“WOW! What an exciting title!” you must be thinking. I know, I know, I’ve really outdone myself here. But don’t worry, I personally do think this is really cool and well worth talking about, so please don’t go…

I’ve tried a fair few tools for taking notes, all the usuals from Google Docs to Notion and Obsidian, and more. But none of these have really ever stuck with me. Google Docs works best for writing documents, as the name suggest (though I still prefer having a desktop app like LibreOffice Writer), and while I do think tools like Notion and Obsidian are good if you take the time to learn them properly and create a system, I don’t really want a tool that’s that complicated. All I want is:

  • Someplace I can quickly drop notes without titles
  • Markdown support (I LOVE MARKDOWN, THIS BLOG IS WRITTEN WITH IT ❤️❤️❤️)
  • Simplistic organization so I can categorize notes, but not too much extra
  • Accessible from any device

Basically I wanna be able to make digital sticky notes with small bits of info and categorization as needed.

This is where my new FAVOURITE note taking software comes in:

Memos

Memos is an open source, self hostable, note-taking app that can be compared to dropping all your notes in a private Twitter feed, with some extra features. Do people still use that? It’s uhh… It’s like if you had a private Bluesky.. profile…. yeah. Mastodon may be a better comparison- but that’s irrelevant.

While you do need to self-host Memos, it’s actually one of the easiest self-hosted tools to self-host I’ve ever self-hosted. You can basically just copy the docker compose file and caddyfile directly from the Memos docs, and it sets it up with SSL and everything.

And I mean… just look at these results!

Me typing a post in Memos that reads "Wow, I just had a thought! #gangster #realgangsterhours"

In Memos you’re able to post memos to a private, workspace, or public* feed. Public feeds can be disabled which is what that asterisk is for. Don’t go looking for anything else, you won’t find anything. When you use hashtags in a memo, they’re automatically added a list of all current tags on the side, and you can choose what tags to categorize by with a simple click. Additionally, all of your typical markdown including fancier stuff like - [ ] checkboxes are all supported and fully functional, allowing you to create checklists and quotes, and whatever else you may need. (Plus, you can also enable additional features like adding locations to memos which could be useful, though I keep it off typically.)

A post from "RealPerson" on Memos, the post reads "Guys... a little help ._."

I’ve genuinely found Memos to be the only note-taking software that really works with my brain. It’s organized enough with tags (There’s subtags too if you do #tag/subtag, though I prefer just using multiple tags), but it’s not overbearingly organized and a hassle to mess around with once you get a system going like Obsidian or Notion (I mean, I know someone who basically has an entire actual website built up in Notion just for her own personal note-taking. I could never haha). It’s got the markdown (❤️), and I can add it to my phone homescreen as it functions as a progressive web app.

I’ve only ever used it by myself on my own personal instance, but it’s got some cool “social” features that I think could be really useful among indie dev teams… and other people presumably? That’s out of my range of focus. Comments, reactions, that kind of stuff, and the “workspace” feed is viewable to anyone with an account on your server.

Personally I think one of the coolest features is just the fact that it natively supports Mermaid.js (and LaTeX math notation!) which means I can create flow charts and other diagrams with a few lines of text.

A nonsensical flow chart generated in real time with mermaid.js

I’ve personally already used Memos for a few school projects and I’ve found it super handy since I can create a checklist, individual posts detailing different things, and tag it all super easily. Maybe I just need to be babied, I don’t wanna organize my notes, I want Memos to put all my hashtags next to each other for me.

My only complaint at the moment would just be the fact that there’s no way to be signed into multiple accounts at once unless you open up a few private windows; I have a separate one on my instance for school stuff with account information that mirrors that of my typical school account which is nice to keep things just a little bit more separate.

If I have persuaded you, why not give Memos a try? They’ve got a live demo that gets wiped once per day over at demo.usememos.com. It seems someone has changed the admin account password today, but you can still register a normal one or wait `til tomorrow haha…

if you do like it, let me know! I’d love to hear I have successfully spread the gospel of Memos. That’s more or less it from me, thanks byeee!~

-Ax 🩷

*OK I LIED THE ASTERISK DID LEAD SOMEWHERE

…oh and would you look at that! One idea finished from my Memos blog post ideas list!