Take note of Inkdrop

Note-taking is a tricky business, especially if you want to be able to easily read and edit them on multiple devices. The things I want to be able to do sounds easy enough: simple Markdown editing, backed by Dropbox, with full-text search, on desktop and mobile. The desktop part of this is easy enough – hello Notepad!

For years I did this very happily on mobile with an app on my Android phone called Draft. It’s since ceased development and isn’t available in the Play store any more (here it is on APK Mirror), and so for a few years I’ve had a simple “docs” folder in my Dropbox, which is full of Markdown-formatted notes, manually sorted into directories.

Whilst this fulfils my minimal requirements, it’s a pain in the ass to find the right note quickly, and the editing experience is far less than ideal. I’ve tried a few other note editors, but I got on with the UI of Draft so well that everything else feels like a poor imitation (the author of Draft does publish other apps and I am a fan of his Feedly client – Newsfold).

And so like all great leaders brought low, I compromised on my ideals.

After looking around, I have landed on Inkdrop. It’s come up a few times on Hacker News since the author has been quite open about making subscriptions to this app his sole source of income (there is a 60 day trial before you have to provide any bank details).

So: simple Markdown editing, cloud sync (not Dropbox), with full-text search, on desktop and mobile. The mobile app does have some text-editing problems because of the component being used, but it’s not (currently) a deal-breaker.

If I do end up wanting to move away from it, there is an “Export all as Markdown” option, which reassures me (even if the filenames are prefixed with an ID), but once I’ve used it for a few more months I may even want to import all my old Markdown notes. There’s no native functionality for this, but Inkdrop lets you write your own plugins, and someone has already written an “Import Markdown” plugin that looks like it should do the job.

So far, I’m a very happy customer, and provided you’re not after a direct Evernote replacement, you probably will be too. There’s even a pre-trial demo version so you can try the UI without having to sign up at all. Give it a go!