There are many note taking applications that you can use on Linux. Some of them are desktop applications (e.g. Simplenote) and some are web applications (e.g. Google Keep). And all of them work pretty well for general use cases. But if you are interested in something that was built with robust security measures at its core, Standard Notes has got you covered.
Standard Notes
Standard Notes is a note taking application that puts particular emphasis on privacy & security. It is cross-platform and of course, completely open-source.
The core application is free to use and comes with a free account that syncs your data across all the platforms without any limit on data capacity. You can also use their web application if you don’t have the desktop application installed yet.
About the security part, Standard Notes uses end-to-end AES-256 encryption. That means, no one except you can read your notes. Because, whenever your data is sent to server it’s always encrypted. So, even if someone has access to the servers and thus your data, they will see nothing but nonsensical gibberish. Only when you login to your account all your encrypted data is downloaded on your computer and then decrypted for you. So, no more worrying about someone else reading your private notes!
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Features of Standard Notes
From what I’ve observed, Standard Notes is really neat and well crafted and is definitely worth trying out. To sum up the features Standard Notes offers:
- End-to-end AES-256 encryption
- Cross-platform applications for Web, Android, Linux, iOS, Mac and Windows
- Sync your notes without any limitations
- Online and Offline access
- Additional extended features via subscription
Extended Features of Standard Notes
Apart from the free features Standard Notes also provides some additional features for a monthly/yearly subscription. A $4/month or 36$/year subscription will give you access to:
- Themes: Additional customizable themes for tweaking the appearance to your own taste.
- Editors: Powerful and custom editors for working with Markdown, Code and other features like custom fonts, colors, alignment, tables etc. for crafting rich documents.
- Actions: You will be able to attach files and share notes with others.
- Time Travel: You will be able to browse through full version history of your notes.
- Additional Backup: Real-time backup to Dropbox and Google Drive.
Also, you will be supporting Standard Notes to keep up their good work by subscribing to the service.
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Installing Standard Notes on Linux
Though Standard Notes is not available via Ubuntu software repositories or PPA, it is quite a smooth experience installing it on your system. All you have to do is going to the official Standard Notes website, scrolling down a bit and you will see the download button for Linux. Go ahead and download it. After the download is finished, you will find a file like this:
That is the whole Standard Notes application in a neat AppImage package (The thing about AppImage packages is that you can run it on any Linux distribution! Cool, isn’t it?). You can move this file wherever you want. But after the first run, you will have to keep it there.
Now, for running it we will have to change its file permission so that it can be executed. For doing that, open a terminal in the directory where you have put the AppImage package and enter the following command:
chmod u+x standard-notes-*.AppImage
Now, you can double-click on it and a window like this will appear:
Click the “Yes” button for adding Standard Notes in the application menu. And that’s it. From now on, you can start Standard Notes like any other applications.
What do you think about Standard Notes? Share your opinion with the community! :)