Looking for note taking apps recommendations

Hello everyone, I am looking for note taking/writing apps recommendations. I think I tried most of the ones in the PureOS store, which I’ve listed below but have yet to find “the one”. I’m looking for something not too fancy, ideally for an app that is exactly, or similar, to the iphone’s Notes app with a nice mobile friendly UI, dark theme support (must have), and simple features such as creating/editing folders, text formatting options (bold, italics, etc). Not really interested in cloud sync, spell checking, text completion or anything of the sorts.

Writing novels is my hobby and I use my phone to write when I ride the public transport or to jot things down whenever an idea randomly comes to mind. So, I just need an app that is simple and reliable that does the job. Can anyone provide app recommendations or tips for resolving some of the issues that I’ve encountered with the ones that I have tried so far (if any)?

Thanks in advance!

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Like(d)

  • K-Notes: Currently using. It’s stable, nice features, smooth scrolling and haptics sensitivity. I switched editor and tool bar to use the dark theme but the white bar on the top of the screen gets a bit annoying after a while. I have not been able to find a preference to change the colour of it and I wonder if its even possible.
  • Kate: The app icon dissapear from my screen after I installed K-Notes. I was able to run it from the terminal and PureOS store but ended up uninstalling since I didn’t want to re-install K-Notes. I really liked the overall design and functionality though, I hope its fully adapted for mobile devices someday because its definitely more suited for desktop use or with an external monitor.
  • Cherry Tree: Love it but same as Kate. Font, layout and menus are too small when used with convergence making it hard to read/write/edit long text files.
  • QOwnNotes: I like it but its not optimized for mobile devices. The folder directories do not load properly sometimes and it crashes from time to time.
  • Zim: Nice layout and features but I can’t get it to load existing .txt files. It only renders the first line of the file.
  • Iotas: Its okay for simple note taking tasks. Haptics and scrolling is unpredictable and a bit too sensitive.
  • ThiefMD: Not so bad but it crashed often and ended up uninstalling.

Disliked

  • LibreOffice: Big mistake and I regret installing it. It was a pain to remove and I suspect it messed some config along the way.
  • Notes for Gnome: Terrible on mobile, no black background option, crashed a lot and same as above. My librem has been acting up since I uninstalled it. It seems like I might need to re-flash the image soon. I wish aptitude had Super Cow Powers sights
  • Notes-Up, Notes (blue feather icon): Crashed on start up.
  • Standard Notes: App did not load or crashed on start up, can’t remember which.
  • V-notes: Only light theme available, not compatible with Adwaita-dark (?). Limited features available.
  • Text Editor: Haptic sensitivity is way too high. Paragraphs are selected when you are scrolling up/down if you are not careful. Adwaita-dark theme inverts the text highlighting colour making it impossible to read the white font when lines are highlighted. Limited features available.

I might have missed 1-3 apps but I can’t recall the names and issues with them right now.

It was fine to me. I used the Flatpak for quite a few months, but recently started putting everything into drafts in Tuta instead.

I jused joplin for a long time and liked it. Used webdav to sync with my nextcloud instance.

Haven’t set it back up after breaking some things (my own doing and unrelated to any application) and mostly that’t been a function of other priorities and not needing to take notes for a while… should probably get on that.

Using gsettings I was able to set it so that it will not highlight, making it possible to read in dark-mode

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