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I love Notion but the speed, or rather lack of, is killing me daily. Last Friday I was taking some notes, and suddenly the page refreshed and everything was gon

I love Notion but the speed, or rather lack of, is killing me daily. Last Friday I was taking some notes, and suddenly the page refreshed and everything was gone. Went on twitter to see, I wasn't alone .. i feel like hosting my own notion clone is the way to go forward to use Notion...

KitDuncan 6y ago
I am not sure Focalboard has the features you are looking for, but outline wiki is a cool notion like wiki and pretty fast.
movedx 6y ago
I've actually just started using Notion and the UI is nice, as is the feature set, but yeah, I'm getting a little annoyed by the constant page loads. I mean this kind of thing continues to fuel my beliefs that software is going backwards here because frankly, how hard can it be to render some text?
- jfim 6y ago
  > how hard can it be to render some text? It really depends. If the only thing you care about rendering is US ASCII with a monospace bitmapped font, that's not too hard. However, a general purpose text renderer will have to handle things like directionality (left to right versus right to left text orientation), wide/half text rendering (for CJK characters), combining characters (for some European, South East Asian languages, and zalgo), line break rules (handling characters like soft hyphens and non breaking spaces), and so on. On the font rendering side of things, there's kerning (some letters are closer to one another), font ligatures (certain fonts handle things like fi ffi fl ffl differently, not to mention things like hasklig), antialiasing, sub pixel rendering, and the fact that fonts are actually programs running on a stack based virtual machine [0]. That's also ignoring more advanced text rendering features like ruby characters and vertical text rendering. Or that apparently Turkish has different small caps than English ones [1]. In practice, it's probably not the text rendering that's the issue, it's probably just features that are implemented inefficiently. [0] https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/RM03/Chap3.html#font_program https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/... [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/ttochap1#opentype-layout-terminology https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/tt...
  - capableweb 6y ago
    "how hard can it be to render some text" as the previous author is a valid complaint, if Notion only rendered text but they do not. There is a lot of data structures around what looks like "just text", including images and everything else. I agree that Notion has big performance problems, and I myself left it for logseq a long time ago just because of the performance issues and the non-flexible architecture overall. But Notion's performance issues are not about rendering text, it's rendering everything but text.
  - barry27 6y ago
    right. its probably nothing to do with text rendering. the vast majority of your response was orthogonal nonsense. par for the course here on HN.
  - isitdopamine 6y ago
    All of this can be done quite efficiently on a native widget. The problem with Notion is that it uses Electron.
    - Griffinsauce 6y ago
      Which makes rendering text extremely simple. It's a fun meme to blame Electron for everything but the problems with Notion are obviously with its state and data management. Booting/rendering performance is not the bottleneck here, and having used lightning fast Electron apps, I'm sure it never will be. Put differently: what measurements do you have of the performance issues of Notion and is Electron performance the root problem of them?
      - isitdopamine 6y ago
        Let’s just say that the fact that Electron needs to allocate hundreds of MB in memory to display a single “Hello world” text does not depose in Electron’s favor. Compare it with the few MBs needed by an equivalent native app with exactly same functionality. By any standard and by any metric, Electron is bloated. Some applications (like VSCode) can disguise it quite well and give a an acceptable user experience.
- scq 6y ago
  I'm sure it was a lot snappier when I started using it, but it has been getting quite slow over the past couple of years. Really makes me want a lightweight alternative because I love its editing model.
  - movedx 6y ago
    I honestly think I'll just use Vim, a "~/notes" directory and my already powerful file searching functionality built into Vim (fzf powered I think it's called)
tibu 6y ago
Same here. And I still did not find the perfect note taking app. I have so few requirements. WYSIWYG editing, easy image insertion, export function with open standard format, mobile app, some security.
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  Have you tried Joplin? I switched to it and have been loving it. Planning on launching a backup service for it this week actually (Backups +/- encryption to OneDrive, Dropbox, AWS S3 and WebDAV support are all built in): https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/
  - wlk 6y ago
    Compared to Obsidian, Joplin suits me much better and it's way more features. I have given Obsidian a fair trail, but now I'm using Joplin
- rayiner 6y ago
  Try moo.do
- smusamashah 6y ago
  Typora is best WYSIWYG Markdown app
- gala8y 6y ago
  I recently moved (almost) all of my note taking into Obsidian [0]. They just released a closed beta mobile app (they are very active in development and great community), but they are local first app. [0] https://obsidian.md https://obsidian.md edit: To clarify, using they mobile app will require paid subscription in all scenarios, I think (not sure, as I don't need that).
  - input_sh 6y ago
    > To clarify, using they mobile app will require paid subscription in all scenarios, I think (not sure, as I don't need that). Nope. They've said they'll support opening a folder on a phone. Therefore, as long as you sync the folder using some cloud software, the mobile app will work just fine. But of course, you can pay them for the convenience and they'll sync them for you.
it33 6y ago
Focalboard team here. You can try the "Focalboard Personal Desktop" to run locally where your performance won't be affected by other users. We made it available in Windows Store and Apple AppStore to make it easy to try out. This is just a v0.6 right now, and we would love bug reports and enhancement ideas. It's the early days of the project and we are excited to hear input: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  > We made it available in Windows Store and Apple AppStore to make it easy to try out. I would prefer a simple non-store app, a portable app perhaps. Can I get a classic zip/whatever?

KitDuncan 6y ago

I am not sure Focalboard has the features you are looking for, but outline wiki is a cool notion like wiki and pretty fast.

movedx 6y ago

I've actually just started using Notion and the UI is nice, as is the feature set, but yeah, I'm getting a little annoyed by the constant page loads. I mean this kind of thing continues to fuel my beliefs that software is going backwards here because frankly, how hard can it be to render some text?

jfim 6y ago
> how hard can it be to render some text? It really depends. If the only thing you care about rendering is US ASCII with a monospace bitmapped font, that's not too hard. However, a general purpose text renderer will have to handle things like directionality (left to right versus right to left text orientation), wide/half text rendering (for CJK characters), combining characters (for some European, South East Asian languages, and zalgo), line break rules (handling characters like soft hyphens and non breaking spaces), and so on. On the font rendering side of things, there's kerning (some letters are closer to one another), font ligatures (certain fonts handle things like fi ffi fl ffl differently, not to mention things like hasklig), antialiasing, sub pixel rendering, and the fact that fonts are actually programs running on a stack based virtual machine [0]. That's also ignoring more advanced text rendering features like ruby characters and vertical text rendering. Or that apparently Turkish has different small caps than English ones [1]. In practice, it's probably not the text rendering that's the issue, it's probably just features that are implemented inefficiently. [0] https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/RM03/Chap3.html#font_program https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/... [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/ttochap1#opentype-layout-terminology https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/tt...
- capableweb 6y ago
  "how hard can it be to render some text" as the previous author is a valid complaint, if Notion only rendered text but they do not. There is a lot of data structures around what looks like "just text", including images and everything else. I agree that Notion has big performance problems, and I myself left it for logseq a long time ago just because of the performance issues and the non-flexible architecture overall. But Notion's performance issues are not about rendering text, it's rendering everything but text.
- barry27 6y ago
  right. its probably nothing to do with text rendering. the vast majority of your response was orthogonal nonsense. par for the course here on HN.
- isitdopamine 6y ago
  All of this can be done quite efficiently on a native widget. The problem with Notion is that it uses Electron.
  - Griffinsauce 6y ago
    Which makes rendering text extremely simple. It's a fun meme to blame Electron for everything but the problems with Notion are obviously with its state and data management. Booting/rendering performance is not the bottleneck here, and having used lightning fast Electron apps, I'm sure it never will be. Put differently: what measurements do you have of the performance issues of Notion and is Electron performance the root problem of them?
    - isitdopamine 6y ago
      Let’s just say that the fact that Electron needs to allocate hundreds of MB in memory to display a single “Hello world” text does not depose in Electron’s favor. Compare it with the few MBs needed by an equivalent native app with exactly same functionality. By any standard and by any metric, Electron is bloated. Some applications (like VSCode) can disguise it quite well and give a an acceptable user experience.
scq 6y ago
I'm sure it was a lot snappier when I started using it, but it has been getting quite slow over the past couple of years. Really makes me want a lightweight alternative because I love its editing model.
- movedx 6y ago
  I honestly think I'll just use Vim, a "~/notes" directory and my already powerful file searching functionality built into Vim (fzf powered I think it's called)

tibu 6y ago

Same here. And I still did not find the perfect note taking app. I have so few requirements. WYSIWYG editing, easy image insertion, export function with open standard format, mobile app, some security.

hardwaresofton 6y ago
Have you tried Joplin? I switched to it and have been loving it. Planning on launching a backup service for it this week actually (Backups +/- encryption to OneDrive, Dropbox, AWS S3 and WebDAV support are all built in): https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/
- wlk 6y ago
  Compared to Obsidian, Joplin suits me much better and it's way more features. I have given Obsidian a fair trail, but now I'm using Joplin
rayiner 6y ago
Try moo.do
smusamashah 6y ago
Typora is best WYSIWYG Markdown app
gala8y 6y ago
I recently moved (almost) all of my note taking into Obsidian [0]. They just released a closed beta mobile app (they are very active in development and great community), but they are local first app. [0] https://obsidian.md https://obsidian.md edit: To clarify, using they mobile app will require paid subscription in all scenarios, I think (not sure, as I don't need that).
- input_sh 6y ago
  > To clarify, using they mobile app will require paid subscription in all scenarios, I think (not sure, as I don't need that). Nope. They've said they'll support opening a folder on a phone. Therefore, as long as you sync the folder using some cloud software, the mobile app will work just fine. But of course, you can pay them for the convenience and they'll sync them for you.

it33 6y ago

Focalboard team here. You can try the "Focalboard Personal Desktop" to run locally where your performance won't be affected by other users. We made it available in Windows Store and Apple AppStore to make it easy to try out. This is just a v0.6 right now, and we would love bug reports and enhancement ideas. It's the early days of the project and we are excited to hear input: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues

qwerty456127 6y ago
> We made it available in Windows Store and Apple AppStore to make it easy to try out. I would prefer a simple non-store app, a portable app perhaps. Can I get a classic zip/whatever?