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Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought
- webwanderings 6y agoI miss Typora's WYSIWYG Markdown editing in VS Code. For a note-taking, two pane window (one for editing and one for preview) makes very less sense.
- vegadw 6y agoSo much this. I think it's the number one problem that Roam, Obsidian, and this has. Without live-rendered markdown it's more mental overhead than it's worth.
- iterating 6y agoSiyuan is what you're looking for. [https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan/blob/master/README_en_US.md https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan/blob/master/README_en_...] The app itself is in English. It's got a WYSWYG editor with a nice table feature.
- riidom 6y agoObsidians source code display is pretty close to preview quality, actually. Sadly they don't dare to feature this in the official screenshots, they are all in preview mode. Here is a side-by-side to get the idea (the theme may be subject to taste, but it's not really relevant to the topic anyway, and there are a lot, less fancy ones as well): https://forum.obsidian.md/uploads/default/original/1X/3c3aaf944214956f1e2d3598fcb99dbbdb9c47a9.jpeg https://forum.obsidian.md/uploads/default/original/1X/3c3aaf... Edit: word repetition
- koheripbal 6y agoWhat do you mean you "miss" it? Typora has a stand-alone app that works great. Did it used to be a VS Code extension?
- webwanderings 6y agoTypora's markdown experience is great. I wish to see the same in VSCode. It isn't feasible to use Typora just for markdown and VSCode for other type of files.
- pknopf 6y agoI've always wanted a better way to document and structure arguments/debates. Assertions can have supporting statements (as children), that can be further expanded and evaluated. This way, I can evaluate and discard branches, distilling an argument to what matters. Would a tool like this help me?
- XFrequentist 6y agoLike this? https://www.rationaleonline.com/ https://www.rationaleonline.com/
- modeless 6y agoAnother one https://www.kialo.com/tour https://www.kialo.com/tour
- joshspankit 6y agoI really find Kialo to be awesome for focusing the random arguments that see:to happen so much online. There are basically zero duplications in arguments since there’s a spot specifically for each one. There are some things I would change, but I’m happy about the time and effort I’ve put in to the discussions there.
- ibn_khaldun 6y agoYou may be interested in Hypernomicon http://hypernomicon.org/ http://hypernomicon.org/
- fastball 6y ago
- roddds 6y agoHow is Dendron different from Foam[1]? At first glance, both projects are very similar.
- curo 6y agoNot the author, but foam isn't hierarchical for one
- vorpalhex 6y agoFoam can be setup and run hierarchical. I use this setup for mine with broad groupings at the top (history, medicine, politics, etc) and then subgroups as needed (history -> pandemics, history -> wars, etc). You can use foam-doctor to regenerate paths and titles on a regular basis.
- firstSpeaker 6y agoI would be also interested in a more detailed comparison. Specially with foam and obsidian
- iterating 6y agoOne of Dendron's main innovations is how it handles note namespaces. While most apps with hierarchy separates titles linearly with folders for nesting, Dendron separates note titles among both an x and y axis, along with a nesting hierarchy. What results is a nicely organized navigation sidebar for choosing notes to open, as well as ease of naming new notes and adding on to existing notes. Foam seems to be Obsidian ported to VSCode, minus several features and without a searchable graph view.
- kevinslin 6y agofoam is a note taking tool heavily modeled after roam research and backlinks. the core foam extension mainly focuses on stitching together third party extensions for most of its functionality. dendron is also, in part, inspired by roam (backlinks, daily journals, etc) but is built around the notion of [hierarchical note taking](https://www.kevinslin.com/notes/3dd58f62-fee5-4f93-b9f1-b0f0f59a9b64.html https://www.kevinslin.com/notes/3dd58f62-fee5-4f93-b9f1-b0f0...). dendron takes the structure provided by well built hierarchies and combines it with the freedom of roam's backlinks and block references. while dendron also relies on third party extensions, the majority of functionality is inside the dendron extension. you can refactor notes via regex (dendron will update both backlinks and file names), lookup your notes via their path, apply schemas to categorize your notes, and much more.
- maxioatic 6y agoI was curious what was different about this than Roam/Obsidian/ect. and checked the FAQ: > Dendron is a highly opinionated note taking tool that focuses on hierarchal note taking. It provides the freedom of Roam’s every note exists everywhere philosophy while layering on top flexible hierarchies to keep track of it all. [0] Not sure how I feel about that approach. However, it does look pretty polished and I'll likely check it out at some point. [0] - https://www.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b558#how-is-dendron-different-from-x-note-taking-tool https://www.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e8...
- plesiv 6y agoIt seems that the core features of Dendron correspond most closely to Obsidian's, to the point that I thought it's an Obsidian skin, but Obsidian is closed source while Dendron isn't. Roam is a Web app whose unit of data is a text block - Obsidian's and Dendron's unit of data is a file Markdown file.
- maxioatic 6y agoAgreed. I've personally never used Roam, as I definitely need my files to be in some form of plain text. Obsidian is cool in my eyes because I can start it up and click around if I want (more of review tool and looking at a cool graph), but in general I just create/edit my files in Vim. That's why I'm unsure about the opinionated hierarchy deal of Dendron. It just seems like another layer to deal with - although not much of a stretch to see a value add with it. Right now, I don't have enough files to be overwhelmed with my ad-hoc structure to spend the time trying it.
- Eugeleo 6y agoThere is a way to link to individual blocks now (paragraphs in Obsidian speak). And an alpha plugin API has just been unveiled to the insiders. (No affiliation, just a happy insider)
- aaisola 6y agoOn the website you mention using it in conjunction with other note taking tools. How do you envision using Dendron in conjunction with another note taking tool like Roam?
- kevinslin 6y agoDendron has a notion of pods - plugins you can use to import, export, publish and (soon to come) sync data between different tools of thought. These plugins can be written and share using nodejs and are meant to provide interoperability between dendron and other tools
- Naac 6y agoJust quickly watched this[1] video showing an intro to Dendron. I'm currently using tiddlywiki[2] so that's primarily what I'm comparing it too. Both tiddlywiki and dendron look very similar, supporting various forms of linking to one another. Dendron seems to have a more complete hierarchical way of combining pages, at least compared to the way that I use tiddlywiki. Tiddlywiki's advantage is the amount of plugins it has available. I think I also still prefer tiddlywiki because I just have it hosted on a server, so I can access my notes from whatever machine, including my phone. For dendron ( an electron app ) I'm guessing I would have to have some sort of Dropbox/Nextcloud system setup to sync notes between machines. The fact that I'm in my browser all the time and can just open a web page to access tiddlywiki is also preferable. The least amount of friction between a thought in my head to being able to write it down, the better. I was interested in Dendron because looking at its website, dendron supports a graph visualization of all your notes, like concept mapping[3]. But unfortunately it doesn't look like this concept mapping feature is prioritized, or the main focus of dendron. That's really the main thing I would like to add to tiddlywiki, some sort of functional concept mapping feature. I've tried tiddlymap[4], but its not very well supported. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3io2fHRmZsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3io2fHRmZsE [2] https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_map [4] http://tiddlymap.org/ http://tiddlymap.org/
- sammorrowdrums 6y ago> I'm guessing I would have to have some sort of Dropbox/Nextcloud system setup to sync notes between machines. I thought the point was to store the data, and distribute it in git or something.
- Naac 6y agook, so even more of a pain to keep notes in sync now right? git push from the source, and then again a git pull from the destination. And let's not think about if you accidentally forgot to sync your two repos, and now you have to deal with merge conflicts.
- brainburp 6y ago
- bloopernova 6y agoCan the author tell me the similarities and differences between this and Emacs org-mode?
- kevinslin 6y agoI would refer you to this writeup here: https://www.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b558.html#how-is-dendron-different-from-x-note-taking-tool https://www.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e8...
- dvt 6y agoHacker News loves their note taking apps. I've seen at least a dozen apps this year that have solved the exact same problem in just about the exact same ways. Am I the only one that still uses pen and paper? To me, there's a certain je ne sais quoi about closing my laptop and putting my phone away, grabbing a pen and my notebook, and brainstorming without technology.
- system2 6y agoI use good old windows notepad and save them on my desktop. I tried almost anything, rocketbook, asana, one note, pen and paper. Simplest one was notepad and always worked for me.
- rdiddly 6y agoYep, visually ̶s̶h̶i̶t̶t̶y undistracting, lightning fast, available everywhere and dead simple. Want hierarchy? Make folders. Want to cut across the hierarchy? Make links. Want to search? Use a search tool. (You can even use grep now in a WSL session.)
- waiseristy 6y agoMy coworker exclusively uses pen and paper, I don't know how she does it. I keep a little throw-away notepad around for brainstorming / diagramming, but nothing beats a keyboard & mouse for text manipulation.
- fn1 6y agoI do that too. And afterwards I scan the page for archival.
- detritus 6y agoI do most note-taking on paper. Problem with paper is that it's not searchable, as I discovered to my cost trying to find some specific reference details for a job I did last year and am repeating today. My problems are probably more due to ad hoc disorganisation - particularly, sometimes going off-piste and making critical notes on random sheets of paper, away from my main notebooks. I'd love some kind of e-paper solution, in a notebook form, but I've no idea how it could gracefully and capably mimic the act of turning pages and having a chrono-spacial awareness of where the content in each of those pages lie. In some far future we'll have paper-thin writeable electronic displays and can literally make a notebook to rule them all, but it'll be a while. And even then, likely very expensive.
- nullandvoid 6y agoThis is really interesting for me. I've just got into roam the last few months after an intertest in trying zettelkasten (and my notion growing rather unwieldly), but the $15/m is grinding at me. The idea I'll be locked in at that price forever more doesn't sit well For me org-roam doesn't scratch the portability itch (easily add notes on my phone etc), but I'm actively looking for alternatives I can make the jump for, and rely on it not disappearing in a few years I really like the idea of this extension, but as mentioned I'm not sure this existing only in VSCode helps me much at this point. Props for releasing though, great to see this revolution in note taking apps, and shifts in thought around the optimal way to take them.
- BiosElement 6y agoYou might want to check out Dynalist. I've used it for project planning and idea dumps for a couple years and it's served perfectly for me. Saved my bacon with school notes as well. As for lock-in, their paid plan includes daily experts so even if the service vanished, all my notes are safe as markdown files.
- briangray 6y agoI went through a similar tool search (i.e. zettelkasten, roam, notable.md, dendron, etc). With the same notions of dendron operating only in VSCode. Long story, it didn't fit well for me. While dendron operated and was structured well, VSCode was just too slow to launch and not widely available enough for my use case. May be important to note though that I don't 'live' in VSCode like many others do. I settled on other applications which allow me to directly interact with the files inside and outside the application.
- artemonster 6y agowhat do you use as a texteditor/IDE?
- briangray 6y agoAre you asking specifically for notes or as the development environment that I _do_ live in? For notes I'm (currently) using Obsidian.md, which has many of the same benefits of the previously mentioned systems. I settled on it because it allowed me to easily import notes from the previous apps and they are stored as simple markdown files. Which means I can access them using vi if I'm on a system that doesn't have Obsidian installed. While I enjoy VSCode, most of my development is done in Visual Studio. And occasionally vi/vim for smaller applications.
- waiseristy 6y agoUnsure about the tool being a vscode plugin. I like my current note taking app (ZimWiki) partly due to it being standalone.
- adkadskhj 6y agoOn an semi-related topic, has anyone seen HTML+CSS (non-JS) versions of node relationship displays? I'm working on a knowledge store and so many of the node/graph navigation tools are heavy JS libraries. I'd like to implement a pure HTML one for ultimate lightweight, but i've never seen one - so i'm struggling on inspiration.
- WClayFerguson 6y agoThe web platform I've created (https://quanta.wiki https://quanta.wiki) has a lot of these same design principles, and I run a local copy of it for my personal note-taking. Some day there should emerge some kind of de-facto winner in this category, because it's so sad that it's 2020 and there's still not a super wide-spread mass-adoption kind of general purpose app for handling hierarchical data and interacting with it. When XML was invented I was sure it would change the world (and arguably, enabling RSS/Atom did), but now in 2020 you don't hear much about XML. All word processors should be hierarchical rather than monolithic (linear), imo, and Quanta endeavors to show one way to do that in a wiki-like app.
- weswpg 6y agoInteresting but your app promotes this list of culture-war entertainers [0] and presents them as the "Intellectual Dark Web", including Ben "just sell your underwater house if the sea levels rise" Shapiro; that's a big red flag [0] https://quanta.wiki/app?id=5ca14747487e8f0001a3bcff#5ca25b1a487e8f00017983ca https://quanta.wiki/app?id=5ca14747487e8f0001a3bcff#5ca25b1a...
- WClayFerguson 6y agoI do plan on moving the IDW Podcast list to under my own personal blog node instead, and not directly on the portal, only because politics should be kept separate from career stuff imo.
- esperent 6y agoWouldn't it be better to just not give these crazies any more publicity?
- WClayFerguson 6y agoThanks for your opinion. Fighting BigTech censorship was one of my reasons for creating Quanta. https://quanta.wiki/u/WClayFerguson/social-media-revolution https://quanta.wiki/u/WClayFerguson/social-media-revolution
- mwnivek 6y agoHere's an interesting alternative for hierarchical notes: https://gingkoapp.com/ https://gingkoapp.com/ https://github.com/gingko/client https://github.com/gingko/client
- SamBam 6y agoI haven't yet really tried to commit to one of these Roam-like tools (is there a word for a note-taking tool where every bullet is a nested note, and they can link to each other?), except for a small demo notebook I made, but I wonder how people feel they mesh with the concept of "evergreen" notes. I've found from using Evernote for a decade that I've really focussed on making evergreen notes -- notes that I continue adding to over time. I worry that the Roam-like notebooks instead lead you to making a "Personal Wikipedia" of your knowledge, where many notes are just the stub of an article, because it's so easy to do. I worry that, if I used this, instead of a 2-3 big pages on Topic X, I'd have 50 little notes on Topic X, which, yes, I can find through backlinks, but I would not have felt like I had synthesized. Thoughts?
- Toenex 6y agoMaybe Dynalist is worth a look? Basically an outliner in the Workflowy style but it has linking and backlinking at the node level.
- athriren 6y agoi am using Obsidian to sort of address this problem by tackling it in reverse. my team has a massive project going live and it has to have a knowledge base. we are creating the master in Obsidian, which is just a wrapper around .md files. the way we are approaching it, which i have adopted for my personal use, is to have a data dictionary file that defines the terms used. that is used as a structural launching point for fleshing out each page precisely once and keeping terminology consistent. then, Obsidian handles the linking between each page when each term appears. this works really well for documents that don’t absolutely have to be read in a very linear order and users can effectively bounce around to whatever they are interested in. for a published manual, like “how to use postgres” or something, this strategy would not work at all.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> I haven't yet really tried to commit to one of these Roam-like tools (is there a word for a note-taking tool where every bullet is a nested note, and they can link to each other?) This is not a "Roam-like tool" by that description. Notes are basically markdown. A bullet might contain a link to a different note, or you could link to several in a bullet or paragraph, or you could link to none, but using bullets doesn't implicitly create nested notes any more than it normally creates separate nested documents in Markdown. The additional logic seems more built around the directory structure than bullets. > I worry that, if I used this, instead of a 2-3 big pages on Topic X, I'd have 50 little notes on Topic X, which, yes, I can find through backlinks, but I would not have felt like I had synthesized. I haven't used Dendron, just barely installed it and poked around, but it seems like the combination of markdown documents and a heirarchical organization alongside a link graph makes it more straightforward to maintain large bodies of maintained/synthesized content rather than small bits of linked content that are easy to navigate but hard to pull together (which tools that focus on linking between small documents as the main structure do seem to encourage.)
- chadlavi 6y agoI still haven't found anything that beats markdown files in a competent text editor like VSCode
- mhh__ 6y agoArgument mapping is a good technique. I was expecting to hate it but it was very helpful when reading the Institute of world politics's summary of the cases for and against Roger Hollis.
- JacksonGariety 6y agoIt only works for VSCode? This is so frustrating because this is exactly the kind of system I've been looking for.
- haswell 6y agoPurely out of curiosity, why is the dependency on VS Code an issue?
- Fnoord 6y agoIt is bloated. High latency, uses unnecessary disk space, high on resources. My default editor is either Sublime or Vim (usually Vim but sometimes I prefer Sublime). VSCode as dependency is a dealbreaker for me. So I was happy to read this on Dendron website (author linked it elsewhere): > That being said, the core dendron engine is not vscode specific and there are folks that are experimenting with porting it over to other editors (eg. sublime, vim). We also have plans for a standalone editor in the future (most likely, this will be a fork of VSCode optimized for note taking)
- kevinslin 6y agoIt's on VSCode because it was the quickest way for me to prove build out. We do have plans for standalone editors in 2021 (https://dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b558.html#why-is-dendron-built-on-top-of-vscode https://dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b55...)
- nahtnam 6y agoCurious if .so is the "new" .io since Notion started that trend
- kevinslin 6y agoThe .com was taken .so I figured this would do
- jeffnappi 6y agoI think Dendron is on to something great here - it's not just about note taking, it's also about highly efficient retrieval of notes. I have poked around it, but I intend to take a deeper dive and think about how I can make it part of my process.
- kevinslin 6y agoOne of my reasons for creating Dendron is that while all note taking apps (try) to make it easy to put notes in, they all make it hard to get them back out, especially as you add more. It didn't make sense to me, especially since like code, I tend to spend more time reading notes than writing it
- stevenwliao 6y agoI met Kevin at the YC hackathon last year and first heard about Kevin's ideas around note-taking there. I'm really enjoying Dendron so far. The biggest thing for me is the lightweight structure- I would have never created a hierarchical structure if I had to create multiple nested folders every time I wanted a new category. Hoping for some mobile support in the future.
- kevinslin 6y agoHey Steven! We should catch up sometime, it's been too long :D It's not the same as mobile support but currently any markdown enabled mobile app can support writing to Dendron. Here are a few apps that my other users have suggested: https://dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def4b4865.html#mobile-support https://dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def4b486...
- piazz 6y agoThis looks extremely impressive and polished, especially for a single dev. Looking forward to trying. Congrats
- kevinslin 6y agoThanks! If you have any questions or run into anything, you can reach out to me at kevin@dendron.so We also have an active discord channel with lots of good people: https://discord.gg/AE3NRw9 https://discord.gg/AE3NRw9
- xaedes 6y agoHaving a graph-based interface for the relationships is nice. But i think this works best with big monitor (think 43'') and when the graph is the main interface, not just a small window somewhere. I.e. display the content of nodes directly in an infinite-pan&zoom graph view. Code reading could be nice this way. I suppose mentally one builds up a similar graph everytime reading through code. And eventually get lost. One can hold only so many things in flesh(sic) memory...
- unphased 6y agoI'm planning to create a (probably written in Vulkan, so it will be ambitious...) project where I want to leverage modern 3D graphics for displaying potentially very large graphs in an intuitive & interactive way. I'm trying to target use cases such as note taking and mind-mapping as well as code browsing and git repo browsing as I see many potential ways to create visualization capability (via unification) across the multiple abstraction layers (many of which involve graph structures). E.g., git tree is a DAG, and the nodes on there are source file trees themselves. We could view a list of GitHub PRs on a repo as a list of nodes which point into locations within the repo's git tree. It's turtles all the way down, since source files can themselves be decomposed into ASTs, and those yet further into syntactical trees. I imagine that with common workflows (one of which I just proposed) without the barrier of context switching could be a big win. At a certain zoom level I'm envisioning being able to directly see which portions of source are touched by the different PRs for example. Another example of this is in applying this toward file browsing and the management of backups (i'll want to sprinkle tree differencing visualization in there).
- xaedes 6y agoThis also spooks through my mind. Some thoughts: Source code should be able to fall back to editable text when necessary. Multiple Projections to view/interface the same data with different views must be possible. Optimal would be that it integrates any editor I'd like (I want sublime, others not so much). Ideally other file formats like word documents, latex documents etc. should also be supported. But that sounds very hard, basically makes the whole thing an infinte pan zoom graph based window manager (with all the other graph related features). Hm.. Maybe this all really is on the operating system level. I favor html as base technology for the reason of easily including different "apps", like code editors, pdf viewers, webgl content, etc. But thats just because I don't really want to develop this at the window manager/operating system level... Honestly I feel html is too slow for what I really want. There is a reason I use sublime and not VSCode, even it is just a millisecond or so. I hope more people think in similar directions with the graph based interface. May one day some hero actually succeed with what we envision. I encourage you to be that one!
- desireco42 6y agoI tried Dendron in the past, solid tool. I personally use Obsidian and would recommend it over others like Roam. It is super fast and super responsive. Advantage that Dendron has is that it is based on VSCode which is fantastic foundation. Pretty much why I love Obsidian, you type fast and can work on ideas quickly. I personally couldn't care less about graph, it looks pretty but to me not useful at all. Good thing about tools like this is that you can sync and backup text files. Bad thing is that having mobile app would be difficult. However, I use IAWriter to write into type of Inbox on my phone and this file is in Obsidian (again same workflow like Dendron) To me personally, Dendron is too similar to existing one I am using, otherwise solid tool and would recommend to people.
- agambrahma 6y agoEnjoying Obsidian at the moment, will keep an eye on this one too, but honestly can't justify the switch away (note-taking is such a habit-based, "flow" tool) unless there's a _significant_ advantage to Dendron. I guess everyone values something different. I am happy to pay for these tools, and even have them closed-source, as long as (1) it can run locally, "offline", and (2) the format is open (index-able text, whether one file or many)
- kevinslin 6y agoat the end of the day, if you have a note taking tool that you like and are using, then my advice is to stick with it. that being said, we'll be launching an obsidian importer next week to make it easy for folks to experiment with dendron if the temptation strikes :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- berkayozturk 6y agoI wish Obsidian supported mobile devices, Github based versioning and cross-device synchronization.That would be the perfect note taking app for me. Is there such alternative? I want the graph view too.
- Ninjinka 6y agoI use GitHub with my Obsidian vault for versioning and cross-device synchronization. I wish there was a mobile app as well, but GitJournal has been sufficient so far.
- etherio 6y agoWow! Another knowledge base tool :). I'm working on https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy and am especially excited about the new plugin system [0] that'll be ready soon. [0]: https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy/issues/86 https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy/issues/86
- evo_9 6y agoI have tried a number of note taking apps including Bear and Notable; I recently switched to MS OneNote because it's cross-platform from OSX to PC, making it easier for me to consolidate all my notes in once desktop app. It's likely an unpopular choice given it's from 'Big-Co, Inc', etc, but it's hard to beat. My favorite feature that sold me is the ability to tab and instantly create an inline table (with each subsequent tab pressing creating additional columns). It's quite powerful and flexible. You can also add multiple text blocks to a note page allow for extra context to be placed anywhere. This isn't limited to just text, but adding a graphic to an existing text block, again anywhere on the note 'space' Honestly, it's really quite an impressive note app and I've moved completely off of Bear in favor of it. The syncing is also free, which was something I was paying a yearly sub to Bear for. The cherry on-top is the also free iOS app which works really well too. That said, I do think there is room for something like Dendron, which is pretty slick and I quite like that it's a VS-Code add-on. I'll def give it a serious look, nice job!
- lazyasciiart 6y agoI've used OneNote religiously for a dozen years as a daily notes app, but the Mac and Web experiences are terrible and I'm just sick of it not syncing tags across my machines. And now I have a new laptop and as far as I can tell the ability to add tags to shortcut keys is just gone. Why???
- unishark 6y agoI've used oneNote a long time, but I certainly click threads like these hoping for something better. I agree the web version sucks and is very buggy. Also it took a big step backwards when they discontinued the office version and forced everyone to use the app version which has a lot less options. Perhaps that's your problem.
- iterating 6y agoWhen it comes to ease in creating notes, image support, and pen support, Onenote is king. What Onenote falls short on is ease in retrieving notes. It lacks previews, thumbnails, indexes, table of contents, nested tags, or customizable sidepanels. You cant "flip" though your existing notes while keeping the current note or side panel in view. This is where Dendron shines. Dendron's navigator side panel is clean of clutter and easy to navigate, even when you have hundreds of notes. You can also navigate your notebook by open TODOs, nested tags, saved (regex or non rgex) search filters, or by graph view.
- ibn_khaldun 6y agoIf anyone can help. I am looking for note taking application that can fulfill the following requirements: - Plain-as-in-Plain Text - meaning I don't have to export my notes as JSON or XML or something else. Each note is a single .md or .txt file. - Full-text search - No Markup Lock-in - Meaning, for example, that I can use any flavor of Markdown (in my case MultiMarkdown) that I'd like and export/preview/build the file elsewhere. - Preferably Mac native...or anything not Electron if necessary - Wikilinks, please The Archive fills these needs but after looking at their Roadmap, I've realized that I have no intentions of paying for an upgrade when V2 is released and I do not want to risk V1 slowly becoming a mess to operate somewhere down the line if I can find an alternative. The Archive is great because it's simple and it's core but can be extendable if necessary. Obsidian is nice...but has too much going on for my liking. Same with Org-Roam. I'm really considering Emacs w/ Zetteldeft.
- awake 6y agoI feel like this is widely desired and could be implemented as a language server and then used in the text editor of your choice.
- ibn_khaldun 6y agoIf you may, please explain to me what a language server is and how to implement one.
- totolouis 6y agoWhat do you think about Zettlr? But I think it is an electron app...
- ibn_khaldun 6y agoYes, Zettlr is an Electron application. There's room for compromise (as you see, I've tried Obsidian). Thank you for the suggestion.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoThe joplin API works pretty well from my experience, although the note to note linkage is not great. The export of notes dumps as guid.md file name. I personally like it because it has the features I want, works well on mobile, local first backed up by sync (you provide the target) and the API isn't hard to use.
- obiefernandez 6y agoIsn't this Roam except free?
- _huayra_ 6y agoIt's frustrating but completely understandable that the author chose to do this in VScode. The value of having a highly-customizable editor that is extensible in a well-known language is great. I really hope a true VSCode competitor will emerge in the future that is truly open source and not controlled by a company that does not have its users best interests in mind; all this Linux-friendly stuff Microsoft is doing lately is to basically get people into their ecosystem and then slowly push out Linux and other alternatives (e.g. who's using sublime / atom anymore?). There is some pithy name for this strategy that escapes me, but effectively it is the equivalent of dumping in commerce: use one's cash reserves to sell a product at a loss in order to squeeze out competitors, then capitalize on the cornered market (i.e. "All Hail Microsoft!" after trying to squeeze out others). I really wish the Xi [0] editor gained more traction, though as an Emacs user I'm hoping the speedup with v28 and the GccEmacs [1] go a long way there. I would certainly like more parallelism though, e.g. `dired` mode not pausing the entire editor when moving a large file, and I've never really become fluent in elisp. [0] https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs
- joubert 6y ago“Embrace, extend, and extinguish”
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoHe was being sarcastic.
- TomasEkeli 6y agosarcasm works so well in written communication, particularly online with strangers
- PeterStuer 6y agoWould the MIT license on vscode not protect you from the scenario you entertain? Don't get me wrong. VS Code is most certainly a loss leader for the Microsoft ecosystem. This businessmodel for gaining developer mindshare is not new. It was pioneered by the free software ecosystem, but has been the defacto standard for some time now.
- iterating 6y agoHey all, I've methodically used many of the available notetaking apps in the past year- Dynalist, Roam, Remnote, Obsidian, and Siyuan, on top of several years of using Onenote, Evernote, Trilium, and Joplin. The three criteria that I've found to best sum up the notetaking experience are 1) Friction in capturing a new thought 2) Friction in finding a previous thought and 3) How memorable the note structure is. I've found Dendron to have subtle but well throught-out features that gives it a strong balance in these uses, standing out from the rest. Dendron solves the problem of visually organizing notes Ive always had an issue with too many notes with all different titles, creating giant dropdown menus in the sidebars of note apps. My Google Docs documents list needs its own table of contents. It's not an issue anymore because Dendron's organization brings in an X-axis to the formerly single direction binary tree organization, and I've been using that to keep my nav sidebar clean. Dendron's "schema" syntax looks just like the .JSON or .OPML outputted by a mind mapping app. Dendron creates a graph/mindmap not of the individual notes, but of the organization of the notes. So it represents the ontologies and "phylogenies" of knowledge as a map, just like how my mind does. There's something more memorable about navigating to your notes from a map, than from a table of contents or by ctrl-F. Dendron allows you to create new notes that "branches" off the namespace of an existing note. I use this to seperate source material and my own annotations on subjects. It supports my dream of having my own frictionless intranet to take notes on. I use the Markdown Clipper browser extension copy entire webpages into Dendron. When I look up something up on UptoDate.com, a pretty dense medical database, I just copy the whole article into Dendron. Next time I look up the same topic, I head for my Dendron note, and use link to make my own mental wikipedia out of what I understood out of the information. Then when I want to review a topic, give a presentation, or make a review outline, can reference in my own notes plus the original context where I read the information in the first place. Also, Dendron integrates well with the VSCode to Anki extension.
- zby 6y agoI used to have a PersonalWiki (https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://zby.aster.net.pl/kwiki/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://zby.aster.net.pl/kwiki/*) running off my desktop in my living room, but it was too cumbersome to keep my own server especially when I was working abroad. I switched it off, and then my backup drive failed - I have only what was saved in the Archive. Then I had a blog on Blogspot - but Google neglected it and I started to have problems with logging into the blog editor (even though I used gmail constantly) - it still is there: http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/ http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/ but I probably cannot access the editor. Then I started a blog at Medium: https://medium.com/@zby https://medium.com/@zby It kind of works - but I hate the fact that to be a fully supported author I have to put my blog behind their paywall. I understand the need for a business model - but this one does not work for people like me, who write because they have something to say and not because they try to make money directly from their writing. And I am afraid it is those amateurs who write the best blogs - now the core of Medium writers seem to be some aspiring professional writers who just compile "10 things that ..." or try to build a "story" out of any mediocre thought. I also started a paper notepad with Zettelkasten method - I have some notes there, but I haven't established an effective habit for it. I'll see how that develops - but I still want to publish my thoughts. I wish I stayed with my PersonalWiki - I feel a need to constantly add and modify the articles even after publishing them. But the ideal would be something that works like: https://www.gwern.net/About https://www.gwern.net/About - now I understand the need for a LongSite (https://www.gwern.net/About#long-site https://www.gwern.net/About#long-site). There are many contenders presented in this discussion here, with lists of features, what is lacking from these analyses is the business models that would give me a feeling of security for my potential LongSite.
- slightwinder 6y agoI remember I tried this one some months ago and was driven of by the obscure and pointless design for their note-managment. But otherwise it seemed like a very active and dedicated projects. And their Server Migration-plan is a promising future. So let's see how it will unfold next years...
- brainburp 6y agoInteresting. But, I'm surprised no one mentions the 'originator' of this type of application: TheBrain from TheBrain Technologies LP. Perhaps because this is closed source commercial product? This product and approach was invented over 20 years ago and has all the features mentioned. One use case, Jerry's brain, has over 500K nodes and is still useful graphically. Two problems with these types of things is 1. the graph is most useful on large displays. I have not tried the mobile apps. On a large data set I would imagine scrolling and zooming would be needed. 2. Search is still a key feature. Even with fully linked graph structure, finding something would take too long, 'tip of the tongue' recall problem.
- kqr2 6y agoAlso recommend http://strlen.com/treesheets/ http://strlen.com/treesheets/