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I remember setting out to write a Workflowy/Roam style outline viewed editor using prosemirror and it wasn’t as easy. Kudos to the author for building one. Als

I remember setting out to write a Workflowy/Roam style outline viewed editor using prosemirror and it wasn’t as easy. Kudos to the author for building one. Also, why is that all these note-taking apps see everything as a list item? As for me, most of my writings are loosely structured scattered across paragraphs, quotes and codeblocks. Why isn’t this mainstream? Why is “Everything is a list item” winning?

xixixao 6y ago
It’s appealing to impose some structure. You can still write paragraphs, one for each list item. I like to write related paragraphs as a nested bullet item. It helps scanning the content later.
chrisweekly 6y ago
It takes some getting used to, but it does make a certain amount of sense, in allowing for very easy refactoring / restructuring, and fine-grained control over the shape of the graph.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
renke1 6y ago
I am writing my own kind of Roam-style editor which is more free-form. From my experience, it's way easier – from a technical perspective – to think in terms of list items (or "blocks" in general) where each one is some kind of mini-editor. It's much easier to link to a block instead of an arbitrary section of your document. Also, it's much easier to render a document consisting of blocks without thinking too much about performance.
input_sh 6y ago
Look up Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/). Built by the team that built Dynalist. It's basically Markdown + wikilinks ([[like this]]), allowing you paragraphs, quotes, and codeblocks. I found out that I end up using lists more often than not, but I like the flexibility it offers.
- smarx007 6y ago
  Been a paying user of Dynalist but instead of moving to Obsidian decided to give https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/ a try and I love it so far! Everything is pushed to my private Git repo.
  - kanjus 6y ago
    I‘d recommend Zettlr instead: open source, free, local (so you own your data), great active community. Obsidian is closed source, and I’d say its features do not justify choosing that over Zettlr (unlike something like Notion.so) https://www.zettlr.com/ https://www.zettlr.com/
    - anoffvu 6y ago
      We’re actually building the desktop app and local storage is almost done for the web app over at https://logseq.com https://logseq.com ! We’re using the new Filesystem API so look forward to many of these tools supporting local storage in the future!
      - kanjus 6y ago
        Thanks for the heads up, I’ll be sure to check your app out! Your approach is also kind of similar to Joplin (joplinapp.org), another open source, privacy-focused, and cross-device app, but you have more features.
    - slightwinder 6y ago
      > Obsidian is closed source Should be noted that the Core-Application is closed Source. The plugins are at the moment open source, or at least source available. I think the long term goal is to build on a rich plugin-ecosystem with a sleak core. Also closed source doesn't really matter in this case, because it's build on open data-formats and running local. There is no vendor lockin. If the app disappears some day, you can still continue to use it or use a different markdown-editor (which are already existing today).
yardshop 6y ago
I wish more of these systems allowed arbitrary indentation as a feature instead of just providing list items. I've gotten used to this in OneNote, and of course in plain text and Python. I don't want an outliner necessarily, but want to be able to indent a group of paragraphs and images with further indented sub-points, then outdent to move on to the next point. Of course a lot of these systems don't support it because MarkDown doesn't support it. An indented block is a code block and that's it. I started putting together a Tiptap editor project, which itself is based on ProseMirror, but got overloaded. I also tried building something with CKEditor but also ran into too much personal friction trying to get a simple project working. I have to learn Node and JS at the same time and it's a lot.
- anoffvu 6y ago
  Right! On one hand going deeper and back out of a though feels so much more natural, just like our brain branches off and returns back. But we are so used to paragraph based text due to its history and it feels more familiar. I like how in Notion you can indent and deindent normal paragraphs but that still doesn’t feel totally fluid, I’m not sure what it is. Maybe different modes or views for each is closer to the ideal?
amardeep 6y ago
You might like https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/. It works with either markdown or emacs org-mode syntax. It also syncs with github, so you could do local editing too.
- zikzak 6y ago
  I have gone completely over to this from emacs recently. I can fully commit knowing if things don't go well it's back to emacs with no issues.
johnknowles 6y ago
I've thought about this for awhile, and I can only come up with two ideas: a) laziness or b) lack of imagination. It's a bit of a harsh criticism, but we are spatial creatures who live in a world full of objects that are organized into different forms. The "list" is a very valuable organizational structure and convenient to implement digitally, but it is a rather simple structure, being a 1D-structure. We use "lists" (in the form of shelves and stacks) to store objects and give the collection order, but in order to interact with objects, we remove them from their list and interact with them in higher dimensions (spreading out on a desk, pinning to a wall, arranging in space, etc). The fact that we only have 1D structures in most software UIs may well be that higher-order structures are too complex to practically implement or are not viewed as necessary, but again, this is an argument out of "laziness", convenience to the developer who is implementing the UI. Or, designers and developers genuinely believe that we are most-suited to composing with 1D structures (eye-roll).
- anoffvu 6y ago
  Interesting point, I do really enjoy the spatial aspect of graphs being incorporated into many knowledge tools now. I guess the valuable insight is that if 1D is bad and unwieldy, what’s a good alternative? Like a bulletin board?

xixixao 6y ago

It’s appealing to impose some structure. You can still write paragraphs, one for each list item. I like to write related paragraphs as a nested bullet item. It helps scanning the content later.

chrisweekly 6y ago

It takes some getting used to, but it does make a certain amount of sense, in allowing for very easy refactoring / restructuring, and fine-grained control over the shape of the graph.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

renke1 6y ago

I am writing my own kind of Roam-style editor which is more free-form. From my experience, it's way easier – from a technical perspective – to think in terms of list items (or "blocks" in general) where each one is some kind of mini-editor. It's much easier to link to a block instead of an arbitrary section of your document. Also, it's much easier to render a document consisting of blocks without thinking too much about performance.

input_sh 6y ago

Look up Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/). Built by the team that built Dynalist. It's basically Markdown + wikilinks ([[like this]]), allowing you paragraphs, quotes, and codeblocks. I found out that I end up using lists more often than not, but I like the flexibility it offers.

smarx007 6y ago
Been a paying user of Dynalist but instead of moving to Obsidian decided to give https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/ a try and I love it so far! Everything is pushed to my private Git repo.
- kanjus 6y ago
  I‘d recommend Zettlr instead: open source, free, local (so you own your data), great active community. Obsidian is closed source, and I’d say its features do not justify choosing that over Zettlr (unlike something like Notion.so) https://www.zettlr.com/ https://www.zettlr.com/
  - anoffvu 6y ago
    We’re actually building the desktop app and local storage is almost done for the web app over at https://logseq.com https://logseq.com ! We’re using the new Filesystem API so look forward to many of these tools supporting local storage in the future!
    - kanjus 6y ago
      Thanks for the heads up, I’ll be sure to check your app out! Your approach is also kind of similar to Joplin (joplinapp.org), another open source, privacy-focused, and cross-device app, but you have more features.
  - slightwinder 6y ago
    > Obsidian is closed source Should be noted that the Core-Application is closed Source. The plugins are at the moment open source, or at least source available. I think the long term goal is to build on a rich plugin-ecosystem with a sleak core. Also closed source doesn't really matter in this case, because it's build on open data-formats and running local. There is no vendor lockin. If the app disappears some day, you can still continue to use it or use a different markdown-editor (which are already existing today).

yardshop 6y ago

I wish more of these systems allowed arbitrary indentation as a feature instead of just providing list items. I've gotten used to this in OneNote, and of course in plain text and Python. I don't want an outliner necessarily, but want to be able to indent a group of paragraphs and images with further indented sub-points, then outdent to move on to the next point. Of course a lot of these systems don't support it because MarkDown doesn't support it. An indented block is a code block and that's it. I started putting together a Tiptap editor project, which itself is based on ProseMirror, but got overloaded. I also tried building something with CKEditor but also ran into too much personal friction trying to get a simple project working. I have to learn Node and JS at the same time and it's a lot.

anoffvu 6y ago
Right! On one hand going deeper and back out of a though feels so much more natural, just like our brain branches off and returns back. But we are so used to paragraph based text due to its history and it feels more familiar. I like how in Notion you can indent and deindent normal paragraphs but that still doesn’t feel totally fluid, I’m not sure what it is. Maybe different modes or views for each is closer to the ideal?

amardeep 6y ago

You might like https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/. It works with either markdown or emacs org-mode syntax. It also syncs with github, so you could do local editing too.

zikzak 6y ago
I have gone completely over to this from emacs recently. I can fully commit knowing if things don't go well it's back to emacs with no issues.

johnknowles 6y ago

I've thought about this for awhile, and I can only come up with two ideas: a) laziness or b) lack of imagination. It's a bit of a harsh criticism, but we are spatial creatures who live in a world full of objects that are organized into different forms. The "list" is a very valuable organizational structure and convenient to implement digitally, but it is a rather simple structure, being a 1D-structure. We use "lists" (in the form of shelves and stacks) to store objects and give the collection order, but in order to interact with objects, we remove them from their list and interact with them in higher dimensions (spreading out on a desk, pinning to a wall, arranging in space, etc). The fact that we only have 1D structures in most software UIs may well be that higher-order structures are too complex to practically implement or are not viewed as necessary, but again, this is an argument out of "laziness", convenience to the developer who is implementing the UI. Or, designers and developers genuinely believe that we are most-suited to composing with 1D structures (eye-roll).

anoffvu 6y ago
Interesting point, I do really enjoy the spatial aspect of graphs being incorporated into many knowledge tools now. I guess the valuable insight is that if 1D is bad and unwieldy, what’s a good alternative? Like a bulletin board?