I’ve seen this post: A proposed solution to one of the biggest issues for notetaking apps in 2022
It seems there is some interest within the Agenda team to create the ability to at least mirror files to be locally hosted in a non proprietary format like markdown. My questions are:
It’s not in Agenda yet. Ironically, we had something like that — very primitive though — in early development versions of Agenda before it was public.
We are certainly considering something like that at some point. It would be a nice way to support other platforms indirectly. Quite a bit of work though getting it all to work, I’m afraid. We’ll see what we can do in future.
I’m not sure I know another app that mirrors notes. There may be one.
There are certainly markdown editors that just work straight from markdown files on disk.
One of the complicating factors is the granularity of sync. This is what makes sync a difficult problem. Imagine an app just uses text files on disk, and that they are synced up using Dropbox or whatever. If you add a lot of text to a note on one device, and then start up your iPhone after a few days of not using it, and make a small edit to that same note, before the new changes have arrived from the cloud, good chance you just lost all that work you did a few days earlier.
The tricky bit of sync is how to properly merge changes from different devices. That is what our solution would do. You could edit the markdown, and the Agenda app would track those changes, and merge them in properly with changes made inside the app. This is difficult to get right, but something we have a lot of experience with (Eg. the Agenda collaboration feature works in basically this way.)
Thanks - if anyone has thoughts on other apps that are able to do this and have similarities to Agenda I’d appreciate hearing about them.