8 ms·

Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

237 points by kpats 6y ago

kevinslin 6y ago
Founder here. I started Dendron because I was frustrated with the lack of good note taking tools while working as a developer at AWS. I wanted something with the ease of notepad, the structure of evernote, and the speed of redis. Iterating over these features led me to Dendron and its been battle tested with my own collection of 30K+ notes
- LeSaucy 6y ago
  Did you find any features in particular lacking in Obsidian?
  - kevinslin 6y ago
    Dendron's main difference from obsidian is that we put the emphasis on structuring and organizing your notes. Obsidian (and other tools like it) focus on backlinks and using a graph to connect your ideas. This is valuable for connecting disparate ideas but its still hard to find any individual note once you have a lot of them. Dendron helps you organize your notes into hierarchies that you can enforce using schemas (think type system but for your hierarchies) The problem we're solving: once you have hundreds or thousands of notes, how do you find a specific one? More on this here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b558.html#how-is-dendron-different-from-roam https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
smilekzs 6y ago
Thank you. I tried hopping onto the Zettelkasten/self-markdown-wiki bandwagon with Obsidian but its non-commercial clause was really discouraging... so I said "F it" and returned to OneNote (which BTW does have pretty permissive links!).
- kevinslin 6y ago
  I was a long one note user. I think they have great UX. I found it difficult to export from one note or drill down to something specific quickly. If it helps, we do have a bunch of former one note users as well as scripts to convert from one note to markdown
gervwyk 6y ago
This looks really cool! I'm going to give it a try. I always lose my notes. My workaround is a personal Discord server, to post notes to myself, which is nice to have a mobile app where I can share links to on mobile I want to save for later, but the different channels doesn't really provide enough structure to the notes, plus searching is not great in discord. Do you have like a hack to post notes to and from mobile?
- kevinslin 6y ago
  For mobile, a lot of our users use gitjournal or an equivalent app. Since your notes are backed by git, anything that supports git will work. Also looking into building a draft like mobile app later this year to support your use case of quickly adding to existing nots. See mobile use cases here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def4b4865.html#mobile-support https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def...
inakarmacoma 6y ago
Would love to see a feature comparison between Dendron and Obsidian.md if anyone has experience with both.
- kpats 6y ago
  I actually started with Obsidian. It's a beautiful editor and was pretty easy to pick up. I must've built my first batch of notes in Obsidian. I picked up Dendron due to 2 things: 1. Hierarchies leading to better note structure - I can have my notes be folders (kind of like notion) 2. VSCode - working with something extensible and familiar to me. Here's more from the wiki: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b558.html#how-is-dendron-different-from-x-note-taking-tool https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...
allenleein 6y ago
Thanks for sharing it. Here is another similar product: A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode https://github.com/foambubble/foam https://github.com/foambubble/foam
- rektide 6y ago
  I'm very interested in a compare between the two!! I'd known of Foam & was planning to at around with it's forming new extension api[1]. I like that foam stores history in git, & can write static html output, which the project uses to self-document. It'd be sweet to hear from folks who've tried both how they found the experience. I'll try to become one of those folks myself, at some point. [1] https://jevakallio.github.io/notes/foam-six-months-later https://jevakallio.github.io/notes/foam-six-months-later
  - kevinslin 6y ago
    Dendron is similar to foam. We support all the features of foam but put the emphasis on structuring and organizing your notes. Dendron helps you organize your notes into hierarchies that you can enforce using schemas (think type system but for your hierarchies) The problem we're solving: once you have hundreds or thousands of notes, how do you find a specific one? More on this here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b558.html#how-is-dendron-different-from-roam https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...
    - gegtik 6y ago
      FYI, following that link brings us to a link about hierarchies https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f3a41725-c5e5-4851-a6ed-5f541054d409.html https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f3a41725-c5e5-4851-a6ed-5f5410... which then attempts to link to an 'axiom' which is 404: https://www.kevinslin.com/organizing/its_not_you_its_your_knowledge_base/ https://www.kevinslin.com/organizing/its_not_you_its_your_kn...
    - gegtik 6y ago
      one note on Foam vs. Dendron .. reminds me of vim vs emacs. One of them is simple and just gets out of your way, the other is more powerful and complex and requires more investment to set up correctly to your use case. Probably different strokes for different folks here.
endisneigh 6y ago
How are people using tools like this and Roam, Obesdian, etc. etc. etc? Personally I could see the use if you were writing a book or something, but I feel like in practice for normal notes I would just have all of these notes that I'd never look at again or spend so much time traversing my notes and not getting things done. As someone with distractive tendencies I'd love to hear the situations where this is useful so I stay on track. I hear the term "second brain" used a lot. The thing is with your brain, you don't actively spend time searching and traversing your "notes" consciously. Generally your mind brings things to be recalled just as you need it. Is there something like that?
- thomascgalvin 6y ago
  A big part of my note-taking is just to get stuff out of my brain. I might never revisit any of it, and that's fine. If I write it down I know I can always go back when I need to, but if I don't, it's going to be an annoying distraction in my subconscious. A lot of my note-taking therefore becomes an excuse to successfully ignore the things I know I don't need to pay attention to. I do have a bunch of notes that I use for everyday stuff, however. My engineering journal is a hierarchical notebook, allowing me to go back and see all of the contributions I've made to $PROJECT, which is great come review time. I also have a tech notes section for problems that I seem to have to solve over and over again. For example, every time we have a power outage, my Mac Mini gets stuck in a reset password screen, and I need to reset the NVRAM to fix it. I don't remember the keycode to do that, so I have a note called "Fix mac mini password reset" that tells me that it's `Cmd-option-p-r`. Lastly, anything that might be good in a self-hosted wiki goes in my notebook; basically, my own little set of `README.md`s.
  - kstrauser 6y ago
    That first paragraph is exactly my experience, too. When I read "Getting Things Done", the lightning bolt that struck me was learning that simply getting stuff out of my head and into a trusted system is enough to let me stop obsessing about it and concentrate on other things. Last week I had one of those dreaming-about-writing-code sort of nights, where I half woke up and was thinking about the stuff I'd been dreaming about and couldn't go back to sleep. I tossed and turned until I grabbed my phone, opened my notes app, jotted down some of the idea, then closed it. That alone let my mind say "ok, now I won't forget it" and I was finally able to go back to sleep. Some people go full-on Zettelkasten, which is awesome and I'm happy for them. Turns out I really don't need all the organization. I just need somewhere to offload my thoughts where I know I can find them later, and just the process of writing them down usually gets me 99% of the benefit of having such a system.
emptysongglass 6y ago
We have so many roam-alikes but so very few with web publishing as a first-class citizen and the ones that do have it paywalled (Roam, Obsidian) or don't support org-mode (Neuron v2 though there's plans to reintroduce), which just blows Markdown out of the water.
- hpfr 6y ago
  https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/publishing-org-roam-via-gitlab-ci https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/publishing-org-roam-via-g... To be honest, I don’t see much appeal in publishing your entire unfiltered notes to the web. Synthesize interesting portions of them occasionally into coherent blog posts that other people can consume without digging through a forest of links, backlinks, and footnotes.
- Off 6y ago
  You should try logseq[1], been using it for quite some time now and it's coming really well. It is an Open source local-first roam alternative, it supports both markdown and org syntax and it has a lot of features like publishing, encryption, time tracking etc. [1] https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/
qwerty456127 6y ago
Why? Isn't Obsidian better?
- kevinslin 6y ago
  See here on the differences between Dendron and Obsidian https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b558.html#how-is-dendron-different-from-roam https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e... tldr: obsidian is easier to get started with and is good for free association of notes. dendron is better integrated into the development workflow and is amazing at helping you organize your notes into well defined hierarchies
georgyo 6y ago
This get's posted to HN fairly frequently, always as a new Show HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dendron.so https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dendron.so Each time, it catches my interest, I try it out, and I cannot make it work for me. It looks really fantastic with a lot of documentation, but learning curve, preview, conflicting with existing vscode plugins, etc; I'll likely continue to try it out, because the marketing and documentation looks so good. Having spent a fair bit of time on this now, I don't think it's really possible to have a good experience with VSCode as the input.
- kevinslin 6y ago
  We've been doing weekly iterations so there's been a bunch of changes between posts. As for the learning curve, yes, you're right and we're working on it. We just launched a new tutorial: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/678c77d9-ef2c-4537-97b5-64556d6337f1.html https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/678c77d9-ef2c-4537-97b5-64556d... One of our users also made a great video series about Dendron on egghead: https://t.co/qIRvQqtttZ https://t.co/qIRvQqtttZ
  - weaksauce 6y ago
    compared to something like org-mode how complex is the learning curve here? with org you can be up and running with the basics of the notes in a few min.
- prepend 6y ago
  Until then, I’ll just keep having 50 draft documents open in BBEdit, occasionally saving them off somewhere permanent.
gaucheph 6y ago
There's a weird recursive bug I found on dendron.so where if I click the "Blog" heading, go to "Film" on the left, choose "Agents of Shield", click one of the notes to get a tooltip saying "This page has not sprouted yet", and then click the "Dendron" link in that tooltip. What I'm seeing is dendron.so within dendron.so. This process can be repeated using the inner frame.
- kevinslin 6y ago
  nice find! just fixed
edoceo 6y ago
I built a similar tool but as a new-tab extension, basically dumps all my notes into Sqlite, simple PHP script for "sync". Just recently got the web-share-targrt on Android working so I can drop Trello. And I built the silly "discovery" feature where it randomly pushes an old one to the top to help keep it clean. Also, Sqlite text search FTS5 is rad
atleta 6y ago
My biggest gripe with note taking apps is that basically all of the ones I've seen take the IDE approach. They are not as much note taking apps as specialized document editors. Because of this I'm still stuck with Tomboy which is very far from ideal but at least it's quick and easy to start typing a new note . (Unfortunately it doesn't support markdown, only starting bullet points with typing a *, it does support wiki links, which I don't use much but it uses some xml format.) Most notes, at least the way I work, start as just that: notes. Then some of them grow more complex and evolve into a larger document (or ideally, could evolve into multiple linked ones), but Tomboy doesn't really support it (at least if it had support for copy-ing away text as markdown...) and I really don't feel like having yet another IDE like app taking up the whole screen for every small note.
- slightwinder 6y ago
  Collecting, writing and managing notes are each different steps, demanding different UI&features. But writing is the step taking most time. So naturally the focus is there. And collecting is more a matter of your setup. It's unhealthy easy to collect stuff with any mature noteapp this days.
- kpats 6y ago
  I like this way of thinking about notes - trying to move them up a ladder of utility (from short -> long term): https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z6f6xgGG4NKjkA5NA1kDd46whJh2Gt5rAmfX https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z6f6xgGG4NKjkA5NA1kDd46whJh2... It's ideal to have a tool that is extensible enough to handle scratch notes all the way to densely linked evergreen notes.
- adamhp 6y ago
  If you're on the Apple ecosystem, Bear is quite nice. It's basic markdown and the only hierarchical structure is parsed from "tags" which are created by typing #tag in the document. There is some nesting too, so you can do #work/project or #personal/ideas. I've found it really intuitive and the UI/UX is clean.
- yaml-ops-guy 6y ago
  Have you ever looked at jrnl? iirc it was debuted here on HN https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/ https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/ I use it and like the way it's implemented md and other format support in that you can either create a new note formatted as markdown, or update existing and previously created journals and the tool will re-render them to md: https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/formats/#markdown https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/formats/#markdown
smaudet 6y ago
Nah, sounds too complex, plus its in VS Code (blegh), so not gonna even consider it. I would suggest if you are serious about it being a serious note app, jettison the vscode dep.
drcursor 6y ago
Zettlr [1] with some custom CSS changes [2] has been working wonders for me. 1 - https://www.zettlr.com/ https://www.zettlr.com/ 2 - https://gist.github.com/drcursor/8dd91f28bf5a58dd5f23f828d48ae2d7 https://gist.github.com/drcursor/8dd91f28bf5a58dd5f23f828d48...
- prepend 6y ago
  This looks like a great tool, thanks for linking it here.
- bachmeier 6y ago
  Zettlr is great for some things. It has a couple downsides relative to something like org-mode: It doesn't have any real outliner capabilities. Not that everyone wants an outliner, but you get it with org-mode. It doesn't work like a wiki. In other words, if you link to a file that doesn't exist, it just says the file doesn't exist. It's kind of annoying to have to create those files manually and then reopen the document so you can add a link, even worse if you've linked to several notes you want to create.
  - e3bc54b2 6y ago
    Agree on automatic creation part. I use org-roam extensively and create many many tiny files. Usually I start writing in daily note and simply link to the file. Then when I have something substantial I move to the linked file (automatically created when linking first time) and write stuff here. I get backlinks simultaneously so it is pretty easy to follow my chain of thoughts.
siproprio 6y ago
Text editor extensions now have founders. Anyways, for these note taking systems, the one thing that I miss is a good quality mobile Android app to go with it. A lot of times I just end sending myself a Telegram message because their app is good and fast.
- kpats 6y ago
  Everything starts somewhere :). Yeah, I get my mobile support through gitjournal (I'm syncing my notes with github). Other Dendron users contributed these other mobile apps that work: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def4b4865.html#mobile-support https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def...
jjice 6y ago
I really like these in depth, detailed note taking strategies/tools, but I've come to just using markdown files with good naming. Even then, I'm getting annoyed with myself splitting up class days into separate files. I think I may even just go back to plain text. I use markdown because it looks great when rendered to HTML, but I've only ever used my rendered notes once in three years. I always just grep them or vim search them instead. Since I'm not getting a benefit from markdown, I'm just going to switch back to text files, using one per class for the rest of the semester and a separate file for misc topics/notes. I think I'm just not the audience for this, but I like the concept of these detailed note systems a lot, I'm just not very often searching my notes again without just using plain old grep.
- kevinslin 6y ago
  At the core, Dendron is a tool to help you manage markdown files with consistent naming structures :) And for the most part, I don't use HTML rendering but Dendron gives you easy ways of creating notes from links, creating relative links to files, and pasting images into your markdown.
rcarmo 6y ago
I tried Dendron once and was put off by the dotted namespacing (foo.bar.note.md). Would be a lot simpler if I could just use folders instead (much less clutter, and I'd be OK with specifying the folder name in links). Not sure if the current version already allows that - but this is a common flaw with most Markdown note-taking software (I have around 8000 posts/notes spanning 16 years of hierarchies, some time-based and some context-based).
- kevinslin 6y ago
  the dotted namespace has been a back and forth in our community. some people love it, some people not so much. we're still using the dotted namespacing but we've also introduced the ability to export your notes to plain markdown (it inlines dendron specific markdown like note references to regular markdown). if you have folder based markdown, you can import them to dendron's format using our markdown importer and then export them to the same format as well (this is coming soon)
  - rcarmo 6y ago
    Well, yes, but I'd rather not import/export anything. Either it can cope with the folder structure I want, or I will just keep using vim and ag.
- slightwinder 6y ago
  Have you tried obsidian? It's directly working on the filesystem, including folders. No vendor lockin.
  - rcarmo 6y ago
    I did, and I sort of like and sort of dislike it because of the way it handles metadata. For me, this kind of note taking app ought to use folder names as topics or categories (dev/rust) and have an index.md (dev/rust/index.md) as an entry point, and some sub-documents/sub-sections in the same folder. Also, many of these tools only go half way: they have folder support but instead of a "bag of posts" you have to put images in a "bag of media" folder, which is even worse sometimes...
dgreensp 6y ago
I tried out Dendron a few months ago for personal note-taking, technical docs, and organizing tasks. I was excited at first, but overall the cons outweighed the pros for me. Pros/exciting things: 1) There's a simplicity in using VS Code for writing notes and docs if (and probably only if) you already spend your day in VS Code, like I do. 2) The Markdown Preview Enhanced VS Code extension (which is a dependency of Dendron) is super cool for having so many "batteries" included. For example, check out all the diagram types it supports: https://shd101wyy.github.io/markdown-preview-enhanced/#/diagrams https://shd101wyy.github.io/markdown-preview-enhanced/#/diag... . I still use it, separately from Dendron. 3) Storing my data as plain text on disk (backed up by GitHub or Dropbox) has nice properties compared to how SaaS apps do it (e.g. if you use Notion, say, your data materializes out of "the cloud" when you launch the app, and otherwise has no tangible existence). When my data is plain text on my local disk, I own it; I know I can export it, I can run whatever editor or program on it; I can access past versions (via git or Dropbox); I don't have to worry about it being corrupted, or accidentally deleting some of it, or not being able to access it because of server issues, or not being able to export it, or being offline, and so on. 4) The Dendron docs ("wiki") site is created using Dendron. It's a cool thought that I could create a nice website of documentation or notes without leaving VS Code. Cons: 1) Can't access my notes from mobile. 2) Major warts in navigating between notes. Each note has a tab for editing it and a tab for viewing/previewing it. Opening a note behaves differently depending on which tab is focused. Clicking links to go from one note to another doesn't work very well. 3) Poor full-text search (just VS Code's code search). 4) You can't specify an order for notes, only unordered hierarchy, and you can't easily view multiple notes at once, which means keeping lots of short notes, or using different notes for different sections of a document, doesn't really work. There's a tension in any note-taking tool between short notes and long notes. Should notes be as short as possible? Or stretch into long documents? The ideal tool IMO would blur the difference between an ordered hierarchy of sections within a document and an ordered hierarchy of notes within some grouping. Dendron makes it seem like it is for keeping thousands of small notes, but the ways in which you can view, organize, and navigate between notes (lack of good "browse," search, links, lists, seeing multiple notes, next/previous note, and so on) are so limited that it makes more sense to write long documents. In which case, all you really need is Markdown Preview Enhanced and the file system.
batmanthehorse 6y ago
I've struggled for so long to find a note-taking app. I basically need something like Atom, VSCode, or Notepad++ (advanced text editing features) and then ability to embed images. Half of my job is taking screenshots and analyzing logs. I use Atom for text right now, and OneNote for images, but it would be ideal to combine them. I've tried a few Atom plugins that say they can do this, but none work (possibly due to API changes over time). Anyone know of a good solution?
- kevinslin 6y ago
  So Dendron does this. We have a shortcut to automatically embed images as well (https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a91fd8da-6895-49fe-8164-a17acd8d9a17.html https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a91fd8da-6895-49fe-8164-a17acd...). I describe Dendron as basically notepad with additional features :)
scudd 6y ago
I think it would be really cool if there was a VS code extension where you could embed dot graphs in your .md file within a triple back tick block. Then when you hit the preview button, it automatically renders it. Something like this: https://markdownmonster.west-wind.com/docs/_5ef0x96or.htm https://markdownmonster.west-wind.com/docs/_5ef0x96or.htm But as a VS Code extension.
- kevinslin 6y ago
  Dendron supports mermaid diagrams: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/eea2b078-1acc-4071-a14e-18299fc28f48.html#mermaid https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/eea2b078-1acc-4071-a14e-18299f...
bachmeier 6y ago
One thing that's kind of important to me is that Dendron does not (as far as I can tell) have much in the way of outliner functionality. Other tools in this space do - for instance, org-mode for Emacs users. That would be a nice addition, given how powerful outlines can be.
- kevinslin 6y ago
  Yeah, we don't do outline in the workflowy sense. we do outlines in the sense that we have shortcuts to create notes from bullets and autolink the new note. not the same but gets close. you can see an example here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/593206ea-5658-4874-bafd-18a138870f91.html#kevins-workflow https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/593206ea-5658-4874-bafd-18a138...
mcbishop 6y ago
I found Dendron via HN a few months ago and absolutely love it. I was hemming and hawing with my Dendron file structure until I found the PARA method (in a Dendron tutorial): https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/ https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/. I love that the dots in Dendron file names (e.g. resource.orgs.pacific-energy-center) lets me avoid the awkwardness of folders while still having hierarchical organization. I move around and make changes fast with Dendron's shortcuts. I'm opting to keep a lot of my lists (e.g. my to-do list) in Excel, and rely on Dendron more for the written-out stuff. I'm grateful for this free open-source awesomeness!
- kevinslin 6y ago
  Thanks for trying us out :) Spreadsheet like support is not something we currently support but we'll have integrations and also native support coming soon!
hobo_mark 6y ago
I have not seen it mentioned here a lot, but Joplin (another open-source, local-first, markdown-based, note-taking tool) also has a vscode extension (to search and edit notes in code), in addition to desktop and mobile apps. Joplin is much simpler however (no linking between notes for example), depending on what you do that may be an advantage.
- sjellis 6y ago
  Joplin is everything that I want in a note-taking app, and I use it constantly. It actually does support linking between notes.
erezsh 6y ago
I notice that your directory structure and markdown formatting are very similar to those that are used by static site generators such as Hugo or Nikola. Do you have, or thought about, integration with one of these? I like the idea of writing my notes in Dendron and being able to automatically publish them (or a subset of them).
varispeed 6y ago
How do you learn how to write notes like this or is it natural? The representation of my notes would be noise, but surprisingly I can find everything I want easily.
majkinetor 6y ago
I just use awesome GistPad [2] vscode extension and add tags to notes (just array of #tag1 #tag2 in description). This is accessible easily via various tools on ad hoc place (mobile, browser or whatever), such as GistList [1], GistPad / vscode has some good filtering features and I can download all gists locally and use any file manager to filter out tags. Its also a collection of mini git repositories with all nice things (revisions, multiple files etc.) and me not having to think about any of that. You can easily go from there to graphs and folders and other advanced stuff (PlantUML et al are all possible via extensions) if you need them, but I have around 200 notes and do not usually need any of that. What I do need is an easy system not depending on any particular technology - all parts of it can be replaced with something else or nothing at all and still be usable with regular OTB OS tools. [1] https://gistlist.ksdev.pl/ https://gistlist.ksdev.pl/ [2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vsls-contrib.gistfs https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vsls-con...
- moondev 6y ago
  This is fantastic, thanks for the recommendation. Great example of lightweight implementation and really supercharges the usefulness of gists.
jeswin 6y ago
Since you're doing a Show HN for a product which has previously had a full discussion [1][2], it'd probably make sense to mention what has changed. According to the guidelines, "New features and upgrades ("Foo 1.3.1 is out") generally aren't substantive enough to be Show HNs. A major overhaul is probably ok." [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24898373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24898373 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23890035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23890035
goody612 6y ago
While Dendron is not my Core Note-Taking app yet (only use it while programming), I do have to say it is super amazing. It is one of the Best Note Taking apps out there. The founder Kevin is a super cool guy too. Recommend trying it out at least.

237 points by kpats 6y ago

Founder here. I started Dendron because I was frustrated with the lack of good note taking tools while working as a developer at AWS. I wanted something with the ease of notepad, the structure of evernote, and the speed of redis. Iterating over these features led me to Dendron and its been battle tested with my own collection of 30K+ notes

LeSaucy 6y ago
Did you find any features in particular lacking in Obsidian?
- kevinslin 6y ago
  Dendron's main difference from obsidian is that we put the emphasis on structuring and organizing your notes. Obsidian (and other tools like it) focus on backlinks and using a graph to connect your ideas. This is valuable for connecting disparate ideas but its still hard to find any individual note once you have a lot of them. Dendron helps you organize your notes into hierarchies that you can enforce using schemas (think type system but for your hierarchies) The problem we're solving: once you have hundreds or thousands of notes, how do you find a specific one? More on this here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b558.html#how-is-dendron-different-from-roam https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...
deleted 6y ago
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smilekzs 6y ago

Thank you. I tried hopping onto the Zettelkasten/self-markdown-wiki bandwagon with Obsidian but its non-commercial clause was really discouraging... so I said "F it" and returned to OneNote (which BTW does have pretty permissive links!).

kevinslin 6y ago
I was a long one note user. I think they have great UX. I found it difficult to export from one note or drill down to something specific quickly. If it helps, we do have a bunch of former one note users as well as scripts to convert from one note to markdown

gervwyk 6y ago

This looks really cool! I'm going to give it a try. I always lose my notes. My workaround is a personal Discord server, to post notes to myself, which is nice to have a mobile app where I can share links to on mobile I want to save for later, but the different channels doesn't really provide enough structure to the notes, plus searching is not great in discord. Do you have like a hack to post notes to and from mobile?

kevinslin 6y ago
For mobile, a lot of our users use gitjournal or an equivalent app. Since your notes are backed by git, anything that supports git will work. Also looking into building a draft like mobile app later this year to support your use case of quickly adding to existing nots. See mobile use cases here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def4b4865.html#mobile-support https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def...

inakarmacoma 6y ago

Would love to see a feature comparison between Dendron and Obsidian.md if anyone has experience with both.

kpats 6y ago
I actually started with Obsidian. It's a beautiful editor and was pretty easy to pick up. I must've built my first batch of notes in Obsidian. I picked up Dendron due to 2 things: 1. Hierarchies leading to better note structure - I can have my notes be folders (kind of like notion) 2. VSCode - working with something extensible and familiar to me. Here's more from the wiki: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b558.html#how-is-dendron-different-from-x-note-taking-tool https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...

allenleein 6y ago

Thanks for sharing it. Here is another similar product: A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode https://github.com/foambubble/foam https://github.com/foambubble/foam

rektide 6y ago
I'm very interested in a compare between the two!! I'd known of Foam & was planning to at around with it's forming new extension api[1]. I like that foam stores history in git, & can write static html output, which the project uses to self-document. It'd be sweet to hear from folks who've tried both how they found the experience. I'll try to become one of those folks myself, at some point. [1] https://jevakallio.github.io/notes/foam-six-months-later https://jevakallio.github.io/notes/foam-six-months-later
- kevinslin 6y ago
  Dendron is similar to foam. We support all the features of foam but put the emphasis on structuring and organizing your notes. Dendron helps you organize your notes into hierarchies that you can enforce using schemas (think type system but for your hierarchies) The problem we're solving: once you have hundreds or thousands of notes, how do you find a specific one? More on this here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b558.html#how-is-dendron-different-from-roam https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...
  - gegtik 6y ago
    FYI, following that link brings us to a link about hierarchies https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f3a41725-c5e5-4851-a6ed-5f541054d409.html https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f3a41725-c5e5-4851-a6ed-5f5410... which then attempts to link to an 'axiom' which is 404: https://www.kevinslin.com/organizing/its_not_you_its_your_knowledge_base/ https://www.kevinslin.com/organizing/its_not_you_its_your_kn...
  - gegtik 6y ago
    one note on Foam vs. Dendron .. reminds me of vim vs emacs. One of them is simple and just gets out of your way, the other is more powerful and complex and requires more investment to set up correctly to your use case. Probably different strokes for different folks here.

endisneigh 6y ago

How are people using tools like this and Roam, Obesdian, etc. etc. etc? Personally I could see the use if you were writing a book or something, but I feel like in practice for normal notes I would just have all of these notes that I'd never look at again or spend so much time traversing my notes and not getting things done. As someone with distractive tendencies I'd love to hear the situations where this is useful so I stay on track. I hear the term "second brain" used a lot. The thing is with your brain, you don't actively spend time searching and traversing your "notes" consciously. Generally your mind brings things to be recalled just as you need it. Is there something like that?

thomascgalvin 6y ago
A big part of my note-taking is just to get stuff out of my brain. I might never revisit any of it, and that's fine. If I write it down I know I can always go back when I need to, but if I don't, it's going to be an annoying distraction in my subconscious. A lot of my note-taking therefore becomes an excuse to successfully ignore the things I know I don't need to pay attention to. I do have a bunch of notes that I use for everyday stuff, however. My engineering journal is a hierarchical notebook, allowing me to go back and see all of the contributions I've made to $PROJECT, which is great come review time. I also have a tech notes section for problems that I seem to have to solve over and over again. For example, every time we have a power outage, my Mac Mini gets stuck in a reset password screen, and I need to reset the NVRAM to fix it. I don't remember the keycode to do that, so I have a note called "Fix mac mini password reset" that tells me that it's `Cmd-option-p-r`. Lastly, anything that might be good in a self-hosted wiki goes in my notebook; basically, my own little set of `README.md`s.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  That first paragraph is exactly my experience, too. When I read "Getting Things Done", the lightning bolt that struck me was learning that simply getting stuff out of my head and into a trusted system is enough to let me stop obsessing about it and concentrate on other things. Last week I had one of those dreaming-about-writing-code sort of nights, where I half woke up and was thinking about the stuff I'd been dreaming about and couldn't go back to sleep. I tossed and turned until I grabbed my phone, opened my notes app, jotted down some of the idea, then closed it. That alone let my mind say "ok, now I won't forget it" and I was finally able to go back to sleep. Some people go full-on Zettelkasten, which is awesome and I'm happy for them. Turns out I really don't need all the organization. I just need somewhere to offload my thoughts where I know I can find them later, and just the process of writing them down usually gets me 99% of the benefit of having such a system.

emptysongglass 6y ago

We have so many roam-alikes but so very few with web publishing as a first-class citizen and the ones that do have it paywalled (Roam, Obsidian) or don't support org-mode (Neuron v2 though there's plans to reintroduce), which just blows Markdown out of the water.

hpfr 6y ago
https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/publishing-org-roam-via-gitlab-ci https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/publishing-org-roam-via-g... To be honest, I don’t see much appeal in publishing your entire unfiltered notes to the web. Synthesize interesting portions of them occasionally into coherent blog posts that other people can consume without digging through a forest of links, backlinks, and footnotes.
Off 6y ago
You should try logseq[1], been using it for quite some time now and it's coming really well. It is an Open source local-first roam alternative, it supports both markdown and org syntax and it has a lot of features like publishing, encryption, time tracking etc. [1] https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/

qwerty456127 6y ago

Why? Isn't Obsidian better?

kevinslin 6y ago
See here on the differences between Dendron and Obsidian https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e80b558.html#how-is-dendron-different-from-roam https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/683740e3-70ce-4a47-a1f4-1f140e... tldr: obsidian is easier to get started with and is good for free association of notes. dendron is better integrated into the development workflow and is amazing at helping you organize your notes into well defined hierarchies

georgyo 6y ago

This get's posted to HN fairly frequently, always as a new Show HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dendron.so https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dendron.so Each time, it catches my interest, I try it out, and I cannot make it work for me. It looks really fantastic with a lot of documentation, but learning curve, preview, conflicting with existing vscode plugins, etc; I'll likely continue to try it out, because the marketing and documentation looks so good. Having spent a fair bit of time on this now, I don't think it's really possible to have a good experience with VSCode as the input.

kevinslin 6y ago
We've been doing weekly iterations so there's been a bunch of changes between posts. As for the learning curve, yes, you're right and we're working on it. We just launched a new tutorial: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/678c77d9-ef2c-4537-97b5-64556d6337f1.html https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/678c77d9-ef2c-4537-97b5-64556d... One of our users also made a great video series about Dendron on egghead: https://t.co/qIRvQqtttZ https://t.co/qIRvQqtttZ
- weaksauce 6y ago
  compared to something like org-mode how complex is the learning curve here? with org you can be up and running with the basics of the notes in a few min.
prepend 6y ago
Until then, I’ll just keep having 50 draft documents open in BBEdit, occasionally saving them off somewhere permanent.

gaucheph 6y ago

There's a weird recursive bug I found on dendron.so where if I click the "Blog" heading, go to "Film" on the left, choose "Agents of Shield", click one of the notes to get a tooltip saying "This page has not sprouted yet", and then click the "Dendron" link in that tooltip. What I'm seeing is dendron.so within dendron.so. This process can be repeated using the inner frame.

kevinslin 6y ago
nice find! just fixed

edoceo 6y ago

I built a similar tool but as a new-tab extension, basically dumps all my notes into Sqlite, simple PHP script for "sync". Just recently got the web-share-targrt on Android working so I can drop Trello. And I built the silly "discovery" feature where it randomly pushes an old one to the top to help keep it clean. Also, Sqlite text search FTS5 is rad

atleta 6y ago

My biggest gripe with note taking apps is that basically all of the ones I've seen take the IDE approach. They are not as much note taking apps as specialized document editors. Because of this I'm still stuck with Tomboy which is very far from ideal but at least it's quick and easy to start typing a new note . (Unfortunately it doesn't support markdown, only starting bullet points with typing a *, it does support wiki links, which I don't use much but it uses some xml format.) Most notes, at least the way I work, start as just that: notes. Then some of them grow more complex and evolve into a larger document (or ideally, could evolve into multiple linked ones), but Tomboy doesn't really support it (at least if it had support for copy-ing away text as markdown...) and I really don't feel like having yet another IDE like app taking up the whole screen for every small note.

slightwinder 6y ago
Collecting, writing and managing notes are each different steps, demanding different UI&features. But writing is the step taking most time. So naturally the focus is there. And collecting is more a matter of your setup. It's unhealthy easy to collect stuff with any mature noteapp this days.
kpats 6y ago
I like this way of thinking about notes - trying to move them up a ladder of utility (from short -> long term): https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z6f6xgGG4NKjkA5NA1kDd46whJh2Gt5rAmfX https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z6f6xgGG4NKjkA5NA1kDd46whJh2... It's ideal to have a tool that is extensible enough to handle scratch notes all the way to densely linked evergreen notes.
adamhp 6y ago
If you're on the Apple ecosystem, Bear is quite nice. It's basic markdown and the only hierarchical structure is parsed from "tags" which are created by typing #tag in the document. There is some nesting too, so you can do #work/project or #personal/ideas. I've found it really intuitive and the UI/UX is clean.
yaml-ops-guy 6y ago
Have you ever looked at jrnl? iirc it was debuted here on HN https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/ https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/ I use it and like the way it's implemented md and other format support in that you can either create a new note formatted as markdown, or update existing and previously created journals and the tool will re-render them to md: https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/formats/#markdown https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/formats/#markdown

smaudet 6y ago

Nah, sounds too complex, plus its in VS Code (blegh), so not gonna even consider it. I would suggest if you are serious about it being a serious note app, jettison the vscode dep.

drcursor 6y ago

Zettlr [1] with some custom CSS changes [2] has been working wonders for me. 1 - https://www.zettlr.com/ https://www.zettlr.com/ 2 - https://gist.github.com/drcursor/8dd91f28bf5a58dd5f23f828d48ae2d7 https://gist.github.com/drcursor/8dd91f28bf5a58dd5f23f828d48...

prepend 6y ago
This looks like a great tool, thanks for linking it here.
bachmeier 6y ago
Zettlr is great for some things. It has a couple downsides relative to something like org-mode: It doesn't have any real outliner capabilities. Not that everyone wants an outliner, but you get it with org-mode. It doesn't work like a wiki. In other words, if you link to a file that doesn't exist, it just says the file doesn't exist. It's kind of annoying to have to create those files manually and then reopen the document so you can add a link, even worse if you've linked to several notes you want to create.
- e3bc54b2 6y ago
  Agree on automatic creation part. I use org-roam extensively and create many many tiny files. Usually I start writing in daily note and simply link to the file. Then when I have something substantial I move to the linked file (automatically created when linking first time) and write stuff here. I get backlinks simultaneously so it is pretty easy to follow my chain of thoughts.

siproprio 6y ago

Text editor extensions now have founders. Anyways, for these note taking systems, the one thing that I miss is a good quality mobile Android app to go with it. A lot of times I just end sending myself a Telegram message because their app is good and fast.

kpats 6y ago
Everything starts somewhere :). Yeah, I get my mobile support through gitjournal (I'm syncing my notes with github). Other Dendron users contributed these other mobile apps that work: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def4b4865.html#mobile-support https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def...

jjice 6y ago

I really like these in depth, detailed note taking strategies/tools, but I've come to just using markdown files with good naming. Even then, I'm getting annoyed with myself splitting up class days into separate files. I think I may even just go back to plain text. I use markdown because it looks great when rendered to HTML, but I've only ever used my rendered notes once in three years. I always just grep them or vim search them instead. Since I'm not getting a benefit from markdown, I'm just going to switch back to text files, using one per class for the rest of the semester and a separate file for misc topics/notes. I think I'm just not the audience for this, but I like the concept of these detailed note systems a lot, I'm just not very often searching my notes again without just using plain old grep.

kevinslin 6y ago
At the core, Dendron is a tool to help you manage markdown files with consistent naming structures :) And for the most part, I don't use HTML rendering but Dendron gives you easy ways of creating notes from links, creating relative links to files, and pasting images into your markdown.

rcarmo 6y ago

I tried Dendron once and was put off by the dotted namespacing (foo.bar.note.md). Would be a lot simpler if I could just use folders instead (much less clutter, and I'd be OK with specifying the folder name in links). Not sure if the current version already allows that - but this is a common flaw with most Markdown note-taking software (I have around 8000 posts/notes spanning 16 years of hierarchies, some time-based and some context-based).

kevinslin 6y ago
the dotted namespace has been a back and forth in our community. some people love it, some people not so much. we're still using the dotted namespacing but we've also introduced the ability to export your notes to plain markdown (it inlines dendron specific markdown like note references to regular markdown). if you have folder based markdown, you can import them to dendron's format using our markdown importer and then export them to the same format as well (this is coming soon)
- rcarmo 6y ago
  Well, yes, but I'd rather not import/export anything. Either it can cope with the folder structure I want, or I will just keep using vim and ag.
slightwinder 6y ago
Have you tried obsidian? It's directly working on the filesystem, including folders. No vendor lockin.
- rcarmo 6y ago
  I did, and I sort of like and sort of dislike it because of the way it handles metadata. For me, this kind of note taking app ought to use folder names as topics or categories (dev/rust) and have an index.md (dev/rust/index.md) as an entry point, and some sub-documents/sub-sections in the same folder. Also, many of these tools only go half way: they have folder support but instead of a "bag of posts" you have to put images in a "bag of media" folder, which is even worse sometimes...

dgreensp 6y ago

I tried out Dendron a few months ago for personal note-taking, technical docs, and organizing tasks. I was excited at first, but overall the cons outweighed the pros for me. Pros/exciting things: 1) There's a simplicity in using VS Code for writing notes and docs if (and probably only if) you already spend your day in VS Code, like I do. 2) The Markdown Preview Enhanced VS Code extension (which is a dependency of Dendron) is super cool for having so many "batteries" included. For example, check out all the diagram types it supports: https://shd101wyy.github.io/markdown-preview-enhanced/#/diagrams https://shd101wyy.github.io/markdown-preview-enhanced/#/diag... . I still use it, separately from Dendron. 3) Storing my data as plain text on disk (backed up by GitHub or Dropbox) has nice properties compared to how SaaS apps do it (e.g. if you use Notion, say, your data materializes out of "the cloud" when you launch the app, and otherwise has no tangible existence). When my data is plain text on my local disk, I own it; I know I can export it, I can run whatever editor or program on it; I can access past versions (via git or Dropbox); I don't have to worry about it being corrupted, or accidentally deleting some of it, or not being able to access it because of server issues, or not being able to export it, or being offline, and so on. 4) The Dendron docs ("wiki") site is created using Dendron. It's a cool thought that I could create a nice website of documentation or notes without leaving VS Code. Cons: 1) Can't access my notes from mobile. 2) Major warts in navigating between notes. Each note has a tab for editing it and a tab for viewing/previewing it. Opening a note behaves differently depending on which tab is focused. Clicking links to go from one note to another doesn't work very well. 3) Poor full-text search (just VS Code's code search). 4) You can't specify an order for notes, only unordered hierarchy, and you can't easily view multiple notes at once, which means keeping lots of short notes, or using different notes for different sections of a document, doesn't really work. There's a tension in any note-taking tool between short notes and long notes. Should notes be as short as possible? Or stretch into long documents? The ideal tool IMO would blur the difference between an ordered hierarchy of sections within a document and an ordered hierarchy of notes within some grouping. Dendron makes it seem like it is for keeping thousands of small notes, but the ways in which you can view, organize, and navigate between notes (lack of good "browse," search, links, lists, seeing multiple notes, next/previous note, and so on) are so limited that it makes more sense to write long documents. In which case, all you really need is Markdown Preview Enhanced and the file system.

batmanthehorse 6y ago

I've struggled for so long to find a note-taking app. I basically need something like Atom, VSCode, or Notepad++ (advanced text editing features) and then ability to embed images. Half of my job is taking screenshots and analyzing logs. I use Atom for text right now, and OneNote for images, but it would be ideal to combine them. I've tried a few Atom plugins that say they can do this, but none work (possibly due to API changes over time). Anyone know of a good solution?

kevinslin 6y ago
So Dendron does this. We have a shortcut to automatically embed images as well (https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a91fd8da-6895-49fe-8164-a17acd8d9a17.html https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a91fd8da-6895-49fe-8164-a17acd...). I describe Dendron as basically notepad with additional features :)

scudd 6y ago

I think it would be really cool if there was a VS code extension where you could embed dot graphs in your .md file within a triple back tick block. Then when you hit the preview button, it automatically renders it. Something like this: https://markdownmonster.west-wind.com/docs/_5ef0x96or.htm https://markdownmonster.west-wind.com/docs/_5ef0x96or.htm But as a VS Code extension.

kevinslin 6y ago
Dendron supports mermaid diagrams: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/eea2b078-1acc-4071-a14e-18299fc28f48.html#mermaid https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/eea2b078-1acc-4071-a14e-18299f...

bachmeier 6y ago

One thing that's kind of important to me is that Dendron does not (as far as I can tell) have much in the way of outliner functionality. Other tools in this space do - for instance, org-mode for Emacs users. That would be a nice addition, given how powerful outlines can be.

kevinslin 6y ago
Yeah, we don't do outline in the workflowy sense. we do outlines in the sense that we have shortcuts to create notes from bullets and autolink the new note. not the same but gets close. you can see an example here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/593206ea-5658-4874-bafd-18a138870f91.html#kevins-workflow https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/593206ea-5658-4874-bafd-18a138...

mcbishop 6y ago

I found Dendron via HN a few months ago and absolutely love it. I was hemming and hawing with my Dendron file structure until I found the PARA method (in a Dendron tutorial): https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/ https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/. I love that the dots in Dendron file names (e.g. resource.orgs.pacific-energy-center) lets me avoid the awkwardness of folders while still having hierarchical organization. I move around and make changes fast with Dendron's shortcuts. I'm opting to keep a lot of my lists (e.g. my to-do list) in Excel, and rely on Dendron more for the written-out stuff. I'm grateful for this free open-source awesomeness!

kevinslin 6y ago
Thanks for trying us out :) Spreadsheet like support is not something we currently support but we'll have integrations and also native support coming soon!

hobo_mark 6y ago

I have not seen it mentioned here a lot, but Joplin (another open-source, local-first, markdown-based, note-taking tool) also has a vscode extension (to search and edit notes in code), in addition to desktop and mobile apps. Joplin is much simpler however (no linking between notes for example), depending on what you do that may be an advantage.

sjellis 6y ago
Joplin is everything that I want in a note-taking app, and I use it constantly. It actually does support linking between notes.

erezsh 6y ago

I notice that your directory structure and markdown formatting are very similar to those that are used by static site generators such as Hugo or Nikola. Do you have, or thought about, integration with one of these? I like the idea of writing my notes in Dendron and being able to automatically publish them (or a subset of them).

varispeed 6y ago

How do you learn how to write notes like this or is it natural? The representation of my notes would be noise, but surprisingly I can find everything I want easily.

majkinetor 6y ago

I just use awesome GistPad [2] vscode extension and add tags to notes (just array of #tag1 #tag2 in description). This is accessible easily via various tools on ad hoc place (mobile, browser or whatever), such as GistList [1], GistPad / vscode has some good filtering features and I can download all gists locally and use any file manager to filter out tags. Its also a collection of mini git repositories with all nice things (revisions, multiple files etc.) and me not having to think about any of that. You can easily go from there to graphs and folders and other advanced stuff (PlantUML et al are all possible via extensions) if you need them, but I have around 200 notes and do not usually need any of that. What I do need is an easy system not depending on any particular technology - all parts of it can be replaced with something else or nothing at all and still be usable with regular OTB OS tools. [1] https://gistlist.ksdev.pl/ https://gistlist.ksdev.pl/ [2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vsls-contrib.gistfs https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vsls-con...

moondev 6y ago
This is fantastic, thanks for the recommendation. Great example of lightweight implementation and really supercharges the usefulness of gists.

jeswin 6y ago

Since you're doing a Show HN for a product which has previously had a full discussion [1][2], it'd probably make sense to mention what has changed. According to the guidelines, "New features and upgrades ("Foo 1.3.1 is out") generally aren't substantive enough to be Show HNs. A major overhaul is probably ok." [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24898373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24898373 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23890035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23890035

goody612 6y ago

While Dendron is not my Core Note-Taking app yet (only use it while programming), I do have to say it is super amazing. It is one of the Best Note Taking apps out there. The founder Kevin is a super cool guy too. Recommend trying it out at least.