Anytype

The License

This is the first note taking application I started using, because I was FOOLED by the license. Originally, I thought it was simply free and open source, like all good software should be, however looking more carefully I noticed the license isn't truly open source, but rather, source available. That is, the source code may be viewed freely, but may not be shared or contributed to. What a pity, onto the review of what it's like

The works

Anytype uses a non-WYSIWYG editing style, meaning the texts are formatted using UI buttons or shortcuts instead of symbols or phrases (like HTML and such). This was not very nice for me, but it's eased a little by the ability to use markdown-like writing to auto-format the text, despite it being a bit clunky at times

Anytype has very much an interconnected system, where things just work and sync out of the box, which is nice. It works wonders for interacting and sharing knowledge with others. The password to store your vault is randomly generated, but very easy to remember thanks to the fact it's 12 words (see XKCD 936).

It can be kind of complicated to understand how certain Anytype system works, especially things like queries and lists, but understanding them can be very powerful. Morevoer the ability to create pages of different classes is quite intuitive to me as a developer, and very useful at times! Overall, Anytype is very convenient and good if you don't mind a slightly closed-source license. Do look out, they don't seem super opposed to AI integration! That may appear someday, but until then you can take notes with no problems on just the free plan. And even if you run out of your allotted cloud storage, the peer-to-peer connection system can allow you to still sync your notes no questions asked.

The looks

Anytype looks really good, it's got a coherent design philosophy, but it's not super customizable. The UI can be a bit cluttered at times but it's actively being reworked all the time so it may change The graph view is as useless as always but it looks so SO good.