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At the risk of diverting this into yet another discussion of note taking apps... I'm using Notion. Its ok, but I'd like to have a way to snapshot documents to

At the risk of diverting this into yet another discussion of note taking apps... I'm using Notion. Its ok, but I'd like to have a way to snapshot documents to incorporate into my notes. And lately I feel like I'm paying for all their new AI stuff that I just don't use. So help me HN: whats a good open source, self-hostable, replacement with decent desktop/mobile tooling and a practicable migration path from a Notion export/backup?

johnnyworker 3y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by snapshots, and it's not open source -- but if you haven't tried it yet, check out Obsidian. "Vaults" are self-contained, just markdown files in folders, with an extra folder for the Obsidian stuff, i.e. all settings and state and even the plugins. Plays great with SyncThing etc. And there are so many great community plugins, which is where the real magic of it is for me.
- jgalt212 3y ago
  I really do like the data model of obsidian. For the most part the data (markdown files) and the meta data (the .obsidian directory) stay out of each other's way.
jddj 3y ago
Logseq is as close as it gets. In my humble opinion these tools aren't quite there yet, which is not to say they aren't polished, but that they don't disappear from view like good tools should. There's still a noticeable impedance mismatch due to having to use their editor, for example, which has its quirks and is different enough to a standard text editor to cause a context switch. But it's open source and it's pretty good.
cobertos 3y ago
Used to use Notion. I haven't found any good open source alternatives either. I was using Typora for a while, before Obsidian got better. It was just a tree of Markdown files and a _really_ nice Notion-like editor. I had to write https://github.com/Cobertos/notion_export_enhancer https://github.com/Cobertos/notion_export_enhancer to get my data out of notion in an actual nice tree-like structure. I tried Obsidian again recently and their editor caught up to Typora's (and it was faster than the last time I used it). I'm trying to switch to it now, as the tree is more "file-y" than Typora (which removes blind spots for me, as I save PDFs and other stuff in my note tree). I've resorted to writing my own though now. Notion, Typora, and Obsidian are great for one specific type of management (documents, markdown-like), but I think there's a higher level abstractions here.

johnnyworker 3y ago

I'm not sure what you mean by snapshots, and it's not open source -- but if you haven't tried it yet, check out Obsidian. "Vaults" are self-contained, just markdown files in folders, with an extra folder for the Obsidian stuff, i.e. all settings and state and even the plugins. Plays great with SyncThing etc. And there are so many great community plugins, which is where the real magic of it is for me.

jgalt212 3y ago
I really do like the data model of obsidian. For the most part the data (markdown files) and the meta data (the .obsidian directory) stay out of each other's way.

jddj 3y ago

Logseq is as close as it gets. In my humble opinion these tools aren't quite there yet, which is not to say they aren't polished, but that they don't disappear from view like good tools should. There's still a noticeable impedance mismatch due to having to use their editor, for example, which has its quirks and is different enough to a standard text editor to cause a context switch. But it's open source and it's pretty good.

cobertos 3y ago

Used to use Notion. I haven't found any good open source alternatives either. I was using Typora for a while, before Obsidian got better. It was just a tree of Markdown files and a _really_ nice Notion-like editor. I had to write https://github.com/Cobertos/notion_export_enhancer https://github.com/Cobertos/notion_export_enhancer to get my data out of notion in an actual nice tree-like structure. I tried Obsidian again recently and their editor caught up to Typora's (and it was faster than the last time I used it). I'm trying to switch to it now, as the tree is more "file-y" than Typora (which removes blind spots for me, as I save PDFs and other stuff in my note tree). I've resorted to writing my own though now. Notion, Typora, and Obsidian are great for one specific type of management (documents, markdown-like), but I think there's a higher level abstractions here.