I have a good collection of notes in Microsoft OneNote. I have been thinking of moving all those into a more open format. As of now, I am thinking of going with markdown.

For exporting the OneNote notes, I tried https://github.com/SjoerdV/ConvertOneNote2MarkDown. That seems to do the job, though I will have to spend some time reformatting it.

For editing the files, I will most likely use VSCode (may be with Dendron) or Typora or Zettlr.

Next thing to figure out is where do I host this. I have been experimenting with a couple of self hosted solutions such as Gitea & NextCloud with raspberry pi. I would like to access the notes from my phone (over OpenVPN or Wireguard).

Another very important requirement is search. With OneNote, I can just type in words and get results instantly. Gitea doesn't seem to support search. NextCloud & Gitlab seems to need ElasticSearch (which slowed down my Pi a lot). ElasticSearch seems overkill for this.

What kind of self hosted solution would you recommend that will allow me to

1. access the notes from mobile over VPN

2. provide full text search across all files (markdown files as well as source code) from both mobile as well as laptop.

If you have any other suggestions, please share them as well.