Why I Built HelixNotes - A Local-First Markdown Notes App

I tested dozens of note-taking apps over the years. Free, paid, everything. None of them worked. So I built my own. The Problem I take a lot of notes. Technical documentation, project planning, ideas that hit at random, all of it goes into whatever note-taking app I'm using at the time. And over the years, I've used most of them. Notion was slow. Like, noticeably slow. Every click had a delay. The offline mode was a joke. It barely worked, and when it did, syncing back was a coin flip. Evernote was fine in 2015. Then it got bloated, changed pricing three times, and I stopped trusting them with my data. Then I found UpNote . Clean UI, fast, just works. Honestly, I loved it. But there was one problem: your data lives in Google Firebase. Your notes, on someone else's cloud, tied to a proprietary format. For a privacy-focused person running Linux, that's a dealbreaker. The Obsidian Detour So I tried Obsidian. Local files, markdown, own your data - great philosophy. But as a plain markdown