Install Standard Notes

What Standard Notes is

Standard Notes is a note-taking app where the text is encrypted before it leaves your computer. You write, the notes sync between phone and computer, and whoever runs the server cannot read what is there. The basic version is free and the software is open source.

That sounds like a detail until you have something to write down that should not sit in a shared document: what you actually pay the supplier, what you said at the meeting with the business partner, the thoughts about why the collaboration went wrong. The app is stripped down on purpose. It does few things, and they will still work in ten years.

Installing on Windows

Download the Windows version from standardnotes.com/download. The file is a regular installer that you run and click through. The program starts with a login window, and the first thing you do is create an account.

Installing on Linux Mint

The project distributes the Linux version as an AppImage. It is a single file that contains the whole program, and it does not need any installation. Download it from the same download page, put it in a folder you can find your way back to, and give it permission to run: right-click the file, choose Properties, go to the Permissions tab and check that the file may run as a program. Then you double-click it.

The project itself does not provide any package in Mint's own software manager, and you do not need one. The web version at app.standardnotes.com also works the same way in the browser if you are at a computer where you are not allowed to install anything, for example a shared computer at the office.

Three things to do first

1. Create the account with a long password and save it in the company password manager right away, before you write the first note. The reason is further down and is more important than it seems.
2. Write a note and tag it, for example ekonomi or möten. Standard Notes has no folders. Tags are the whole system, and two or three go a long way.
3. Install the app on your phone and log in with the same account. Syncing takes seconds, and it is only when you see the same text on both screens that you dare to trust the program.

What the program is not

Standard Notes is for personal notes, not a shared document. Two people cannot write in the same text at the same time and see each other's cursors, and that is not a shortcoming but a choice: the encryption that makes the notes unreadable to others makes them unreadable to a colleague as well.

So split it up. The business plan, the spreadsheet and what you write together belong in a document tool. Standard Notes handles the rest: your own drafts, things that are not fully thought through, and tasks that should only exist in one place.

The most common trap

Forgetting the password. In most services, that means an unpleasant quarter of an hour with a reset email. Here, it is the end. The encryption is built from your password, and the company behind the service has no copy of either the key or the text. If the password does not exist, the notes do not exist, and no support in the world can change that.

The solution is simple and must be done before the accident: save the password in a password manager that the whole company can access, for example Bitwarden or KeePassXC. Export the notes once a month as well, it sits as a file on the computer and costs you thirty seconds.