No (not yet, at least. Because who knows!). They however changed their license to a more restrictive, non-FOSS one, let’s say.
I think regardless of whether Standard Notes met our criteria before, it certainly doesn’t now:
Honestly I’m more annoyed with them apparently doing exactly 0 research and choosing a very poorly-fitting license just because it was the first non-commercial one they found, instead of doing something normal like using the Commons Clause License. That and the fact that they almost certainly don’t have permission to just randomly relicense their code in the first place just makes me want to remove them for now instead of considering a change to our criteria allowing “source available” software in the category.
6 Likes
I realize that the licensing issue and the team’s behavior around that seems to be the main point of contention, but I want to point out that Crypt.ee might potentially violate “Must support exporting documents into a standard format” as well.
Batch exports are limited to their own .UECD file, which isn’t a standard format….
You can export individual files to HTML or Markdown, but IMO, having non-standard batch exports is more pernicious than Standard Notes’s single editor being non-standard.
Exporting individual files to a standard format is really the only requirement to satisfy this criteria at the moment. It’s definitely valid to want better bulk export capabilities, and if you feel strongly about it we can open another discussion on changing this criteria.
However, very few apps actually provide that functionality as far as I know, for a myriad of reasons (many of which do seem legitimate). I worry about overly limiting options which are otherwise very good, and not being able to find suitable alternatives which do meet this hypothetical criteria.
5 Likes
The reasoning supplied by the dev is legitimate, I agree.
I just wanted to mention it as people were taking issue with Standard Notes’s export, and I thought this was something that might be relevant for those looking to switch.
4 Likes
Good decision!
Standard Notes sent me a link to this update, so I’m holding off on this decision until I get to read it:
2 Likes
It feels like a rug has been pulled under me while drinking hot coffee and the offender had just said oopsie, sorry.
When my 5 year SN sub ends, I will seriously try to find other alternatives. The only way for them to keep me back again is for them to do more than double their effort of being just a better company in all aspects, vague as it sounds right now.
I’m going to look into SN again a lot today. First thing’s first: Re-testing note exports to standard formats…
I know there’s a lot of X’s but we’re really only looking for 1 to pass (more formats is always nice though).
| Note Type | .txt | .md | .html | .rtf .csv |
.docx/.odt .xlsx/.ods |
Conclusion | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plain text |  |
 |
|
|
|
|
Passes |
| Super | |
Unsupported elements (underline, strikethrough, highlight, super/subscript, etc.) removed | |
|
|
|
Passes |
| Rich text | |
|
|
|
|
|
Not sure, I’d like the option to export to format easily editable in another program, like .rtf |
| Markdown | |
|
|
|
|
|
Passes, would be nice to have an HTML export though. |
| Checklist | |
|
|
|
|
|
Passes |
| Code | |
|
|
|
|
|
Would be nice if it exported to the selected language instead of always .txt |
| Spreadsheet | |
|
|
|
|
|
No cross-platform exports  |
I don’t really know if only exporting to .html really counts in the case of the rich text editor, although the super editor seems to be generally superior anyways. I don’t think there’s an open alternative to .rtf unfortunately, but .rtf is basically the standard in this area and recommended by the library of congress for text-based file preservation.
For some reason I can’t find their rich text editor code on GitHub, even though Summernote is open source. I don’t really understand whether adding export functionality would be Summernote’s responsibility or Standard Notes’.
Spreadsheets pretty obviously don’t meet our interoperability criteria at all, as many others have noted. It would be nice to have .xlsx or at least .csv export options. However, does this matter in a notes app? I’m not sure actually, how do people here use notes? I didn’t really envision this criteria applying to formats other than text-based notes in the first place, and I don’t know if it should.
Bulk exports via Automatic plaintext backups technically works, except everything is exported to .txt (including their proprietary .json). Super notes get exported to .txt in Markdown format, with some formatting removed (same as noted above).
Importing their exported .json spreadsheets and token vaults don’t seem to work… so I’m not sure what the point of the exported .json files even is. Importing the .json files works but you have to manually change the note type to whatever the note is supposed to be, otherwise it displays an error.
5 Likes
Onto the second thing, self-hosting… It looks like a lot has changed in regard to SN self-hosting since I last tested this. There are some things I want to know that I’m gonna ask SN:
From Making self-hosting easy for all — Decrypted | Standard Notes -
Please note that if you previously self-hosted under the prior arrangement, you are grandfathered into the old structure and can continue under that arrangement without interruption. Please contact help@standardnotes.com to gain a migration key.
- Who is grandfathered in, everybody who self-hosted prior to Feb 2023? Or did SN have a formal relationship with some self-hosters? I don’t remember a way for self-hosters to subscribe prior to this year.
- What does the migration key unlock?
- Does this offer expire? And if so, has it already, or when does it?
From Subscriptions on your self-hosted server -
Note that subscriptions created on your self-hosted server in this manner unlock server side premium features, but not client-side premium features (such as Super notes and Nested tags).
- Which premium features are server-side and which are client-side? I don’t see a list of features the offline plan unlocks.
- If I purchase regular SN Pro at $120/year, does my account also have an offline subscription for self-hosting?
Also -
- Can Listed (the software) be self-hosted? - Maybe not, I just saw the source code doesn’t have a license for use.
- Can Listed.to (the service) be used by self-hosted users?
I’ll set up a self-hosted server tomorrow to try and find out some of this stuff myself if I can’t come across some answers easier than that.
3 Likes
Thank you so much for testing these. They are very much appreciated as I already have time famine as it is.
I am a long time subscriber but not a self hoster of SN but I had planned to do it eventually. I am not aware of any of these things I wonder if I am grandfathered in as well.
All in all, I am still worried about SN’s future now. I wasnt even aware of their shenanigans until one of our community member posted it.
I should probably just fall back to saving things as markdown or .txt files inside a veracrypt container and save it to my NAS, not that I had a lot of notes anyway to begin with.
My usecase is very minimalist/simplistic: mainly recipes, a few odd thoughts, short lists of things. Scribbled notes essentially, with maybe some Markdown to make it a little nicer — but even that is rare.
Anything more structured, complex or important than that and I’d rather switch to a computer and use a proper office suit editor. To me it’s basically as big a difference as between Paint and Krita —good enough for some cropping and red arrows, but nothing more advanced.
1 Like
After some thought (and the license update on their end), I think that Standard Notes meets all of our criteria and shouldn’t be removed.
For plain-text and Markdown functionality with the Plain Text, Super, and Markdown editors, the per-file export works exactly as expected, and the bulk export/backup option is fully functional (albeit slightly janky). This is on par with our other recommendations, and other filesystem-based note-taking tools we are considering like Obsidian.
Editors which are unrelated to note taking, like Spreadsheet and Authenticator aren’t quite as nice, but for the purposes of our criteria in the Notebooks section we’re not going to consider them as a reason to remove SN. Think of them as a bonus for paid users maybe, but there’s a reason Standard Notes Spreadsheets isn’t included in the Productivity Tools page.
I’m marking this suggestion as rejected, but—as always—this thread will remain open if anyone has further thoughts. And I’ll post an update when I figure out the answer to my self-hosting-related questions, but those questions weren’t going to be a deciding factor on whether SN gets removed or not.
5 Likes
While I think the current problem has been solved, have they fixed the original problem yet though?
Specifically this one in relation to the first rule What are note types and editors?
Derived editors are derived from either open-source or commercial software projects. After studying a product and deciding it would offer a compelling user experience for Standard Notes, we first acquire a commercial license to use the product (or use the open-source license if applicable). We then study the source code and network behavior of each software we license to ensure there is no unwanted behavior. Then, we build a small wrapper on top of the product, which allows the editor and Standard Notes to communicate between each other to save data in a permission-based, controlled, and isolated manner.
There are four editors in this category: Rich Text, Markdown, Spreadsheets, and Code. These are editors that we do not build, maintain, and improve on directly. When you have a feature or issue for one of these editors, there’s a low likelihood that we are able to act on those features. Rather, we would likely work together to forward the issue to the software maker. We do however keep this software up to date with vendor releases.
Where whether or not those are open source is still somewhat in question. I agree that spreadsheet is a bonus but I don’t think markdown is.
This also relates to your comment about not being able to find their rich text editor source code
I personally think that standard notes should be temporarily removed until the details have been fully worked out
Oh, I see what you’re saying, I didn’t catch that was a separate issue. The source code for integrating the Rich Text, Markdown, and Code editors are all in the main standardnotes/app repo. The source for the editors themselves are elsewhere:
- GitHub - summernote/summernote: Super simple WYSIWYG editor
- GitHub - codemirror/dev: Development repository for the CodeMirror editor project
- GitHub - Ionaru/easy-markdown-editor: EasyMDE: A simple, beautiful, and embeddable JavaScript Markdown editor. Delightful editing for beginners and experts alike. Features built-in autosaving and spell checking.
Spreadsheets is separate at https://github.com/standardnotes/secure-spreadsheets.
Since all of these editors merely save notes to the open-source client app which handles all the encryption, syncing, etc. anyways, I’m not sure how much of an impact the source availability of the editors even makes. I’ll still double-check with them though.
2 Likes
I’m unsure if this should get a pass:
- html export is nice and all but importers in other apps is not a common thing and mostly a read-only filetype (sure editable but noone likes to manually type HTML).
- html also is not feature complete (no files / images, no checklists for example)
So it’s not possible to export the content when images are embedded entirely, and only partially if specific elements are used regardless of the export format.
And because Super is their main editor now, I would go this far to say an easy data export is not existent at this point.
3 Likes
We had a brief chat in the Discord server and the SN Team agreed to prioritise a feature complete markdown (incl. files export with relative paths) export soon.
4 Likes
These are all good points. I didn’t actually test images 
…but I agree that images saved within Standard Notes and embedded in the Super editor do export very poorly.
I read through that Discord discussion and it sounds like the export solution they’re planning will be suitable. I’ll throw in my suggestion to export to OOXML (or ODF I suppose) there too to see if they’d consider it.
1 Like
-
We really aren’t sticklers about this. If you email us requesting a code, we’ll give you one. We operate on the belief that most people operate honestly, and even if some don’t, it hopefully shouldn’t be enough to have a negative impact.
-
Full client-side paywalled features, like all editors, daily notebooks, moments, etc. Things the client can offer without coordination with the server. Any server side premium features (there really aren’t many) are unlocked automatically when going through the self-host setup process and creating a subscription for yourself on your backend (at no cost).
-
Nope. Again operating on the good faith principle hoping not too many people abuse it
- SN informs me it does not currently, but they may offer Pro users an offline key if they reach out. The reason I was asking about this is because SN supports multiple workspaces, so you could theoretically have one workspace which is hosted on SN, and one which you self-host yourself, if you like to compartmentalize your data like this for whatever reason. I’m told this workflow should work perfectly, it’s something I’ll explore further when I have my self-hosted setup installed.
- It can’t really, and Listed.to isn’t available for self-hosted installs either (even with an offline subscription). SN tells me that the future Listed V3 should be open to self-hosted instances…
2 Likes