emanote VS Joplin

Im personally using Emanote which does exactly what you describe. It supports LaTeX and lots of other features via Pandoc. Its also very nice to use in that it supports hot-reloading, instead of requiring manual refreshing. The only downside for some might be that its installed via the Nix ecosystem which is (great but) a bit of a rabbit hole you might not want to deal with, particularly depending on your level of technicality on the computer.

Have you considered neuron or it's successor emanote?

Emanote! Very lightweight. One of the things I can't stand about Notion is its speed.

Also, I'm willing to mentor anyone who is interested in improving Ema or Emanote.

Clarification: Emanote is a successor to Neuron, and written on top of Ema.

I use obsidian (previously just vim) and emanote (previously neuron) to compile some (but not all) of my notes to a static site.

I maintain an extended version of Emanote in Haskell (as an Ema app) that does custom stuff like visualize my hledger transactions, track time, generate invoice and provide custom views of my Markdown notebook, like a Twitter-like timeline generated from H2 headings (with date) from across notes.

I've had great success with using Joplin for this, with Syncthing as a sync backend. Works well across OSes; I use it on Linux, macOS, Windows and Android.

https://joplinapp.org/

The tools to manipulate SQL aren't that bad, no.

But rather than having a self explanatory markdown & flat file, now I have to start learning about the schema & making specific tools (in my preferred language) for manipulating Joplin's schema.

Suddenly I'm digging through 20 different technic specs to decode what data is where, how it works, and what I can do to it. Want to edit history? This is the best help you'll get, pray it's adequately technical to expedite you to your purpose: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/readme/dev/spec...

As I began with, I struggle to imagine anything that generates anywhere near as much user agency as flat files and markdown. Having boring common data & systems lets me apply portable skills I already have, rather than having to skill up in some particular product's own ecosystem.

Joplin is a good open source option too, feels more like the original Evernote in terms of UI/UX https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/

Joplin, an open source, extendable, Markdown-based hierarchical note-taking app: https://joplinapp.org/

It lets you choose a synchronization backend, offers applications for every major desktop and mobile OS (also has a terminal version). You can create notebooks and subnotebooks to organize your notes. You can also add tags for better search experience. I created notebooks for specific domains (work-related, home improvement, etc.) and also keep a "temp" for quick notes and W.I.P. snippets.

Its only con that it uses Electron on desktop which causes relatively slow start of the application.

done