Does it have premade forms available like circles?

You need Obsidian sync for that. It works awesome. It’s not free.

I’ve been using Syncthing for this purpose. My notes are synced between a desktop, laptop, Android phone, and Android tablet. It took me forever to finally take the time to try Syncthing, and it’s been nearly flawless.

weird that it isn’t on F-droid

Also Anytype, but it lacks plugin functionality

Sounds like you’re talking about the readable line length setting. That’s an option you can turn off in the default settings of the app.

Just turn this option off in the Editor settings.

Google Keep is fine. I also use it for short notes which I can access on the go and it’s been reliable for years now.

I just don’t like the layout of the notes all in squares. I’d prefer the option of a regular compact list view

I have to agree. I considered Standard Notes but I would have to pay for super notes in order to use images, even if I self-host. Same for code blocks, organizing notes into folders, spreadsheets, web clipper. Have to get the most expensive plan for offline access and being able to have local backups, although it is discounted if you self-host completely but why still pay a sub at that point? I would rather pay once and then be able to self-host using their super notes without paying more every month.

I liked Obsidian but wanted encryption that works on my android so I went with Joplin.

FOSS doesn’t mean free as in beer. Even so, you can get support for all of the things you mentioned, and more, for free. You can find the link from my comment above by searching for “Awesome Standard Notes,” but since you mentioned editors specifically, this will take you directly where you want to go: https://github.com/jonhadfield/awesome-standard-notes#editors

Edit to add: you can enable a community created editor (other than the ones that are included in the paid subscription) by going to Preferences > Plugins > scroll all the way to the bottom > and then, in the text box under “Install Custom Plugin,” paste the url (like https://mortalhappiness.github.io/sn-tui.editor/ext.json for the Tui Markdown Editor), then click Install, review the extension info, and then click Install again. You can follow these same steps to install a different theme, too.

There are several Markdown compatible editors in that list, so you’re free to choose the one that works best for you.

The Append Editor supports multiple types of Markdown, including Github Flavored Markdown, as well as LATEX. You can get an inline check mark by prepending a line with - [ ], but when you press enter it doesn’t make the next line a checkmark, nor can you click a checkmark to check/uncheck it, so it’s not a good choice if checklists are your main use-case. Some better options:

Tui Markdown Editor requires you to manually start a checklist the same way, but then a new line in either markdown or wysiwyg mode will also have a checkmark. You can also check/uncheck in wysiwyg mode with a click.

The Rich Markdown Editor is also good for checklists. It only offers a wysiwyg experience where you type in the same view as the final one (rather than having a split view), but there’s no top menu. You can still type the normal Markdown characters with exceptions when it’s something that requires multiple characters. In that case, type / on a new line to get a list of options, then type a couple characters and choose the best option. For example, I can’t just type - [ ] and get a checklist because it escapes the characters so that I get a list that would render the [ ]. But I can type / and then type “checklist” or “todo” (really just 2 characters of either of those words) and choose that option to start an in-line checklist. And if I hit enter, the next line defaults to being another checklist item. You can also click the checkmark to check or uncheck it.

For a dedicated task list, Scratch also works well. It’s not Markdown behind the scenes, though (but it is still readable plain text). You can start a checklist by clicking the checkmark icon in the top menu. Like the Rich Markdown Editor, a new line will create a new checklist item and you can click the checkmark to check/uncheck it.

You also might check out the “Advanced Checklist.” It’s in the “Official Extensions” link but I just tested and was able to install it on a free account. (Note that you can also self-host the “paid” editors other than the Super editor and use them for free, though that does require a bit of extra work.)

There are other editors on that page and also other community written editors in general out there. The Marp Editor lets you create presentation slides. The Mermaid Editor lets you create diagrams. Heck there’s even a Music Editor (for tablature, not for directly generating audio). There are a couple sketch / whiteboard apps. I’m not saying it has everything you could ever dream of, but there’s a lot and it’s easy to extend for anyone with front end web development experience.

Regarding your point about Simplenote syncing faster: I assume this is because Standard Notes is end to end encrypted, but Simplenote is not (Unfortunately generally e2ee adds additional overhead to syncing operations as the server cannot optimize nearly as much). There may be more to it than that, though. I’ve looked at Standard Notes’s code a bit but haven’t looked at the server code for Simplenote - as far as I can tell, Simperium, the backend it uses, is not open source. (The frontend is, though.)

That said, I’ve never noticed Standard Notes taking particularly long to sync. I don’t have thousands of notes but I do have several hundred (pretty close to a thousand). Were you seeing bad performance with Standard Notes or just worse (but still fine) performance? And if the latter, can you share some more details?

For me, not being end to end encrypted is a dealbreaker for my private notes (unless I’m self-hosting the app, that is). I’m not comfortable with someone at the hosting company just being able to access my notes. But that’s not important to everyone, and if it’s not important to you and if Simplenote otherwise does everything you want, then by all means use it - it’s a great choice.

Notepad++ works great for taking notes. Besides, it’s open 24/7 anyway so dedicating a tab or two (or dozen lol) feels pretty natural.

I only use Joplin if I have some “very structured” notes about some topic, and while that is also open 24/7 np++ is always my go-to because “it just works” without having to care at all about formatting nor anything fancy.

Decent memory I guess.

Pencil/paper

Even better, Obsidian notes are stored directly in folders on your device as plain text (markdown) files.
It’s all there, nothing missing, and no annoying proprietary format.

Not only can you keep using them without the Obsidian application, you can even do so using a “dumb” text editor - though something that can handle markdown will give you a better experience.