9 ms·

GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world

314 points by ingve 1y ago

_mikz 1y ago
Don't forget the checkbox list! And linking to specific comments.
- hliyan 1y ago
  Ten years ago, I worked in a small non-profit development shop that used Github issues for all project management. Checkboxes were used as both subtasks and ACs. Now that I think back, it worked really well. I don't think we even had Slack (we used Google Talk).
Jakob 1y ago
On the last point on Apple Notes: iCloud has the “keep downloaded” option now on iOS and macOS for folders and files. This makes every app that saves into iCloud files behave like Notes, i.e. work offline with automatic online sync.
- greggsy 1y ago
  How does it handle contention, and how frequently does it sync?
- nsonha 1y ago
  is iCloud still downloading and reuploading again if you drag things between folders?
jbverschoor 1y ago
Noteplan (https://noteplan.co/ https://noteplan.co/)
- orphea 1y ago
  $100/year? No, thank you. Why does everything have to be a subscription?
  - tcshit 1y ago
    … and why are those subscription fees so obscene? I guess too many people have too much money…
    - pbowyer 1y ago
      This. Everything is getting priced for U.S. (software engineer) incomes.
  - jbverschoor 1y ago
    Sure. But it’s worth it for me. It’s really great. And i have full control over my files. It’s not hosted by them. Just markdown files
j_maffe 1y ago
Sounds like Obsidian but with extra steps.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  Obsidian sounds like text files with extra steps, but your point remains, plain text files are great. There's multiple solutions from keeping them available across devices.
  - alfons_foobar 1y ago
    Well yeah, Obsidian is basically a markdown editor with some nice extra features. And apparently a quite thriving plugin ecosystem.
  - Lutger 1y ago
    The extra step is to open the text file in an editor, except in this case the editor is called Obsidian. Granted, you do have to install it versus using the default editor that comes with your operating system, so that is an extra step. But most people don't use the builtin editors from their OS anyway.
- supermatt 1y ago
  Is one of those extra steps “not pay $50 a year to have access on all your devices”, or maybe it’s “not pay $100 a year to access via the web”?
  - nsteel 1y ago
    I have access on all my devices through my email provider WebDAV. I don't pay anything to Obsidian for this (but I do donate to them because it actually is the best notes provider, in my opinion).
    - supermatt 1y ago
      So I guess the extra step is “not install and configure a 3rd party WebDAV plugin for all your devices while ensuring you have WebDAV support by your email provider”?
jtwaleson 1y ago
Broken links with 404s have been called "a feature, not a bug" of the web, but I think that for internal documentation purposes, having consistent bi-directional links is a _very_ good thing to have.
fbnlsr 1y ago
Like many I've been looking for the best note-taking app for years. And somehow I always come back to a bunch of markdown files inside a Git repo.
- msravi 1y ago
  ...accessed through Obsidian (esp on mobile) -- On Android, you can "Open folder as vault" Or neovim with FzfLua (on laptop)
- miroljub 1y ago
  For me, it's the same way, except that instead of Markdown, I use plain org-mode files sprinkled with a bit of org-roam tags when needed.
- triknomeister 1y ago
  I have an idea. Coming soon!!
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    Obsidian + Git plugin? :)
- exe34 1y ago
  org-roam inside git
- frou_dh 1y ago
  Compared to something with automatic bidirectional sync between all devices, something where one has to manually commit/push/pull a new/edited note feels archaic.
  - klez 1y ago
    You can automate commits and push on save. I had a similar setup for vimwiki before migrating to a web-based wiki system (dokuwiki).
  - tasuki 1y ago
Tepix 1y ago
The missing feature is federation! In my view, centralized structures like a giant source repository such as github are something we as a developer community need to avoid. Unfortunately, features like federated merge requests in gitlab ( https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14116 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14116 ) are something we've been waiting for for 9 years and nothing seems to be happening there. This feature alone would enable a lot of new collaboration without forcing everyone to work on a centralized system to use git - a decentralized versioning system - with high efficiency. Last week, Microsoft cut off the email account of the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, after being ordered to do so by the Trump administration. This is merely a week or two after Microsoft did a big PR campaign, telling the European Union how they were to stand up against this administration if the need arises. The irony! Trump isn't hiding his opinion about the EU. What's stopping him from ordering Microsoft to block the EU from accessing github one day? Right now: Nothing at all. Think about how it would impact your business and open source software in general. We must not put all our eggs in a single basket.
- Lutger 1y ago
  Absolutely. Any public institution or governmental body needs to rethink their fragile reliance on technology from countries they can longer trust. This applies to China, but the US is even more unpredictable.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  I keep meaning to check out https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/ for this, but I think I'll wait for things to get even worse before I do, and then later I'll regret not having explored the durable option sooner.
Propelloni 1y ago
So GitHub notes let me do what Zim Desktop Wiki let me do since 2005 without requiring internet. But I get the OP, if you live in GitHub, it makes perfect sense.
xeonmc 1y ago
Alternatively, you can use Codeberg to avoid vendor lock-in, or self-host Forgejo.
- simonw 1y ago
  Not self-hosting and having a cost of zero is one of the features that makes GitHub Issues such a great solution. I don't want to risk my notes on a configuration error or billing mishap.
  - xeonmc 1y ago
    So Codeberg then.
    - simonw 1y ago
      https://codeberg.org/ https://codeberg.org/ says "Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects." Wouldn't hosting my own private notes on there be against the spirit of what they're trying to achieve? I have no problem at all freeloading off GitHub!
  - layer8 1y ago
    You should arrange for backups either way. For example, stuff like this could happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23832437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23832437
    - simonw 1y ago
      My protection against that is nepotism: I'm a "GitHub Star" which gets me direct access to GitHub staff, plus I know a lot of people who work there.
      - layer8 1y ago
        Yeah, I’m writing this for the benefit of people who want to follow your usage. It also means that your advice doesn’t generalize.
aargh_aargh 1y ago
Call me long in the tooth but it sounds to me like he's describing HTML (sans the backlinks part).
styfle 1y ago
I used GitHub issues as a form of project management to plan my wedding many years ago. My wife was skeptical at first, but the ability to add labels, search, etc made it really easy to work together and accomplish the tasked we needed in time for the wedding. The hardest part was creating a bookmark that links directly to the issue tracker. Oh, I’ve also used GitHub issues to organize all the boxes in my most recent move. I would create an issue and the description would list all the contents of a box. Then I would write the issue number on the box. After moving, I could search GitHub to find that one thing I was looking for and know what box it was in.
- klez 1y ago
  Out of curiosity, what other solutions did you explore and why were they lacking?
  - ableal 1y ago
    (Not OP) I've used LibraryThing for book boxes. Using smallish boxes (30-40 paperbacks each) so that carrying them is not a backbreaker. Scan the ISBN barcodes with phone app, fix old ones/whatever on web app, tag with box number written on at least two sides. No problems found so far.
- artursapek 1y ago
  [flagged]
- sph 1y ago
  Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ This is a fun anecdote to share, but everywhere you can find people with absurd workflows that are better dealt with using proper tools. FWIW I used Org mode to organize a move to another country. I really cannot stand the idea of feeding my personal information to Microsoft.
  - birn559 1y ago
    Sounds to me like parent used a proper tool. It just happens to be very flexible. In general, the best tool is the one that you use and makes sense to you.
fsadoifaoie8 1y ago
[dead]
bjourne 1y ago
Totally agree. GitHub issues is probably the best bug tracker/ticketing system you can imagine. Intuitive interface, simple, clean, and fast. Just waiting for a Microsoft redesign to completely fuck it up. :P
- kccqzy 1y ago
  I've used plenty of proprietary issue tracking systems and GitHub is missing several features that I now consider quite important though certainly not essential: * The ability to write an issue summary separate from comments. When you are debugging some hairy bug, some manager doesn't really want to wade through all the comments to get an idea; an editable summary at the very top of the page communicates high-level points to stakeholders while others continue to comment on details. People work around this by editing the initial comment of the issue but it's better if there's something more dedicated. * Sophisticated access control. More than once when someone writes a bug report they are referring to a bug experienced by a single user. For user privacy reasons there needs to be a per-issue permission system to restrict access beyond the permission implied by the repo. * The ability to add personal notes to an issue without publishing it. Whether it's a draft form of a comment or something else, it gets rid of the need to maintain your own notes.
  - 9dev 1y ago
    > an editable summary at the very top of the page communicates high-level points to stakeholders I would hope this will soon be written by AI automatically; summing up high-level points in an issue discussion seems like a perfect task for an LLM.
    - simonw 1y ago
      I've been rolling my own version of that recently via my https://github.com/simonw/llm-fragments-github https://github.com/simonw/llm-fragments-github plugin. Here's an example where I condensed 50+ comments (accumulated over a year and a half!) into a summary comment and added it to the thread: https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-chronicle/issues/7#issuecomment-2833108867 https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-chronicle/issues/7#issuecom... I created the summary like this: llm \ -f issue:https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-chronicle/issues/7 \ -m openai/o4-mini \ -o reasoning_effort high \ -s 'Output markdown explaining this issue and the proposed resolution succinctly and clearly'
chrisjj 1y ago
> Free and unlimited Extremely doubtful. The fact you haven't yet hit limits does not mean no limits. Nor does the fact the provider claims unlimited.
- simonw 1y ago
  There are repos out there with over a hundred thousand issues - https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aclosed https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20st... has 180,000+ now. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues?q=is%3Aissue https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues?q=is%3Aissue is just over 100,000 across both open and closed. I take a lot of notes but I don't think I'm going to end up with the largest issue collection on GitHub. I could always spin up a second repo or org if I do run out. I have my notes scattered across several hundred repos (and a hunch of orgs) already.
  - chrisjj 1y ago
    > There are repos out there with over a hundred thousand issues Yet still, one more could hit the limit.
pmkary 1y ago
This is insane!
- simonw 1y ago
  That's why I wrote this. The idea of using GitHub Issues as an alternative to a dedicated notes app is decidedly non-obvious. I only just realized myself that I've been using it that way for years.
  - dboreham 1y ago
    I've been doing it for years (before GitHub existed...). e.g. https://github.com/dboreham/global-bugs/issues https://github.com/dboreham/global-bugs/issues
cogogo 1y ago
I expected the first comment to be about privacy. I don’t keep a lot of notes but I definitely consider them even more private than even email. Not sure I want them training LLMs. Or are there actually assurances from MS around privacy for private repos?
- fsflover 1y ago
  > Or are there actually assurances from MS around privacy for private repos? Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36184948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36184948
- simonw 1y ago
  The amount of extremely sensitive corporate secrets in GitHub issues makes me assume that their security and privacy are pretty rock solid. A lot of companies pay GitHub a lot of money to look after their source code and related artifacts. That's GitHub's business model. I don't think they would jeopardize that trust for the sake of training a model on private data.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    Where I work we don’t use GitHub, but we do use Copilot. It took a long time before it was opened up for us to be able to use it, as deals had to be struck and accounts and auth setup to use our corporate logins, which have different rules for data privacy than public use of Copilot. We are explicitly forbidden from using the public version of Copilot, or any other AI for that matter. I can only assume that companies paying for GitHub also pay for enhanced levels of privacy. Just because a company can pay GitHub not to train on their data, doesn’t mean they’re not going to train on your data that is being hosted for free. They are almost certainly crawling all free repos.
  - randallsquared 1y ago
    I dunno. For one thing, those companies are paying GitHub a lot of money for the enterprise version, separately hosted (right?). The data isn't actually available to Microsoft employees or LLMs, absent some security flaw or backdoor. For another, companies that pay for this also (sample size is small, though) have automation that scans GitHub repos, issues, etc for any secrets and require them to be removed and scrubbed from history, implying that they don't trust even the self-hosted GitHub Enterprise as much as you do.
ravivyas 1y ago
the notes app... there is none. There will always be better apps, but you need to stick to an app with its flaws and limitations. I have been through this rabbit hole... (paid for Bear, IAWriter, noteplan, FSnotes and probably more that I forget) and have just stuck to local markdown files and use VS code ... I even used LLMs to generate a tiny plugin to solve my micro needs.
vijucat 1y ago
Unpopular opinion: developers obsess about the format being Markdown. This is completely backwards. This is a hammer-sees-nail thing. You should care more about the UX. And that somewhere, someone wrote a parser for the file format. That's it. You don't have to understand every byte of it. It need not be readable text and it need not be version-control friendly. It should be a joy to use, be powerful, be easy to annotate images and pdfs. I bet none of the Markdown solutions do this as elegantly as OneNote or alternatives.
- simonw 1y ago
  The more time passes the more I care about my notes living in Markdown: - I can transform it to other formats should I need to - The GitHub variant of it (GFM) has feature like syntax highlighting for different languages which is incredibly useful to me based on the kinds of notes I take - Diffing clearly genuinely is a benefit, sometimes I want to know exactly what I changed! - I can parse it with regular expressions, so useful information doesn't end up locked in some weird binary format - LLMs are great at reading and writing it These things may not matter to people who are not nerds. I'm a nerd!
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
    Indeed, Markdown has become a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts: You want to use it because the toolchain and ecosystem surrounding the format is good, and the toolchain and ecosystem are good because everyone is using it.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  sir, this is HN, nobody wants to hear your rational practical ideas
lawgimenez 1y ago
Almost the best notebook in the world, as long as there's no outage.
eviks 1y ago
> It has excellent search How is it excellent when current logs could do with a bit of redesign doesn't find the comment (requires quotes to find it) And then a tiny typo "current logs could" do with a bit of redesing also fails you
- sureIy 1y ago
  Confirm. GitHub search is "search" not "excellent search"
  - joker99 1y ago
    The fact that you can’t even specify the branch or search across branches is anything but excellent
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    It's such a wasted opportunity too. It would be so powerful to understand how a tool is used by searching for popular repositories that are already using it.
    - simonw 1y ago
      I do that all the time! What's GitHub search missing that prevents you from doing that? Their code search supports regular expressions now, which I find pretty incredible. https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/the-technology-behind-githubs-new-code-search/ https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/th...
      - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        Maybe I have my search syntax wrong. Suppose I want to search for go projects with a flake.nix in the repo root. This finds nothing: language:Go path:/flake.nix I know they exist though, for instance here's one: github.com/joerdav/xc Can you tell me where I've gone wrong?
bob1029 1y ago
For a typical organization, I think issues are still the most valuable part of the GitHub product stack. You can build very powerful project management abstractions on top of issues & labels. If you have discipline to do a monorepo for the entire organization, your issue and code tabs are effectively the entire universe in one place. This is the only thing I've seen that can pull middle managers out of email - a single bucket that has everything of concern in it.
bgwalter 1y ago
Except if you lose your 2FA one day before you need your plans. Or are all plans public? Any local notebook, including pencil and paper, is better.
- simonw 1y ago
  Pencil and paper is terrible because you can lose the paper. I want my notes backed up to the cloud, with backups replicated across at least two continents. I've experimented with a bunch of tools for extracting copies of my issues and pulling them down locally, which is easy thanks to the GitHub API. One that's particularly fun is a GitHub Actions setup that copies the full contents of each issue thread into a file in the repo itself. Then I can "git pull" to fetch my backup! I still don't have any of them running on a cron at home but I might set that up some day.
pier25 1y ago
Isn’t there something like Obsidian that uses GitHub instead?
OutOfHere 1y ago
For offline use, these were posted recently: https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue
pacifika 1y ago
How’s the mobile experience?
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
The stuff that gets upvoted here... Next up: - "SQLite is almost the best notebook in the world" - "Claude is almost the best notebook in the world" - "An SQLite database containing only Markdown files in a Git repo self-hosted on an SD card in my Raspberry Pi served by a Node.js web app accessible via 56k modem is almost the best notebook in the world" - "I created a startup to take the previous thing, reinvent GitHub Issues on top of it, call it AI Notes, and make almost the best notebook in the world, and it's now valued at $50B"
- getsprite 1y ago
  Yeah absurd takes abound
simonw 1y ago
This is fun: it turns out you can paste this GraphQL query: { viewer { issueComments { totalCount } issues { totalCount } } } Into https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/overview/explorer https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/overview/explorer in order to see the total number of issues and comments you've posted over your time on GitHub. I got 9,413 issues and 39,087 comments, for a grand total of 48,500 combined!
AstroJetson 1y ago
I always wonder when I see all these best notebooks / note taking systems, etc. why people don't spin up any of the dozens of wiki servers. You can put it online so you can get to it anywhere You can run it off a stick to keep it with you (Tiddlywiki) You can cross link pages to be able to collect things together You can search. Some even have auto link builders so you can build a page of links to pages that match a category. Some support Markup so you have formatting the way you want.
- prepend 1y ago
  For me, I like to keep my life simple and not run servers unless I have to. I haven’t run a wiki in years because markdown+git is good enough and simpler. I never really need anonymous edits.
bjornasm 1y ago
Councidentally I just started using it as my todo list. Its really neat, especially when using githubs cli gh.
paradox460 1y ago
Try it with ZenHub atop and it's so absurdly good it boggles the mind why anyone would use Jira
- trenchgun 1y ago
  Well... not everybody uses github, and not every task in Jira is about code in version control
yearesadpeople 1y ago
I've come to the same conclusion myself in the past 2 months (possibly driven by the AI / LLM age making me think even more in version control... writing those words make me wince). I have a small webapp too, which hoovers up issues I like to publish, from a repo with links on the web I like that I feel I would like to share (I believe the kids are calling this 'new age curation'). Its really quite a nice, organic, process. And its so odd its taken me 15 years of note apps - every other hot note app on the market - to realise this. Love Simon's articles, another nice insight
- digdugdirk 1y ago
  Interesting, do you have a repo for that webapp? Sounds interesting, I'd like to check it out.
zie 1y ago
Forgejo does almost everything Github does around issues that the OP mentioned(I think). * It doesn't extract the title from the issue on bare linkes, instead the url will become something like: <group>/<repo>#15 Which isn't as nice. So issue #15 in repo tootie/mynotes would look like: tootie/mynotes#15 * It also doesn't do offline sync. I think that's the only thing it doesn't do. I use Git Touch on iOS and it seems decent enough, you can get to issues and update them, etc. The bonus is, assuming you run your own Forgejo, or trust whoever runs it for you(say Codeberg), you don't have the MS privacy concerns.
nivertech 1y ago
Years ago I was using GitHub Issues as my personal task manager But ~ 2 years ago I switched to Obsidian for that Eventually I event started used Obsidian for my project management, and ditched GitHub Issues / GitHub Projects With caveats, that I use that for the greenfield project with lots of unstructured exploration + AI agents for keeping design docs and figuring out detailed tasks For the established and legacy projects, I would probably use GitHub Issues for bugs, enhancement requests. And GitHub Projects for all reactive work (support, ops, bugs, etc.) Lastly, I disagree that it's "almost the best notebook in the world". It my might be a best ticketing system or a note taking system, but not a notebook in the sense of Jupyter or LiveBook (but nothing stopping them to make code blocks executable[1], and even add some LLMs). Also it's easy overwrite the content of the issue, even by a single person working from different tabs (at least that was the case in the past). --- 1. GitHub Blocks https://blocks.githubnext.com/ https://blocks.githubnext.com/
getsprite 1y ago
I’m pretty sure you’ve never used any good issue tracking software then.
acquisitionsilk 1y ago
Step 1. Dev trusts Microsoft Step 2. ...? I don't mean to be facetious here. It's just that if GitHub doesn't end up going through the usual enshittification process, it'll be quite the anomaly. Now, maybe it'll be an anomaly, exceptions to rules exist. But it just seems to be an endless cycle, trusting these companies, getting burnt, trusting again, getting burnt again. Is there no end to the cycle? Is there some new pressure on these companies to behave better that was not there before, and therefore we should all give them (yet) another chance? I don't see why we would, personally. It even seems obvious to me that we shouldn't. Like in an abusive relationship, no matter the regret and the promises, eventually you've to say enough is enough, and ideally sooner rather than later. Nonetheless, it's very common practice for people who appear at least superficially like smart people to trust these companies a second, third, fourth time. Either these apparently smart people know something I don't, or they like getting paid large amounts of money so much that they'll stay quiet and use the popular services and simply use their tech savvy to jump to a new thing quickly when the shit hits the fan. Or maybe I just prefer being cynical, and it's a personality thing. Someone, educate me here.
- simonw 1y ago
  One of the main reasons I pick GitHub issues for this is that they have a very stable, reliable API that I can use to get my data back out again - or use to run continual automated exports, should I ever get around to doing that. I wouldn't trust any system for my notes that doesn't have this.

314 points by ingve 1y ago

_mikz 1y ago

Don't forget the checkbox list! And linking to specific comments.

hliyan 1y ago
Ten years ago, I worked in a small non-profit development shop that used Github issues for all project management. Checkboxes were used as both subtasks and ACs. Now that I think back, it worked really well. I don't think we even had Slack (we used Google Talk).

Jakob 1y ago

On the last point on Apple Notes: iCloud has the “keep downloaded” option now on iOS and macOS for folders and files. This makes every app that saves into iCloud files behave like Notes, i.e. work offline with automatic online sync.

greggsy 1y ago
How does it handle contention, and how frequently does it sync?
nsonha 1y ago
is iCloud still downloading and reuploading again if you drag things between folders?

jbverschoor 1y ago

Noteplan (https://noteplan.co/ https://noteplan.co/)

orphea 1y ago
$100/year? No, thank you. Why does everything have to be a subscription?
- tcshit 1y ago
  … and why are those subscription fees so obscene? I guess too many people have too much money…
  - pbowyer 1y ago
    This. Everything is getting priced for U.S. (software engineer) incomes.
- jbverschoor 1y ago
  Sure. But it’s worth it for me. It’s really great. And i have full control over my files. It’s not hosted by them. Just markdown files

j_maffe 1y ago

Sounds like Obsidian but with extra steps.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
Obsidian sounds like text files with extra steps, but your point remains, plain text files are great. There's multiple solutions from keeping them available across devices.
- alfons_foobar 1y ago
  Well yeah, Obsidian is basically a markdown editor with some nice extra features. And apparently a quite thriving plugin ecosystem.
- Lutger 1y ago
  The extra step is to open the text file in an editor, except in this case the editor is called Obsidian. Granted, you do have to install it versus using the default editor that comes with your operating system, so that is an extra step. But most people don't use the builtin editors from their OS anyway.
supermatt 1y ago
Is one of those extra steps “not pay $50 a year to have access on all your devices”, or maybe it’s “not pay $100 a year to access via the web”?
- nsteel 1y ago
  I have access on all my devices through my email provider WebDAV. I don't pay anything to Obsidian for this (but I do donate to them because it actually is the best notes provider, in my opinion).
  - supermatt 1y ago
    So I guess the extra step is “not install and configure a 3rd party WebDAV plugin for all your devices while ensuring you have WebDAV support by your email provider”?

jtwaleson 1y ago

Broken links with 404s have been called "a feature, not a bug" of the web, but I think that for internal documentation purposes, having consistent bi-directional links is a _very_ good thing to have.

fbnlsr 1y ago

Like many I've been looking for the best note-taking app for years. And somehow I always come back to a bunch of markdown files inside a Git repo.

msravi 1y ago
...accessed through Obsidian (esp on mobile) -- On Android, you can "Open folder as vault" Or neovim with FzfLua (on laptop)
miroljub 1y ago
For me, it's the same way, except that instead of Markdown, I use plain org-mode files sprinkled with a bit of org-roam tags when needed.
triknomeister 1y ago
I have an idea. Coming soon!!
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Obsidian + Git plugin? :)
exe34 1y ago
org-roam inside git
frou_dh 1y ago
Compared to something with automatic bidirectional sync between all devices, something where one has to manually commit/push/pull a new/edited note feels archaic.
- klez 1y ago
  You can automate commits and push on save. I had a similar setup for vimwiki before migrating to a web-based wiki system (dokuwiki).
- tasuki 1y ago

Tepix 1y ago

The missing feature is federation! In my view, centralized structures like a giant source repository such as github are something we as a developer community need to avoid. Unfortunately, features like federated merge requests in gitlab ( https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14116 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14116 ) are something we've been waiting for for 9 years and nothing seems to be happening there. This feature alone would enable a lot of new collaboration without forcing everyone to work on a centralized system to use git - a decentralized versioning system - with high efficiency. Last week, Microsoft cut off the email account of the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, after being ordered to do so by the Trump administration. This is merely a week or two after Microsoft did a big PR campaign, telling the European Union how they were to stand up against this administration if the need arises. The irony! Trump isn't hiding his opinion about the EU. What's stopping him from ordering Microsoft to block the EU from accessing github one day? Right now: Nothing at all. Think about how it would impact your business and open source software in general. We must not put all our eggs in a single basket.

Lutger 1y ago
Absolutely. Any public institution or governmental body needs to rethink their fragile reliance on technology from countries they can longer trust. This applies to China, but the US is even more unpredictable.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
I keep meaning to check out https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/ for this, but I think I'll wait for things to get even worse before I do, and then later I'll regret not having explored the durable option sooner.

Propelloni 1y ago

So GitHub notes let me do what Zim Desktop Wiki let me do since 2005 without requiring internet. But I get the OP, if you live in GitHub, it makes perfect sense.

xeonmc 1y ago

Alternatively, you can use Codeberg to avoid vendor lock-in, or self-host Forgejo.

simonw 1y ago
Not self-hosting and having a cost of zero is one of the features that makes GitHub Issues such a great solution. I don't want to risk my notes on a configuration error or billing mishap.
- xeonmc 1y ago
  So Codeberg then.
  - simonw 1y ago
    https://codeberg.org/ https://codeberg.org/ says "Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects." Wouldn't hosting my own private notes on there be against the spirit of what they're trying to achieve? I have no problem at all freeloading off GitHub!
- layer8 1y ago
  You should arrange for backups either way. For example, stuff like this could happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23832437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23832437
  - simonw 1y ago
    My protection against that is nepotism: I'm a "GitHub Star" which gets me direct access to GitHub staff, plus I know a lot of people who work there.
    - layer8 1y ago
      Yeah, I’m writing this for the benefit of people who want to follow your usage. It also means that your advice doesn’t generalize.

aargh_aargh 1y ago

Call me long in the tooth but it sounds to me like he's describing HTML (sans the backlinks part).

styfle 1y ago

I used GitHub issues as a form of project management to plan my wedding many years ago. My wife was skeptical at first, but the ability to add labels, search, etc made it really easy to work together and accomplish the tasked we needed in time for the wedding. The hardest part was creating a bookmark that links directly to the issue tracker. Oh, I’ve also used GitHub issues to organize all the boxes in my most recent move. I would create an issue and the description would list all the contents of a box. Then I would write the issue number on the box. After moving, I could search GitHub to find that one thing I was looking for and know what box it was in.

klez 1y ago
Out of curiosity, what other solutions did you explore and why were they lacking?
- ableal 1y ago
  (Not OP) I've used LibraryThing for book boxes. Using smallish boxes (30-40 paperbacks each) so that carrying them is not a backbreaker. Scan the ISBN barcodes with phone app, fix old ones/whatever on web app, tag with box number written on at least two sides. No problems found so far.
artursapek 1y ago
[flagged]
sph 1y ago
Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ This is a fun anecdote to share, but everywhere you can find people with absurd workflows that are better dealt with using proper tools. FWIW I used Org mode to organize a move to another country. I really cannot stand the idea of feeding my personal information to Microsoft.
- birn559 1y ago
  Sounds to me like parent used a proper tool. It just happens to be very flexible. In general, the best tool is the one that you use and makes sense to you.

fsadoifaoie8 1y ago

[dead]

bjourne 1y ago

Totally agree. GitHub issues is probably the best bug tracker/ticketing system you can imagine. Intuitive interface, simple, clean, and fast. Just waiting for a Microsoft redesign to completely fuck it up. :P

kccqzy 1y ago
I've used plenty of proprietary issue tracking systems and GitHub is missing several features that I now consider quite important though certainly not essential: * The ability to write an issue summary separate from comments. When you are debugging some hairy bug, some manager doesn't really want to wade through all the comments to get an idea; an editable summary at the very top of the page communicates high-level points to stakeholders while others continue to comment on details. People work around this by editing the initial comment of the issue but it's better if there's something more dedicated. * Sophisticated access control. More than once when someone writes a bug report they are referring to a bug experienced by a single user. For user privacy reasons there needs to be a per-issue permission system to restrict access beyond the permission implied by the repo. * The ability to add personal notes to an issue without publishing it. Whether it's a draft form of a comment or something else, it gets rid of the need to maintain your own notes.
- 9dev 1y ago
  > an editable summary at the very top of the page communicates high-level points to stakeholders I would hope this will soon be written by AI automatically; summing up high-level points in an issue discussion seems like a perfect task for an LLM.
  - simonw 1y ago
    I've been rolling my own version of that recently via my https://github.com/simonw/llm-fragments-github https://github.com/simonw/llm-fragments-github plugin. Here's an example where I condensed 50+ comments (accumulated over a year and a half!) into a summary comment and added it to the thread: https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-chronicle/issues/7#issuecomment-2833108867 https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-chronicle/issues/7#issuecom... I created the summary like this: llm \ -f issue:https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-chronicle/issues/7 \ -m openai/o4-mini \ -o reasoning_effort high \ -s 'Output markdown explaining this issue and the proposed resolution succinctly and clearly'

chrisjj 1y ago

> Free and unlimited Extremely doubtful. The fact you haven't yet hit limits does not mean no limits. Nor does the fact the provider claims unlimited.

simonw 1y ago
There are repos out there with over a hundred thousand issues - https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aclosed https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20st... has 180,000+ now. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues?q=is%3Aissue https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues?q=is%3Aissue is just over 100,000 across both open and closed. I take a lot of notes but I don't think I'm going to end up with the largest issue collection on GitHub. I could always spin up a second repo or org if I do run out. I have my notes scattered across several hundred repos (and a hunch of orgs) already.
- chrisjj 1y ago
  > There are repos out there with over a hundred thousand issues Yet still, one more could hit the limit.

pmkary 1y ago

This is insane!

simonw 1y ago
That's why I wrote this. The idea of using GitHub Issues as an alternative to a dedicated notes app is decidedly non-obvious. I only just realized myself that I've been using it that way for years.
- dboreham 1y ago
  I've been doing it for years (before GitHub existed...). e.g. https://github.com/dboreham/global-bugs/issues https://github.com/dboreham/global-bugs/issues

cogogo 1y ago

I expected the first comment to be about privacy. I don’t keep a lot of notes but I definitely consider them even more private than even email. Not sure I want them training LLMs. Or are there actually assurances from MS around privacy for private repos?

fsflover 1y ago
> Or are there actually assurances from MS around privacy for private repos? Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36184948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36184948
simonw 1y ago
The amount of extremely sensitive corporate secrets in GitHub issues makes me assume that their security and privacy are pretty rock solid. A lot of companies pay GitHub a lot of money to look after their source code and related artifacts. That's GitHub's business model. I don't think they would jeopardize that trust for the sake of training a model on private data.
- al_borland 1y ago
  Where I work we don’t use GitHub, but we do use Copilot. It took a long time before it was opened up for us to be able to use it, as deals had to be struck and accounts and auth setup to use our corporate logins, which have different rules for data privacy than public use of Copilot. We are explicitly forbidden from using the public version of Copilot, or any other AI for that matter. I can only assume that companies paying for GitHub also pay for enhanced levels of privacy. Just because a company can pay GitHub not to train on their data, doesn’t mean they’re not going to train on your data that is being hosted for free. They are almost certainly crawling all free repos.
- randallsquared 1y ago
  I dunno. For one thing, those companies are paying GitHub a lot of money for the enterprise version, separately hosted (right?). The data isn't actually available to Microsoft employees or LLMs, absent some security flaw or backdoor. For another, companies that pay for this also (sample size is small, though) have automation that scans GitHub repos, issues, etc for any secrets and require them to be removed and scrubbed from history, implying that they don't trust even the self-hosted GitHub Enterprise as much as you do.

ravivyas 1y ago

the notes app... there is none. There will always be better apps, but you need to stick to an app with its flaws and limitations. I have been through this rabbit hole... (paid for Bear, IAWriter, noteplan, FSnotes and probably more that I forget) and have just stuck to local markdown files and use VS code ... I even used LLMs to generate a tiny plugin to solve my micro needs.

vijucat 1y ago

Unpopular opinion: developers obsess about the format being Markdown. This is completely backwards. This is a hammer-sees-nail thing. You should care more about the UX. And that somewhere, someone wrote a parser for the file format. That's it. You don't have to understand every byte of it. It need not be readable text and it need not be version-control friendly. It should be a joy to use, be powerful, be easy to annotate images and pdfs. I bet none of the Markdown solutions do this as elegantly as OneNote or alternatives.

simonw 1y ago
The more time passes the more I care about my notes living in Markdown: - I can transform it to other formats should I need to - The GitHub variant of it (GFM) has feature like syntax highlighting for different languages which is incredibly useful to me based on the kinds of notes I take - Diffing clearly genuinely is a benefit, sometimes I want to know exactly what I changed! - I can parse it with regular expressions, so useful information doesn't end up locked in some weird binary format - LLMs are great at reading and writing it These things may not matter to people who are not nerds. I'm a nerd!
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
  Indeed, Markdown has become a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts: You want to use it because the toolchain and ecosystem surrounding the format is good, and the toolchain and ecosystem are good because everyone is using it.
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
sir, this is HN, nobody wants to hear your rational practical ideas

lawgimenez 1y ago

Almost the best notebook in the world, as long as there's no outage.

eviks 1y ago

> It has excellent search How is it excellent when current logs could do with a bit of redesign doesn't find the comment (requires quotes to find it) And then a tiny typo "current logs could" do with a bit of redesing also fails you

sureIy 1y ago
Confirm. GitHub search is "search" not "excellent search"
- joker99 1y ago
  The fact that you can’t even specify the branch or search across branches is anything but excellent
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  It's such a wasted opportunity too. It would be so powerful to understand how a tool is used by searching for popular repositories that are already using it.
  - simonw 1y ago
    I do that all the time! What's GitHub search missing that prevents you from doing that? Their code search supports regular expressions now, which I find pretty incredible. https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/the-technology-behind-githubs-new-code-search/ https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/th...
    - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      Maybe I have my search syntax wrong. Suppose I want to search for go projects with a flake.nix in the repo root. This finds nothing: language:Go path:/flake.nix I know they exist though, for instance here's one: github.com/joerdav/xc Can you tell me where I've gone wrong?

bob1029 1y ago

For a typical organization, I think issues are still the most valuable part of the GitHub product stack. You can build very powerful project management abstractions on top of issues & labels. If you have discipline to do a monorepo for the entire organization, your issue and code tabs are effectively the entire universe in one place. This is the only thing I've seen that can pull middle managers out of email - a single bucket that has everything of concern in it.

bgwalter 1y ago

Except if you lose your 2FA one day before you need your plans. Or are all plans public? Any local notebook, including pencil and paper, is better.

simonw 1y ago
Pencil and paper is terrible because you can lose the paper. I want my notes backed up to the cloud, with backups replicated across at least two continents. I've experimented with a bunch of tools for extracting copies of my issues and pulling them down locally, which is easy thanks to the GitHub API. One that's particularly fun is a GitHub Actions setup that copies the full contents of each issue thread into a file in the repo itself. Then I can "git pull" to fetch my backup! I still don't have any of them running on a cron at home but I might set that up some day.

pier25 1y ago

Isn’t there something like Obsidian that uses GitHub instead?

OutOfHere 1y ago

For offline use, these were posted recently: https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue

pacifika 1y ago

How’s the mobile experience?

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

The stuff that gets upvoted here... Next up: - "SQLite is almost the best notebook in the world" - "Claude is almost the best notebook in the world" - "An SQLite database containing only Markdown files in a Git repo self-hosted on an SD card in my Raspberry Pi served by a Node.js web app accessible via 56k modem is almost the best notebook in the world" - "I created a startup to take the previous thing, reinvent GitHub Issues on top of it, call it AI Notes, and make almost the best notebook in the world, and it's now valued at $50B"

getsprite 1y ago
Yeah absurd takes abound

simonw 1y ago

This is fun: it turns out you can paste this GraphQL query: { viewer { issueComments { totalCount } issues { totalCount } } } Into https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/overview/explorer https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/overview/explorer in order to see the total number of issues and comments you've posted over your time on GitHub. I got 9,413 issues and 39,087 comments, for a grand total of 48,500 combined!

AstroJetson 1y ago

I always wonder when I see all these best notebooks / note taking systems, etc. why people don't spin up any of the dozens of wiki servers. You can put it online so you can get to it anywhere You can run it off a stick to keep it with you (Tiddlywiki) You can cross link pages to be able to collect things together You can search. Some even have auto link builders so you can build a page of links to pages that match a category. Some support Markup so you have formatting the way you want.

prepend 1y ago
For me, I like to keep my life simple and not run servers unless I have to. I haven’t run a wiki in years because markdown+git is good enough and simpler. I never really need anonymous edits.

bjornasm 1y ago

Councidentally I just started using it as my todo list. Its really neat, especially when using githubs cli gh.

paradox460 1y ago

Try it with ZenHub atop and it's so absurdly good it boggles the mind why anyone would use Jira

trenchgun 1y ago
Well... not everybody uses github, and not every task in Jira is about code in version control

yearesadpeople 1y ago

I've come to the same conclusion myself in the past 2 months (possibly driven by the AI / LLM age making me think even more in version control... writing those words make me wince). I have a small webapp too, which hoovers up issues I like to publish, from a repo with links on the web I like that I feel I would like to share (I believe the kids are calling this 'new age curation'). Its really quite a nice, organic, process. And its so odd its taken me 15 years of note apps - every other hot note app on the market - to realise this. Love Simon's articles, another nice insight

digdugdirk 1y ago
Interesting, do you have a repo for that webapp? Sounds interesting, I'd like to check it out.

zie 1y ago

Forgejo does almost everything Github does around issues that the OP mentioned(I think). * It doesn't extract the title from the issue on bare linkes, instead the url will become something like: <group>/<repo>#15 Which isn't as nice. So issue #15 in repo tootie/mynotes would look like: tootie/mynotes#15 * It also doesn't do offline sync. I think that's the only thing it doesn't do. I use Git Touch on iOS and it seems decent enough, you can get to issues and update them, etc. The bonus is, assuming you run your own Forgejo, or trust whoever runs it for you(say Codeberg), you don't have the MS privacy concerns.

nivertech 1y ago

Years ago I was using GitHub Issues as my personal task manager But ~ 2 years ago I switched to Obsidian for that Eventually I event started used Obsidian for my project management, and ditched GitHub Issues / GitHub Projects With caveats, that I use that for the greenfield project with lots of unstructured exploration + AI agents for keeping design docs and figuring out detailed tasks For the established and legacy projects, I would probably use GitHub Issues for bugs, enhancement requests. And GitHub Projects for all reactive work (support, ops, bugs, etc.) Lastly, I disagree that it's "almost the best notebook in the world". It my might be a best ticketing system or a note taking system, but not a notebook in the sense of Jupyter or LiveBook (but nothing stopping them to make code blocks executable[1], and even add some LLMs). Also it's easy overwrite the content of the issue, even by a single person working from different tabs (at least that was the case in the past). --- 1. GitHub Blocks https://blocks.githubnext.com/ https://blocks.githubnext.com/

getsprite 1y ago

I’m pretty sure you’ve never used any good issue tracking software then.

acquisitionsilk 1y ago

Step 1. Dev trusts Microsoft Step 2. ...? I don't mean to be facetious here. It's just that if GitHub doesn't end up going through the usual enshittification process, it'll be quite the anomaly. Now, maybe it'll be an anomaly, exceptions to rules exist. But it just seems to be an endless cycle, trusting these companies, getting burnt, trusting again, getting burnt again. Is there no end to the cycle? Is there some new pressure on these companies to behave better that was not there before, and therefore we should all give them (yet) another chance? I don't see why we would, personally. It even seems obvious to me that we shouldn't. Like in an abusive relationship, no matter the regret and the promises, eventually you've to say enough is enough, and ideally sooner rather than later. Nonetheless, it's very common practice for people who appear at least superficially like smart people to trust these companies a second, third, fourth time. Either these apparently smart people know something I don't, or they like getting paid large amounts of money so much that they'll stay quiet and use the popular services and simply use their tech savvy to jump to a new thing quickly when the shit hits the fan. Or maybe I just prefer being cynical, and it's a personality thing. Someone, educate me here.

simonw 1y ago
One of the main reasons I pick GitHub issues for this is that they have a very stable, reliable API that I can use to get my data back out again - or use to run continual automated exports, should I ever get around to doing that. I wouldn't trust any system for my notes that doesn't have this.