7 ms·

Athens an open source Roam alternative

75 points by harporoeder 6y ago

xmprt 6y ago
I've recently picked up Notion and I like it a lot. I looked into Roam but for $15 per month and with a lot of performance issues, I think I'll pass for now. I'm hoping they work out the quirks because the idea of being able to quickly link different concepts together is pretty neat. Fortunately Notion has backlinks which work for most of my needs and the blocks look nicer.
- Lazare 6y ago
  I used Notion for a while, but found the UI just a little tpp sluggish. And I personally value native apps for tools like this, and Notion's Electron based apps were quite large and slow, sadly. I love what they're doing, I understand why they picked the tech stack and architecture they did, and they have some really awesome features! ....but it's just too slow for me. (Then again, I'm picky.)
  - jotson 6y ago
    Same experience... There's a lot to like about notion and I chose it over everything else and am using it professionally and personally. But the sluggishness is really starting to bother me
- jyriand 6y ago
  Tried Notion for a while, but it just does too much in my opion, it gives me too many choices. I could spend hours trying to get the perfect home screen and arrange pages into a perfect order. But that's all I did. I spent more time worrying about getting the right structure than actually taking the notes.
Lazare 6y ago
https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/ is a very nice tool in this space as well. Open source, lots of features.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
  I've been really enjoying Joplin. It works on my phone It works on my computer It syncs to a cloud provider I specify It looks like the API it exposes is fairly straight forward for building on top of.
- brunoqc 6y ago
  I like joplin but does it have backlinks?
  - CalebJohn 6y ago
    Not yet, but plug-ins are on the roadmap[1] and it's my understanding that the plug-in system will be powerful enough to add support for things like backlinks. [1]: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/3723 https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/3723
    - brunoqc 6y ago
      Nice, thanks!
- Yuioup 6y ago
  You obviously know what "Athens" and "Roam" are. Care to explain it to us Plebs?
  - Dolores12 6y ago
    Roam is https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/
  - Lazare 6y ago
    Joplin is an open source note taking tool. You can make notebooks, full of notes. It supports markdown, has a decent UI, supports a bunch of nifty markdown plugins, has search, and is just generally decent. Notably it has native (and good) apps for major desktop and mobile OSes. It also handles sync via your choice of clouds, lets you encrypt your data, and is open source. Also has browser plugins for capturing notes from a webpage. There's a lot to like. True, like a lot of small open source projects, there are some rough edges, and progress is slow, but I believe they welcome new volunteers. There are, however, a TON of note taking apps floating around at the moment. One is Roam. Roam is very expensive ($15/month; a premium price point in a space that's mostly free or a couple of dollars at most), and has a bit of a...well, almost cult-like atmosphere around it. People that like Roam seem to love it, for some reason. On the other hand, development is fast, and they support TONS of features. Backlinks seems to be a big one. Notably I think Roam is more focused around "blocks" of content than around freeform markdown. Other options include Notion, Bear, Obsidian, Tiddlywiki, Evernote, Quiver, Dynalist, Workflowy, Standard Notes and many, many, many others. All are excellent options in this space. And now, Athens, which I suppose is trying to be a better, open source Roam? Honestly, if you care a lot about note taking apps you should dig into it, there's a ton of options and interesting tradeoffs. And if you don't, then....eh, probably doesn't matter much.
Barrin92 6y ago
This doesn't seem ready for use yet. Another Roam alternative I've been using that seems pretty much complete and has the benefit of letting the user host the data is https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
- Lopalis 6y ago
  I'm fairly disappointed with Obsidian so far. While the basic functionality of linking/backlinking works fine, there are too many restrictions in how it works or how I can interact with it to make it anything more than a toy to experiment with. I disagree with your statement that it's "complete", since I consider it quite barebones. It doesn't help that there still isn't an API for me to build the features I need and they're unwilling to open source it.
  - benrbray 6y ago
    Hey, I had exactly the same frustration. I like some features of Obsidian (like backlinks), and I like some features of Typora (like math), but no single editor has all the features I want. It annoyed me to no end that I couldn't simply download the source and make the changes I needed. (or write a plugin) During quarantine I've been working on an open-source alternative called Noteworthy (https://noteworthy.ink/ https://noteworthy.ink/). It's not quite ready for release yet, but keep an eye out the next few months! The source is here, you can technically build it if you try hard enough: (https://github.com/benrbray/noteworthy https://github.com/benrbray/noteworthy) The goal is to be as modular and extensible as possible. People shouldn't have to keep re-inventing file trees, Markdown parsing, etc.. This is my first large TypeScript/Electron project so code feedback is always welcome, especially in the early stages. In the meantime, you might be interested in Zettlr, an open-source editor with similar features which is a bit more stable. If you don't mind me asking, what features in particular are you looking for in an editor?
    - anoffvu 6y ago
      You should check out logseq.com! Has all the features you’ve mentioned (KaTeX, beautiful and functional graph). I’ve been using it for hours each day and it’s been amazing, ze mind is so free! Their extensions platform is coming this month though, so it’s not quite out yet.
spankalee 6y ago
What is it? I can't find a description.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  I tried searching a lot of things, can't tell what the thing is. Seems like something between org mode and a graph/adjacency database.
- 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
  I figure it's like a self-hosted wiki of sorts.
- singlow 6y ago
  I read three levels deep into everything in their readme and still have no idea what it is. I found out it's _like_ a lot of other things that have no description.
  - Lopalis 6y ago
    It's weird. They've obviously written a bunch, but there's no clear "this is what this is and what we want it to be and this is where we're going". It's all very ... academic and "meta" in a very vague way. https://github.com/athensresearch/athens/blob/master/VISION.md https://github.com/athensresearch/athens/blob/master/VISION....
- Lopalis 6y ago
  Seems like the example shows off what it's supposed to be: https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/#/page/0 https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/#/page/0 The caveat that "Athens doesn't persist any data yet" is, uh, significant though.
- na85 6y ago
  Apparently it's a Roam alternative but that's the best I've been able to determine. No idea what Roam is either.
neolog 6y ago
Foam is another https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
- clubdorothe 6y ago
  Foam is built as a vscode plugin - what's not great when you are on mobile and what to write on the go
Sophistifunk 6y ago
Did I miss a paragraph or does that not at all explain WTF either Athens or Rome are?
- brunoqc 6y ago
  Roam is a trendy kinda wiki/note taking tool with backlinks. https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/ We see a clone every other day. I'm glad in part since Roam is too expensive.
  - errantspark 6y ago
    I wouldn't care about the expense if they made a good product. The problem is when it comes to my notes if I don't control where the data is then it can't possibly be a good product.
- runarberg 6y ago
  It doesn’t say in the README, but the description for the repo (About; on the upper right hand side of the file explorer) says: > Open-Source Networked Thought. Rolling out our Beta to Sponsors. Read more at https://www.notion.so/athensresearch/MVP-Update-Funding-and-Why-I-Started-Athens-e68822f0c3654660ae621cdcbf932bc4 https://www.notion.so/athensresearch/MVP-Update-Funding-and-...
  - Sophistifunk 6y ago
    Thanks
- inoffensivename 6y ago
  I came here to say this too
depthfirst 6y ago
I have recently started using Fsnotes [1]. Its based on nvAlt [2]. If we are focusing on networked notes, fsnotes supports it out of the box and best part, it is offline; stores files as markdown on my local machine, which I really want. Not sure if Roam or Athens are offline apps, didn't dig too much into them. [1] https://fsnot.es/ https://fsnot.es/ [2] https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/
cadbox1 6y ago
I think graph/network based notes are really interesting and I'm keen to see how Athens develops. I've created my own open source approach called Very Nested [1] that uses GitHub repos for storage. It also supports files and images. So far, I've enjoyed organising my recipes [2] with it. Feedback welcome, it's new. [1] https://verynested.cadell.dev/ https://verynested.cadell.dev/ [2] https://cooking.cadell.dev/ https://cooking.cadell.dev/
CGamesPlay 6y ago
I'm super excited to see an open source approach to these! Frankly I probably won't use it because I like the plain-text-files approach to note-taking, but when I evaluate new options, being open source and self-hosted are very important factors for me (specifically in the personal knowledge management space).
hardwaregeek 6y ago
If I had a dollar for every damn note taking app (2 for open source note taking app), I'd be set on rent money for a few months. What about note taking makes people want to invent their own app? Is it just bikeshedding? Spending hours writing a note taking app sounds like a perfect way to not end up taking notes and to not use said notes to accomplish much.
- jrm4 6y ago
  Because this particular task really feels like the killer app that we should already have -- frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc. Where I think people are going off the rails is thinking that this can work as a business. I'm hugely skeptical that there's a market here; businesses rely on some measure of "if you don't pay you can't have this part of the thing." -- and even if a startup is able to make this work, it's likely that the "value-add" will be easily replicable into something free (as in freedom) owing to the nature of this being a "power-user" thing. For example, none of these things promise too much more than, e.g. Zim-wiki (longtime user here) -- which itself is extensible either as FOSS, or simply owing to the fact that it saves in Markdown-ish, immediately MAKING it extensible anyway.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    > frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc. You mean a piece of paper with a filing cabinet? I’ve been trying note taking apps for 15 years and nothing beats a plain old notebook for ease of use, flexibility, and helping me think. I don’t do filing cabinets so retrieval has suffered. And for me personally that hasn’t been a problem because most of my notes are ephemeral. When I’m ready to save something long term I write a blogpost and let Google take care of the rest. PS: the main issue with most note taking apps is that there’s just something fundamentally different about thinking on the keyboard vs. thinking with a pen in hand. Digital pens have so far not been able to replicate the feeling for some reason.
clubdorothe 6y ago
Athens story is quite compelling : https://www.notion.so/MVP-Update-Funding-and-Why-I-Started-Athens-e68822f0c3654660ae621cdcbf932bc4 https://www.notion.so/MVP-Update-Funding-and-Why-I-Started-A...
hijklmno 6y ago
Check out https://obsidian.md https://obsidian.md
anoffvu 6y ago
Athens is pretty far behind most alternatives. I use logseq.com and it is miles ahead of Athens and even edges out Roam in a lot of aspects. i.e. it’s based in md and org-mode and all data is stored locally and synced with GitHub. The team is great and super responsive (minutes from message to new deploy) and are open sourcing after beta. They took all the best features of all the trendy note taking apps and put it into one beautiful piece of clojure web app. Super recommend!
piokoch 6y ago
I've tested a lot of those note taking app, Athens does not seem to be particularly better than the rest. My the most favorite app is https://www.zettlr.com https://www.zettlr.com. It has a simple concept that I really like: this is just markdown files viewer that has ability to: (1) edit (2) search(also by tags) and (3) link files. And that's all. Files are stored on a local disc in any folder structure someone wants, can be sync using whatever someone wants - Google Drive, Dropbox, Synology NAS, etc. There is zero vendor lock-in, as it works on plain MD files without any custom elements. This is one more Electron app, however in that case it is not especially annoying, there are some lags, but acceptable.
- feralimal 6y ago
  This is exactly what I want too - it looks really good - simple, tags, etc. Except that it doesn't seem to have a way to integrate notes on different devices... Or do you have a way around that?
feralimal 6y ago
It seems to me that the reason note taking is complex, and so fractured, is because of lack of label support in OS's. Data is mismanaged at the data level, and we are looking for solutions to that problem with applications rather than at the OS level where it belongs. The file tree idea, where a file exists in only one place in the hierarchy is wrong. I'd rather all my notes/files were in one big bucket, but that I could label each, and then sort by labels. I may want to label a file as 'software', 'tech-architecture' and 'finance' - all of them. When I look up any one of those labels, I want to get all the related content. I shouldn't need to guess which bucket I put a note into. So, I say labels should be data associated to files like modified date, or author. To fix the problem of 'no label' as part of the data, I try to use a note taking that applies labels for me. But then an app developer is going to want to do all sorts of extra stuff. I understand that having tons of label data on the file could become ridiculous though. Perhaps the real answer would be to have a hidden metadata file associated with the data itself (eg 'mytext.txt.meta') - labels and any other metadata would go in here, separate to the note 'mytext.txt' itself. So, I think OS's enforce a data organisational structure on us that is unnatural to the way we think and work. And we seek to fix it with apps. And we will never get satisfaction that way :(
kelsolaar 6y ago
Tried most of them, Bear, DEVONThink, Foam, Quiver, Notion, Obsidian, Org-Mode, Roam, Workflowy, and Zettlr to name a few. The feature I found to be the best is the "outliner with zoom" from Roam and Workflowy. With that in mind, Dynalist (https://dynalist.io/ https://dynalist.io/) is what I'm currently using.

75 points by harporoeder 6y ago

I've recently picked up Notion and I like it a lot. I looked into Roam but for $15 per month and with a lot of performance issues, I think I'll pass for now. I'm hoping they work out the quirks because the idea of being able to quickly link different concepts together is pretty neat. Fortunately Notion has backlinks which work for most of my needs and the blocks look nicer.

Lazare 6y ago
I used Notion for a while, but found the UI just a little tpp sluggish. And I personally value native apps for tools like this, and Notion's Electron based apps were quite large and slow, sadly. I love what they're doing, I understand why they picked the tech stack and architecture they did, and they have some really awesome features! ....but it's just too slow for me. (Then again, I'm picky.)
- jotson 6y ago
  Same experience... There's a lot to like about notion and I chose it over everything else and am using it professionally and personally. But the sluggishness is really starting to bother me
jyriand 6y ago
Tried Notion for a while, but it just does too much in my opion, it gives me too many choices. I could spend hours trying to get the perfect home screen and arrange pages into a perfect order. But that's all I did. I spent more time worrying about getting the right structure than actually taking the notes.

Lazare 6y ago

https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/ is a very nice tool in this space as well. Open source, lots of features.

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
I've been really enjoying Joplin. It works on my phone It works on my computer It syncs to a cloud provider I specify It looks like the API it exposes is fairly straight forward for building on top of.
brunoqc 6y ago
I like joplin but does it have backlinks?
- CalebJohn 6y ago
  Not yet, but plug-ins are on the roadmap[1] and it's my understanding that the plug-in system will be powerful enough to add support for things like backlinks. [1]: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/3723 https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/3723
  - brunoqc 6y ago
    Nice, thanks!
Yuioup 6y ago
You obviously know what "Athens" and "Roam" are. Care to explain it to us Plebs?
- Dolores12 6y ago
  Roam is https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/
- Lazare 6y ago
  Joplin is an open source note taking tool. You can make notebooks, full of notes. It supports markdown, has a decent UI, supports a bunch of nifty markdown plugins, has search, and is just generally decent. Notably it has native (and good) apps for major desktop and mobile OSes. It also handles sync via your choice of clouds, lets you encrypt your data, and is open source. Also has browser plugins for capturing notes from a webpage. There's a lot to like. True, like a lot of small open source projects, there are some rough edges, and progress is slow, but I believe they welcome new volunteers. There are, however, a TON of note taking apps floating around at the moment. One is Roam. Roam is very expensive ($15/month; a premium price point in a space that's mostly free or a couple of dollars at most), and has a bit of a...well, almost cult-like atmosphere around it. People that like Roam seem to love it, for some reason. On the other hand, development is fast, and they support TONS of features. Backlinks seems to be a big one. Notably I think Roam is more focused around "blocks" of content than around freeform markdown. Other options include Notion, Bear, Obsidian, Tiddlywiki, Evernote, Quiver, Dynalist, Workflowy, Standard Notes and many, many, many others. All are excellent options in this space. And now, Athens, which I suppose is trying to be a better, open source Roam? Honestly, if you care a lot about note taking apps you should dig into it, there's a ton of options and interesting tradeoffs. And if you don't, then....eh, probably doesn't matter much.

Barrin92 6y ago

This doesn't seem ready for use yet. Another Roam alternative I've been using that seems pretty much complete and has the benefit of letting the user host the data is https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/

Lopalis 6y ago
I'm fairly disappointed with Obsidian so far. While the basic functionality of linking/backlinking works fine, there are too many restrictions in how it works or how I can interact with it to make it anything more than a toy to experiment with. I disagree with your statement that it's "complete", since I consider it quite barebones. It doesn't help that there still isn't an API for me to build the features I need and they're unwilling to open source it.
- benrbray 6y ago
  Hey, I had exactly the same frustration. I like some features of Obsidian (like backlinks), and I like some features of Typora (like math), but no single editor has all the features I want. It annoyed me to no end that I couldn't simply download the source and make the changes I needed. (or write a plugin) During quarantine I've been working on an open-source alternative called Noteworthy (https://noteworthy.ink/ https://noteworthy.ink/). It's not quite ready for release yet, but keep an eye out the next few months! The source is here, you can technically build it if you try hard enough: (https://github.com/benrbray/noteworthy https://github.com/benrbray/noteworthy) The goal is to be as modular and extensible as possible. People shouldn't have to keep re-inventing file trees, Markdown parsing, etc.. This is my first large TypeScript/Electron project so code feedback is always welcome, especially in the early stages. In the meantime, you might be interested in Zettlr, an open-source editor with similar features which is a bit more stable. If you don't mind me asking, what features in particular are you looking for in an editor?
  - anoffvu 6y ago
    You should check out logseq.com! Has all the features you’ve mentioned (KaTeX, beautiful and functional graph). I’ve been using it for hours each day and it’s been amazing, ze mind is so free! Their extensions platform is coming this month though, so it’s not quite out yet.

spankalee 6y ago

What is it? I can't find a description.

microcolonel 6y ago
I tried searching a lot of things, can't tell what the thing is. Seems like something between org mode and a graph/adjacency database.
0xdeadb00f 6y ago
I figure it's like a self-hosted wiki of sorts.
singlow 6y ago
I read three levels deep into everything in their readme and still have no idea what it is. I found out it's _like_ a lot of other things that have no description.
- Lopalis 6y ago
  It's weird. They've obviously written a bunch, but there's no clear "this is what this is and what we want it to be and this is where we're going". It's all very ... academic and "meta" in a very vague way. https://github.com/athensresearch/athens/blob/master/VISION.md https://github.com/athensresearch/athens/blob/master/VISION....
Lopalis 6y ago
Seems like the example shows off what it's supposed to be: https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/#/page/0 https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/#/page/0 The caveat that "Athens doesn't persist any data yet" is, uh, significant though.
na85 6y ago
Apparently it's a Roam alternative but that's the best I've been able to determine. No idea what Roam is either.

neolog 6y ago

Foam is another https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

clubdorothe 6y ago
Foam is built as a vscode plugin - what's not great when you are on mobile and what to write on the go

Sophistifunk 6y ago

Did I miss a paragraph or does that not at all explain WTF either Athens or Rome are?

brunoqc 6y ago
Roam is a trendy kinda wiki/note taking tool with backlinks. https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/ We see a clone every other day. I'm glad in part since Roam is too expensive.
- errantspark 6y ago
  I wouldn't care about the expense if they made a good product. The problem is when it comes to my notes if I don't control where the data is then it can't possibly be a good product.
runarberg 6y ago
It doesn’t say in the README, but the description for the repo (About; on the upper right hand side of the file explorer) says: > Open-Source Networked Thought. Rolling out our Beta to Sponsors. Read more at https://www.notion.so/athensresearch/MVP-Update-Funding-and-Why-I-Started-Athens-e68822f0c3654660ae621cdcbf932bc4 https://www.notion.so/athensresearch/MVP-Update-Funding-and-...
- Sophistifunk 6y ago
  Thanks
inoffensivename 6y ago
I came here to say this too

depthfirst 6y ago

I have recently started using Fsnotes [1]. Its based on nvAlt [2]. If we are focusing on networked notes, fsnotes supports it out of the box and best part, it is offline; stores files as markdown on my local machine, which I really want. Not sure if Roam or Athens are offline apps, didn't dig too much into them. [1] https://fsnot.es/ https://fsnot.es/ [2] https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

cadbox1 6y ago

I think graph/network based notes are really interesting and I'm keen to see how Athens develops. I've created my own open source approach called Very Nested [1] that uses GitHub repos for storage. It also supports files and images. So far, I've enjoyed organising my recipes [2] with it. Feedback welcome, it's new. [1] https://verynested.cadell.dev/ https://verynested.cadell.dev/ [2] https://cooking.cadell.dev/ https://cooking.cadell.dev/

CGamesPlay 6y ago

I'm super excited to see an open source approach to these! Frankly I probably won't use it because I like the plain-text-files approach to note-taking, but when I evaluate new options, being open source and self-hosted are very important factors for me (specifically in the personal knowledge management space).

hardwaregeek 6y ago

If I had a dollar for every damn note taking app (2 for open source note taking app), I'd be set on rent money for a few months. What about note taking makes people want to invent their own app? Is it just bikeshedding? Spending hours writing a note taking app sounds like a perfect way to not end up taking notes and to not use said notes to accomplish much.

jrm4 6y ago
Because this particular task really feels like the killer app that we should already have -- frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc. Where I think people are going off the rails is thinking that this can work as a business. I'm hugely skeptical that there's a market here; businesses rely on some measure of "if you don't pay you can't have this part of the thing." -- and even if a startup is able to make this work, it's likely that the "value-add" will be easily replicable into something free (as in freedom) owing to the nature of this being a "power-user" thing. For example, none of these things promise too much more than, e.g. Zim-wiki (longtime user here) -- which itself is extensible either as FOSS, or simply owing to the fact that it saves in Markdown-ish, immediately MAKING it extensible anyway.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc. You mean a piece of paper with a filing cabinet? I’ve been trying note taking apps for 15 years and nothing beats a plain old notebook for ease of use, flexibility, and helping me think. I don’t do filing cabinets so retrieval has suffered. And for me personally that hasn’t been a problem because most of my notes are ephemeral. When I’m ready to save something long term I write a blogpost and let Google take care of the rest. PS: the main issue with most note taking apps is that there’s just something fundamentally different about thinking on the keyboard vs. thinking with a pen in hand. Digital pens have so far not been able to replicate the feeling for some reason.

clubdorothe 6y ago

Athens story is quite compelling : https://www.notion.so/MVP-Update-Funding-and-Why-I-Started-Athens-e68822f0c3654660ae621cdcbf932bc4 https://www.notion.so/MVP-Update-Funding-and-Why-I-Started-A...

hijklmno 6y ago

Check out https://obsidian.md https://obsidian.md

anoffvu 6y ago

Athens is pretty far behind most alternatives. I use logseq.com and it is miles ahead of Athens and even edges out Roam in a lot of aspects. i.e. it’s based in md and org-mode and all data is stored locally and synced with GitHub. The team is great and super responsive (minutes from message to new deploy) and are open sourcing after beta. They took all the best features of all the trendy note taking apps and put it into one beautiful piece of clojure web app. Super recommend!

piokoch 6y ago

I've tested a lot of those note taking app, Athens does not seem to be particularly better than the rest. My the most favorite app is https://www.zettlr.com https://www.zettlr.com. It has a simple concept that I really like: this is just markdown files viewer that has ability to: (1) edit (2) search(also by tags) and (3) link files. And that's all. Files are stored on a local disc in any folder structure someone wants, can be sync using whatever someone wants - Google Drive, Dropbox, Synology NAS, etc. There is zero vendor lock-in, as it works on plain MD files without any custom elements. This is one more Electron app, however in that case it is not especially annoying, there are some lags, but acceptable.

feralimal 6y ago
This is exactly what I want too - it looks really good - simple, tags, etc. Except that it doesn't seem to have a way to integrate notes on different devices... Or do you have a way around that?

feralimal 6y ago

It seems to me that the reason note taking is complex, and so fractured, is because of lack of label support in OS's. Data is mismanaged at the data level, and we are looking for solutions to that problem with applications rather than at the OS level where it belongs. The file tree idea, where a file exists in only one place in the hierarchy is wrong. I'd rather all my notes/files were in one big bucket, but that I could label each, and then sort by labels. I may want to label a file as 'software', 'tech-architecture' and 'finance' - all of them. When I look up any one of those labels, I want to get all the related content. I shouldn't need to guess which bucket I put a note into. So, I say labels should be data associated to files like modified date, or author. To fix the problem of 'no label' as part of the data, I try to use a note taking that applies labels for me. But then an app developer is going to want to do all sorts of extra stuff. I understand that having tons of label data on the file could become ridiculous though. Perhaps the real answer would be to have a hidden metadata file associated with the data itself (eg 'mytext.txt.meta') - labels and any other metadata would go in here, separate to the note 'mytext.txt' itself. So, I think OS's enforce a data organisational structure on us that is unnatural to the way we think and work. And we seek to fix it with apps. And we will never get satisfaction that way :(

kelsolaar 6y ago

Tried most of them, Bear, DEVONThink, Foam, Quiver, Notion, Obsidian, Org-Mode, Roam, Workflowy, and Zettlr to name a few. The feature I found to be the best is the "outliner with zoom" from Roam and Workflowy. With that in mind, Dynalist (https://dynalist.io/ https://dynalist.io/) is what I'm currently using.