm gonna have to actually switch back to that scene That's weird. Anyways, these are all the settings. That's all there's all they got So you can choose between light and dark themes. You can change the language You can change the font. You can set the path for where it's going to save your notes, which is nice Oddly, it does require a complete application reboot in order to actually have that take effect Why not sure, but it does also you can export and import your data from previous versions of beaver notes And you can encrypt those. That's it. It does list all the Shortcuts that they have Unfortunately, these shortcuts are hard coded. You can't change them. So that's another kind of Want want for me because I'd love to be able to change some of those Specifically being able to get to settings so I can have it be something other than The obs thing that I use but that's you know disappointing So but that's beside there the fact that there are keyboard keyboard shortcuts is is good I'm glad that they exist. So that's all the settings there are So maybe that's the reason why they didn't bother putting a An icon to the settings somewhere that you can get to because there's I mean my bother. There's no settings So this is beaver notes now I know that there's quite a few things that I said in this that that appear to be negatives and They are But I think that this application has potential First off, it's cross platform So you can if you are someone who uses a mac and a Linux machine or a mac and a windows machine You can take your notes across those places and if you were to use something like sync thing or whatever You could sync the files from one place to another So that's a very good feature. Also, it's a nice looking application a lot of Applications that are in this vein either do too much So their UI is very busy or they don't care about UI and they're just kind of fugly, right? So I like that this looks very nice now I'm hoping that as they continue to develop this application because you can tell this is still very early days in terms of development I think like if it's not then they got some problems, but like the help menu is completely just I mean It's empty. So I'm assuming that this is still early days for them but overall I have hope for this application simply because it is simple And it's very nicely designed if they can fill out some of the features that can fix their markdown support Because that's a big one This is an application that I would definitely take a look at again as it is right now. It's still kind of Not quite there Oh, you want to actually before I finish this out There's one thing that I didn't cover is tags So the ability to put tags inside of a note and then see all of the Tags associated with that tag is really cool. So you can put a note And you're also if I create another note here and I do Pound and then select this is a tag I can now go see every note that has this is a tag inside of it So that's a fantastic feature now, obviously that's not original to beaver notes a lot of Different note taking applications do this But that it's here and it works fairly well And you can actually put a tag anywhere in the document that you want So if you're referencing something and you know that you have another note So if you put a tag in both notes that that is exactly the same You can then have a basically a dedicated page Just for everything that correlates to that particular topic That's really cool and highly useful I think that that's something that I would use a lot And it's very easy to do you just use a pound tag now It could get confusing because with the hashtag And the tags being such as they are if I were to go down a line here And do pound and then space it turns into a heading So the fact that those are so very close could be an issue But if you know markdown it won't be an issue for you Just remember that no space with a hash is going to be a tag Space with a hash is going to be a headline So if you remember that you'll be fine And headlines at least when it comes to markdown do work Awesome just the way that they should So that's beaver notes overall an application that I'm fairly Down on but also have high hopes for if that makes any sense I like the design quite a lot. I also like the tag feature I like the archive feature i'm dubious about the encryption feature But the fact that it exists is cool I also like the fact that you can export and import your notes So you could theoretically take this to a different platform And use it in a beaver notes there You could also set up your own sink if you wanted to set up your own sink Using something like sink thing or local send or whatever All that stuff is possible because you basically control the entire stack You don't have to worry about a account anywhere That you have to keep a password for losing your data It's all local right on your machine And that is something that's pretty rare when it comes to note applications these days Especially fully featured ones So I'm really quite interested to see where this application goes in the future If you want to give it a try I'll leave a link to it in the video description below If you have any thoughts on beaver notes You can leave those in the comment section below as well You can follow me on mass it on our odyssey Those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast You can also head on over to the store which is at shop.thelinuxcast.org There you'll find hats and mugs and t-shirts and desk mats and all sorts of stuff All the proceeds from that go directly towards helping me make more linux content So thanks everybody who has done that And we'll do so in the future shop.thelinuxcast.org Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon or youtube You guys are all absolutely amazing without you The channel just went out of anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very much for your support I truly again do appreciate it you guys are amazing Thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time