Ira Cogan

Caution: continued from yesterday’s post about switching from one markdown editor to another. If that sounds boring to you, read no further.

To recap a little: Yesterday I wrote about how much I like a side by side view option in a markdown editor. The left pane shows what you’re writing. The right pane shows what it looks like with markdown applied. IA Writer does this very well for me, but I have issues with it being a kind of one-way sync between my different platform devices. So, I decided to try out StandardNotes.

If you’re a privacy or security nerd, you probably already know about Proton and the products that company offers, and I suspect that’s who this product is for most of all.

The value in StandardNotes, for me, is the side by side view option which IA Writer also has, but with terrific cross-platform sync between (probably) anything without having to jump through hoops or do much toggling when setting it up. The other features are a distant second in my case. The question was do I care about that enough to pay $90-$120 a year for it? Well, no. I suspect it’s priced this way because of the super duper encryption, but, that’s not a feature I was looking for in a markdown editor. With the seemingly world wide movement towards fascism and a surveillance state, I totally see the value in that. Like, it’s a good product and I’m glad I checked it out. I just don’t see myself using it enough right now.

tldr addendum: I thought about it some more and for me, I’d be paying to save myself Select/Copy/Paste a few times a day. Not that it doesn’t have other features that are worth the money for lots of people, but for me, that would be its only utility.

-Ira