a standard notes alternative

shizumu is a standard notes alternative for people who wanted encrypted writing without deciding which features their plan includes.

how the two behave

standard notes is an encrypted note app with an account, built around long-term durability and a paid plan for the richer editors and extras. the free tier is plain on purpose.

shizumu has one version, and it is free: the page with its blocks, sync for two devices, and the source on github, apache-2.0 on the client and agpl-3.0-or-later on the relay. there is no account, and the writing sits on your device unless you turn sync on.

what you keep, and what you leave behind

standard notes exports its own backup and plain text, so the words move. the tags and the extension setup do not. what replaces them is a page that starts empty every day, pins for what turns out to matter, and trails for the threads that continue.

what a page does instead

you write to think. a pin is a pointer back into the page where the thinking happened, and a trail brings its pins back to you when you open it. everything else stays in memory, searchable. that is the way back, and it does not depend on remembering a tag.

the editor is not the plain-tier kind either: / gives a table, a chart, an outline, a block of code, and @ reaches a page, a pin or a trail.

the encryption, named

keys come from a recovery phrase on your device and never leave it; every page is sealed before it goes to the relay. the primitives are written down: how sync is encrypted, what the relay can and cannot see, and how to run the relay yourself.

try before you move

the app runs in your browser with a few weeks of writing already in it: try it. also worth a look: a notesnook alternative and a journaling app without subscription, ads, or ai.

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