I really wanted to like this the last time I gave it a try, but it just did not do it for me. I though I would like it being a VS Code plugin since "why reinvent a .md editor", but the end result felt pretty janky. Plenty of power features, but they were not particularly intuitive to use....
I ended up finding https://logseq.com/ and have been very happy using that as a local application! I really like its balance of control/abstraction and its markdown based editor is beautiful!
I'm strongly considering moving away from Obsidian to Logseq, obsidian just has some limitations that I think I can work around in Logseq (insufficient syntax highlighting due to old integrated version of prismjs being one issue for ex).
I have sincere doubts that Obsidian will ever go open source.
I've started to use Joplin[1] and haven't looked back. It's open source and their business model is hosted cloud syncing. I already have a self-hosted Nextcloud instance running and WebDAV is supported for syncing as well so I'm not paying anything at the moment.
They also have apps on desktop and mobile. The apps may not have the most polished UI but they work extremely well.
sorry dendron didn't work out. was there anything specific that felt "janky"? we've had lots of updates on general ux (see https://buttondown.email/dendron/archive/) and are continuing to focus on that this year.
that being said, logseq is also a great tool. a bunch of folks use both dendron and logseq in tandem
Thanks for recommending logseg. Going to give it a try.
I've been using Dendron mostly because of the search feature and the ability to publish it on web but I didn't really like the experience of editing my notes on VS Code. Seems like logseg have similar feature as well.
Every time I see a new note taking app, I get excited that it might finally be the one that will satisfy my desired workflow. But every time I end up disappointed that nobody seems to think about this space in the way that I do.
Here is my basic premise: I want all of my notes to be dated, and I want them to tell a story of not just what I was thinking, but when.
Time is so fundamental to note taking. A note is never "This is my canonical position on X", it is always "this is what I am thinking about X today." But note taking apps rarely seem to bring time to the forefront.
Think about an issue tracker like GitHub issues. When you view an issue, you see a timestamped history of everything that has been added to the conversation and when. It tells a story of how the understanding of that issue evolved over time, and specific actions that were taken at specific times. I find this invaluable, and I want my own personal notes to work in the same way.
"So just use GitHub issues in a private repo." Well, GitHub issues isn't exactly what I'm looking for. Specifically:
- I want to use #tagging. If I click on a tag, I want a GitHub issues-like timeline view for all notes that include that tag. That way I can categorize notes across multiple dimensions.
- I want more control over how the notes are stored (Git is ideal, I can mirror the repo wherever I want).
- I want more control over how and when I publish the notes: if I'm taking work-specific notes, I want the option to publish them on an internal company server.
A Jekyll-based blog fulfills these criteria pretty well, except:
- Jekyll is primarily focused on publishing a website, not local viewing. To view locally you have to manually run a server in the background all the time ("jekyll serve") and there is a lot of HTML/CSS/configuration cruft that is overkill for note taking.
- Since Jekyll is not an app, it has no streamlined workflow for adding notes on mobile.
If anyone knows an app that is a good match for what I'm looking for, please let me know!
Dendron is very focused on local viewing, creating, and managing your notes (UX/DX). This is in addition to publishing, which is a differentiator between it and SSGs like Jekyll, Hugo, Sphinx, etc. It automatically timestamps notes at creation, and every following update, in two separate fields within a note frontmatter. Since Dendron encourages git for the versioning of your note vaults, you can get the full git history of each note.
With VS Code, you can also use GitLens to traverse and view the history of all the lines within each note (who modified this line last? etc.) with the built-in git blame navigation.
You could technically create a script of some kind that runs git diffs across the git history of files, and maybe create a "*.changelog" child file for each note, in the event that you want to have dedicated files displaying how each note evolved over time? Otherwise, that isn't a built-in feature with Dendron.
For mobile use, I've liked using mgit (Android) + Obsidian for editing my Dendron notes, and then use Dendron on my laptops/desktops. Others have mentioned GitJournal working well for them. Some more on that: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/SJtEnmQQYGu0bP2Kg7UbA/
> You could technically create a script of some kind that runs git diffs across the git history of files, and maybe create a "*.changelog" child file for each note
I think you may have missed my core point. I don't want to revise old notes repeatedly. If I have something to add, or a change in my thinking, I want to create a new note, with a new timestamp, that describes my new thought. Then I want to use #tags to view a timeline of all dated notes that match a specific tag.
Think about GitHub issues. If you discover some new information about an issue, do you edit the initial bug report in place? Probably not (unless it's a minor error like a misspelling). You add a new comment to the existing issue, which makes it clear that this is new information that you didn't know when you filed the issue initially.
I want note taking to operate more like a journal or blog, with journal entries easily selectable by #tag.
I wonder if Trilium Notes and the journal functionality would address your needs. You can use tags and backlink to other related notes if you wanted to. You can view notes in a standard hierarchy structure or view a note map.
You can take it a step further if that doesn't completely address your needs by customizing it. The journal button is just a note with a script (with a specific tag). It's highly customizable.
You can export your notes (all, or get granular with some or a single note) as HTML or Markdown or OPML.
If you live in the Apple ecosystem, Agenda(1) could be just the right tool for you. I also very much like their pricing schema(2), more apps should do it like this!
And whoever posted it put a second slash at the end of the URL, apparently to trick the HN system into allowing it to be posted again. I’m not saying I care, I’m just pointing out that it seems like that’s what was done, because I believe you can only post a link again after a certain time has passed.
I think one reason Dendron (and generally PKM topics) resonates on HN is because fundamentally, we haven't figured out "information architecture for humans"
I would complement your knowledge management platform with a passive way to reference previous content. Save every paragraph of text that is being read/written and implement semantic similarity search. For example you could use a Hugging Face model and an Approximate Nearest Neighbor index.
Then integrate this search with an extension on top of your regular search engine, such as Google. Bonus if it logs across all apps, not just the web browser, and if it implements semantic and source based blacklisting to control what is being logged, for privacy.
This is complementary to your approach because manual logging is hard and slow while passive logging + semantic search can follow everything. It will be like an external memory.
I was once involved in Topic Maps, a failed ISO standard that was challenged Semantic Web at some point.
One thing I remember is the tacit knowledge that all kinds of mind maps are useful on the spot to the person who writes them. Communicating anything via mind maps is difficult, and they become unintelligible even to authors very quickly.
I was rooting for Topic Maps at the time. The notion of Topics, Associations between them and Occurrences of information about a topic seemed to me to be very powerful. I don't think they were necessarily meant to model mind maps (altho no doubt you could), more of a super charged index of an information space.
FWIW Topic Maps were the inspiration for BrainTool [1], which is a 'Topic Manager' maybe in the same space as Dendron. I wrote about the model here [2]. I'm hoping people will exchange Topic Maps that index an information space or area of research!
Totally agree that mind maps are hard to scale out, either across time or people. This is why Dendron focuses on helping folks create consistent structures (we call them schemas) to help map out their knowledge base. Think of it as a type system for organizing your notes. More details on that here (https://nesslabs.com/dendron-featured-tool) if curious
I propose a Dendron Browser Plugin with same annotation functionality (FTW) =D
It would help with IP (Input + Process) components for those who adhere to the "Modern" Zettlekasten's IPA framework [1] (Input + Process + Action) conceptualized and presented by Marc Koenig.
Reminds me of the Apple spin-out name Kalida (sp?) that tried to promote a "personalized programming language" called ScriptX allowing each developer to define their own personal language syntax and write code in that. I was floored something so dumb would get a complete corporate spin-out, developers and the full rah-rah marketing push. Once developed and available, people quickly found nobody could share or even read one another's code. Duh.
I second org-mode. I've tried literally dozens of notes apps, but org-mode just gets everything right.
Well, almost everything. If I have to edit in a simple text editor then I still prefer Markdown and of course syncing files is up to the user (I use a private Gitlab account). Hebrew text that spans a newline is also problematic in Emacs, despite ostensibly fully supporting Unicode. But these limitations are trivial compared to all the issues I've identified in all the newer apps. It turns out that two decades of development really does lead to a mature product.
With other words, are notes in Roam/Obsidian/Logseq/Joplin/Dendron useful on the long term? Is the graph nature of notes a "plus" or just a distraction? Do you query your notes in a way that the results are more helpful than using a "flat wiki" (one or few text/markdown files)?
I use a "flat wiki" or despite not using org-mode, I believe it may be customized to "god-mode" _IF_ you take (plenty of) time to do it. "Wiki notes", by the other hand, seem a waste of time but probably I didn't understand them yet.
The number of potential links in a graph of n vertices scales like O(n^2). That does not mean that the actual number of links in the knowledge base should scale like O(n^2). However, it could mean that the overhead work to maintaining and building the connections in the knowledge base becomes unbearable. That is, the solution is not saving time anymore. Solutions like these need, imo, really good link prediction solutions to make it easier to manage them.
Are any of these personal knowledge base solutions offering link prediction as a feature to alleviate this problem?
> are notes in Roam/Obsidian/Logseq/Joplin/Dendron useful on the long term?
Very useful but the UX is very far from perfect. I would change/add dozens things in Obsidian. I also hate storing notes in a tree hierarchy - a very annoying overhead. I want it to be a freeform graph only with no taxonomy requiring a note to be located in a single specific place.
What I actually want is an open-source (fundamentally extensible but not necessarily free - I would pay up to $100 one-time if I really like it and probably donate more once it becomes an integral part of my life) offline sqlite-backed hybrid of Notion and Obsidian.
The most important feature I miss in Obsidian (as long as it is file system based) is a second file tree - dragging a note file to a distant (not fitting in the screen) place in one panel is painful.
Is there an app this where the editor is WYSIWYG but the storage format is Markdown? Almost like Confluence from a UI perspective but for a personal KB?
The latest Obsidian release has a WYSIWYG editor mode that's quite good in my experience. It stores everything in plain old markdown files and has a ton of plugins for extra stuff like backlinks, etc.
I've configured VSCode for this purpose. You can set a proportional font, at which point you are already halfway there. The default syntax highlighting already assigns scopes for headlines, bold/underline/italics, lists, code blocks and links, and it is either easy or default to style the text accordingly.
Readit News
I ended up finding https://logseq.com/ and have been very happy using that as a local application! I really like its balance of control/abstraction and its markdown based editor is beautiful!
I have sincere doubts that Obsidian will ever go open source.
They also have apps on desktop and mobile. The apps may not have the most polished UI but they work extremely well.
[1] https://joplinapp.org/
I've been using Dendron mostly because of the search feature and the ability to publish it on web but I didn't really like the experience of editing my notes on VS Code. Seems like logseg have similar feature as well.
Well, that's going to save me a chunk of time.
Here is my basic premise: I want all of my notes to be dated, and I want them to tell a story of not just what I was thinking, but when.
Time is so fundamental to note taking. A note is never "This is my canonical position on X", it is always "this is what I am thinking about X today." But note taking apps rarely seem to bring time to the forefront.
Think about an issue tracker like GitHub issues. When you view an issue, you see a timestamped history of everything that has been added to the conversation and when. It tells a story of how the understanding of that issue evolved over time, and specific actions that were taken at specific times. I find this invaluable, and I want my own personal notes to work in the same way.
"So just use GitHub issues in a private repo." Well, GitHub issues isn't exactly what I'm looking for. Specifically:
- I want to use #tagging. If I click on a tag, I want a GitHub issues-like timeline view for all notes that include that tag. That way I can categorize notes across multiple dimensions.
- I want more control over how the notes are stored (Git is ideal, I can mirror the repo wherever I want).
- I want more control over how and when I publish the notes: if I'm taking work-specific notes, I want the option to publish them on an internal company server.
A Jekyll-based blog fulfills these criteria pretty well, except:
- Jekyll is primarily focused on publishing a website, not local viewing. To view locally you have to manually run a server in the background all the time ("jekyll serve") and there is a lot of HTML/CSS/configuration cruft that is overkill for note taking.
- Since Jekyll is not an app, it has no streamlined workflow for adding notes on mobile.
If anyone knows an app that is a good match for what I'm looking for, please let me know!
With VS Code, you can also use GitLens to traverse and view the history of all the lines within each note (who modified this line last? etc.) with the built-in git blame navigation.
You could technically create a script of some kind that runs git diffs across the git history of files, and maybe create a "*.changelog" child file for each note, in the event that you want to have dedicated files displaying how each note evolved over time? Otherwise, that isn't a built-in feature with Dendron.
For mobile use, I've liked using mgit (Android) + Obsidian for editing my Dendron notes, and then use Dendron on my laptops/desktops. Others have mentioned GitJournal working well for them. Some more on that: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/SJtEnmQQYGu0bP2Kg7UbA/
I think you may have missed my core point. I don't want to revise old notes repeatedly. If I have something to add, or a change in my thinking, I want to create a new note, with a new timestamp, that describes my new thought. Then I want to use #tags to view a timeline of all dated notes that match a specific tag.
Think about GitHub issues. If you discover some new information about an issue, do you edit the initial bug report in place? Probably not (unless it's a minor error like a misspelling). You add a new comment to the existing issue, which makes it clear that this is new information that you didn't know when you filed the issue initially.
I want note taking to operate more like a journal or blog, with journal entries easily selectable by #tag.
You can take it a step further if that doesn't completely address your needs by customizing it. The journal button is just a note with a script (with a specific tag). It's highly customizable.
You can export your notes (all, or get granular with some or a single note) as HTML or Markdown or OPML.
https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Day-notes
1. https://www.agenda.com/
2. https://drewmccormack.medium.com/a-cash-cow-is-on-the-agenda...
(Launch) Nov 2021, 85 Comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29176158
(Show) Mar 2021, 84 Comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26491764
(Show) Oct 2020, 168 Comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24898373
Google works for the internet but we don't have an equivalent for PKM or TKM (team knowledge management). This is why we build Dendron (more details at https://blog.dendron.so/notes/N9VxT7G5SovmncezBAGO2.html)
Then integrate this search with an extension on top of your regular search engine, such as Google. Bonus if it logs across all apps, not just the web browser, and if it implements semantic and source based blacklisting to control what is being logged, for privacy.
This is complementary to your approach because manual logging is hard and slow while passive logging + semantic search can follow everything. It will be like an external memory.
https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr
One thing I remember is the tacit knowledge that all kinds of mind maps are useful on the spot to the person who writes them. Communicating anything via mind maps is difficult, and they become unintelligible even to authors very quickly.
FWIW Topic Maps were the inspiration for BrainTool [1], which is a 'Topic Manager' maybe in the same space as Dendron. I wrote about the model here [2]. I'm hoping people will exchange Topic Maps that index an information space or area of research!
[1] https://braintool.org
[2]https://braintool.org/2021/05/15/Organizing-your-life-with-a...
It would help with IP (Input + Process) components for those who adhere to the "Modern" Zettlekasten's IPA framework [1] (Input + Process + Action) conceptualized and presented by Marc Koenig.
1- [https://youtu.be/rjU65enKSEE].
I recommend learning Emacs org-mode. Painful, but eventually faster.
Well, almost everything. If I have to edit in a simple text editor then I still prefer Markdown and of course syncing files is up to the user (I use a private Gitlab account). Hebrew text that spans a newline is also problematic in Emacs, despite ostensibly fully supporting Unicode. But these limitations are trivial compared to all the issues I've identified in all the newer apps. It turns out that two decades of development really does lead to a mature product.
With other words, are notes in Roam/Obsidian/Logseq/Joplin/Dendron useful on the long term? Is the graph nature of notes a "plus" or just a distraction? Do you query your notes in a way that the results are more helpful than using a "flat wiki" (one or few text/markdown files)?
I use a "flat wiki" or despite not using org-mode, I believe it may be customized to "god-mode" _IF_ you take (plenty of) time to do it. "Wiki notes", by the other hand, seem a waste of time but probably I didn't understand them yet.
Are any of these personal knowledge base solutions offering link prediction as a feature to alleviate this problem?
If I need to start adding some (link markup)[linkmarkup.example] while writing, I can't be bothered.
Very useful but the UX is very far from perfect. I would change/add dozens things in Obsidian. I also hate storing notes in a tree hierarchy - a very annoying overhead. I want it to be a freeform graph only with no taxonomy requiring a note to be located in a single specific place.
What I actually want is an open-source (fundamentally extensible but not necessarily free - I would pay up to $100 one-time if I really like it and probably donate more once it becomes an integral part of my life) offline sqlite-backed hybrid of Notion and Obsidian.
The most important feature I miss in Obsidian (as long as it is file system based) is a second file tree - dragging a note file to a distant (not fitting in the screen) place in one panel is painful.
Dead Comment
It’s like an open source Evernote.
* By real I mean that the UI stays WYSIWYG, unlike other apps that fall back to Markdown notation while editing.