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I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

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Dormouse:
Update on Proton/Standard Notes/Notesnook

Come Black Friday offers, I'll subscribe to Proton Ultimate.
A couple of months before that I might subscribe to Standard Notes - as a trial with the intention to cancel and then resubscribe (or not) on Black Friday. I need to be much clearer about how it will progress in the future under Proton's ownership; I'd like to see more development; given the current climate, I'd prefer to have the option of using European servers; I'll want to see that it's at least as good as Notesnook.

Notesnook has the virtues of the curate's egg. It's belief in privacy and security appears to be a core belief not an addon; it's open source. otoh the value of open source depends on the number of good eyes inspecting the code, and it's a relatively small app. It only has three coders in total. The last update included fixing a security weakness they were told about. There are some nice security related features like their monographs (encrypted shareable notes). The overall design is pretty standard. But usability isn't great and the UI seems relatively poor. Maybe I've just been spoilt by the apps I have been using recently.

It's currently working on keyboard shortcuts. It does have some, but many commands can only be accessed by mouse. Now I'm far more mouse oriented than most on this site, but the mouse suits some commands, depending on the workflow, and not others. The relatively new command palette helps, but involves a lot of scrolling and doesn't include all commands. And documentation is virtually non-existent; there is a (limited) online help document - but I only discovered the trigger for the command palette by reading some comments made when the feature was released. No wikilinks. It doesn't parse #tags written in the notes - you have to use the apps own tagging workflow. Search is unsophisticated.

I'd find it unusable - compared to many other apps - if I were trying to use it for all my notes. But I'm not, so I can live with it - but am very open to alternatives. And I will continue to use a security and privacy oriented accessible notes app. I have found it liberating to have one available. My previous system was secure, but the friction meant that I often didn't take notes or tucked them away in imperfect containers like password managers. So, whatever Notesnook's imperfections, it's better than that.

I've seen Anytype suggested as a secure notes program. I don't see it like that. It's interested in security, and data is encrypted and can be local; its AWS servers are in Switzerland. But although the data is encrypted, the indices are not. I suspect other features, eg collaboration, are as important to it as security. I also find it convoluted.

20250302 094751 UPDATE EDIT
Barely a couple of days later there's a few updates.

I downloaded latest version of NN (update button and auto mechanism reportedly not working on v3.0.28), and then switched to the beta channel - so now on 3.1.0 - beta.0.

There's a considerable change in the UI layout, and overall it's a considerable improvement. And there's now reportedly a keyboard shortcut for focus mode - though I can't remember what it was supposed to be (and it's not one I personally need).


Also a SN comment that though there's no feature updating currently, they are working with Proton on improving the backend

Dormouse:
I have now written a number of notes in NN. Despite the UI improvement, it's still not close to the same class for usability as Lattics and Tangent. I semi-regularly moan to myself about some perceived deficiency (eg tab won't indent a paragraph - if I want similar functionality I have to use bullets; getting into a focus mode is cumbersome). Sometimes I want to just write the note in something else and then paste it in; Proton Docs isn't too bad for that (it would somewhat remove the point of NN if I used something less secure to write the original before pasting in). But it's okay.
I'm not entirely sure SN is okay. The free version is very limited and I have no desire to use it. Quite a few negative comments keep floating too. Including once when the sync server was down for quite a while (NN's monograph server has been down once for a few hours only). Communication with the user base doesn't seem great rn. But we'll see.
Proton Docs (pale imitation of google Docs) seems functional.

One similarity I have noticed between Lattics and NN is the primacy of the individual notes. Folders (aka documents or notebooks) exist, but it's as easy to put a note in multiple folders as it is to give them multiple tags. And the views are very similar. I have a suspicion that many modern apps are designed in this way.
One difference between them is that NN is very responsive to users, while Lattic's Discord seems abandoned and that's the only public communication channel I know of. But Lattic's development is coherent and seems to be following a clear plan and purpose, while NN's feature list seems random, apart from the security emphasis which is its purpose. I'm not convinced that user requests are the best way to enhance usability - every user wants something different.

Dormouse:
I have always been aware of the importance of forgetting.
And of minimising cognitive effort.
And yet notes programs tend to focus on total recall and users often choose high effort strategies for managing their notes. Brute force rather than optimised effort.

My mind was drawn to this by a Reddit query from a user who appeared to systematically go through all the notes they had taken and classify or discard them. Wasting the effort in the discarded notes and losing the potential value to future needs.

I will massively oversimplify human memory:
Two main recall/memory systems: episodic/sequential and semantic/categorical. Forgetting avoids recall being clogged up by irrelevant memories - but this forgetting is more akin to fading losing the path than it is to wiping the memory out. Fading is governed by recency and frequency. Recognition memory is possibly used even more frequently in everyday life but needs the stimulus in front of us.

The highest brute force recall in programs is Search (but with the disadvantage that search terms need to be fairly precise). Folders offer Search within defined limits (but user has to know where the desired note is kept and there's often significant user effort in deciding where to put the note originally). Tags are kin to simple predefined Saved Searches and filters; they all depend on recognition of the desired note(s). The advantage of the tags etc system is that it also shows notes that are in some way similar - and notes are rarely wanted on their own. Effectively these are semantic/categorical equivalents.
Programs are less often designed to present notes in an episodic sequence. iirc the original Evernote was designed around it. The Daily Notes popularised by Roam Research is another way of achieving the same thing, but it only does this if all notes are in Daily Notes. Programs using Folders tend to put them into silos and so explicitly don't have a 'see everything in sequence' view. iirc Heptabase had such a view, but the best I have seen is in Lattics. This allows all notes to be seen as cards with view options for summary, summary with images, preview and list. The advantage is that it enables very fast visual scanning with notes being chosen by recognition. Sequence is by latest edit, so I have a recency effect as well.
Another feature popularised by Roam was wikilinking, where notes can be seen as a network of links from a note and backlinks to a note (similar to Luhmann's zettelkasten, but also reminiscent of the Citation Index tomes I well remember from academic libraries; many happy hours spent going backwards and forwards between papers and tomes until I had distilled a network of key papers, researchers and topics; computers just don't have the same aura as reference libraries and books, preferably tomes). Again, it's a typical feature of human memory where one memory will stimulate others to come forward.

Forgetting
Why exactly is forgetting important?
Primarily it's about resource management, prioritisation, and limits to attention and conscious thinking. It clears the memory and thinking palette of noise.
Forgetting is not about the deletion of memories; it's about making them progressively harder to access. The mind also needs to be open to random thoughts and submerged memories: wide open increases the potential for creativity; focus and trying to remember closes that shutter. Bringing one of those into the palette reinforces it and improves future accessibility.
The same factors are important with PKM notes.

But I know of no program that advertises its ability to forget. That's something the user has to devise for themselves - so long as they are aware that forgetting is important.
And the lowest cognitive effort way of doing this is by doing nothing where that is possible.
The difficulty is that most programs are not well set up to do useful forgetting. They either lose the note completely or render it inaccessible except through a very time consuming search process (ie high effort). Because of its fast scanning through episodic notes, Lattics offers another way of finding untagged, unfoldered notes. I only tag or link notes when I know I want that route and at that point it's very easy to do.
And from time to time I delete tags that I know I won't need in the future. The underlying notes are unaffected but there's less overhead when scanning the tag list.

The scanning with Lattics only works for me because I use a large monitor (8 cards on one row) and many of my notes are visually distinct. I'm not sure it would work with the other notes programs I am familiar with. Obsidian probably - but the tweaking is the very definition of high cognitive effort. But I'm sure something similar could be done in some other programs. Maybe the whiteboard notes programs. I assume that the next way of doing this will be using AI.
The system is different to zettelkasten (which has it's own semi-forgetting system - where notes have a parent but no children, are never referenced by any other zettel, and aren't indexed) and structurally different to the process I previously diagrammed (the actual process is somewhat similar but the cognitive effort is much reduced, and the overall structure is essentially flat).

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