For me, mobile and desktop apps plus easy family sharing of individual notes are important.

Apple Notes is really the best I’ve got.

The other solutions I’ve found mother cost too much or have some odd dealbreaker features, or they’re over-complicated, or they’re ugly.

Zoho Notebook is on the ugly side but it’s cheap and has apps on all platforms.

Craft is pretty good but if you hit the need for the paid tier it’s a bit pricey.

I think it’s possible that vibecoding an Apple Notes clone is actually the best solution for me.

A lot of people like Obsidian but I think it’s a bit crazy, and I think it’s unacceptable how difficult it is to self-host the sync functionality, especially since again the paid tier is too expensive.

A Database is great.

Two databases are a migration.

Org-mode plus a file system is a database.

All databases are not relational; relational databases are the tool you want when you want algebraic operations; you might not need algebraic operations for your operations but relational databases are a hammer.

I now await my fate.

If you're a diehard modal-editing aficionado like me and think that Emacs is a great IDE but it's a shame about its editor (and its keyboard scheme), maybe give neorg a try. Might well make you shift away from notes.txt files.

And yes, I know I could just use `evil` in Emacs. Maybe someday I'll overcome my decades of learned resistance to running Emacs, but every time I see the Emacs control scheme, I wince and I'm reminded why I don't use it. Having some key combos be "hold down the Control key while you press two keys" (like `C-x C-s` to save a file) while other key combos are "hold down the Control key while you press one key, then release it before pressing the second key" (like `C-x s` to save all files) is just not going to fit into my brain. Maybe that's intuitive for some people, but it just doesn't work for me. And so I bounce off Emacs before ever giving it a real chance.