[HN Gopher] Show HN: Dendron - fast open-source note-taking in V...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Dendron - fast open-source note-taking in VSCode
Author : kpats
Score : 155 points
Date : 2021-03-17 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.dendron.so)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.dendron.so)
| smaudet wrote:
| 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.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| 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.
| Off wrote:
| 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/
| hpfr wrote:
| 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.
| edoceo wrote:
| 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
| smilekzs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| endisneigh wrote:
| 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_?
| [deleted]
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| epiecs wrote:
| Same here. The combo that seems to work for me is onenote
| combined with zotero.
|
| - Onenote for ideas and scribbles - zotero for bookmarks
| and documents. Supports tags - physical notebook for note
| taking during meetings
|
| btw you can easily connect zotero to your own nas via
| webdav and you have unlimited storage. Works fine for me.
| The only drawback of zotero is that you dont have a native
| mobile client.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I love Drafts for the Mac ecosystem. It has two giant
| things going for it:
|
| - It opens instantly to a blank window ready for me to
| type into.
|
| - It's extensible with built-in actions and JavaScript so
| that I can automate things like posting the text I just
| wrote to Twitter or Mastodon, or add it to OmniFocus, or
| text it to my wife, etc. etc. etc.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Software can't read your mind, so how should it know what you
| need right now? It's up to the user to build a system that
| works for him, and the user must stick with it. Software can
| only supporr you there, but not replace you.
|
| Though, you can use the system of someone else and cope with it
| and use this person tools. But usually this does not really
| work well long for most people.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I'm with you, tried it but couldn't keep up. I didn't commit to
| it for very long which isn't a fair trial, but I just didn't
| see it panning out.
|
| One thing I realized was that most of my notes were links to
| pages on the internet with maybe a few extra words as context,
| and the rest were chicken scratch step-by-step things I did
| setting up something nontrivially complex. For the links, now I
| just use bookmarks in Firefox and add tags religiously to make
| them searchable. For the step-by-steps... I'm not really sure
| what to do, thinking of running a WebDAV server on my LAN and
| using Joplin as a client to just contain arbitrary markdown
| docs.
| [deleted]
| stevesimmons wrote:
| I found Zotero (academic reference software) with the browser
| plugin to be a simple and very effective way to file general
| information, web bookmarks, Arxiv papers, conference
| materials, PDF books, etc, etc. My basic workflow is:
|
| * Keep Zotero open, and navigate to one part of its
| collection (topic) hierarchy.
|
| * Click on the Zotero button in the browser, to save the
| current web page, PDF doc, paper in Semantic Scholar etc into
| the currently selected place in the Zotero hierarchy.
|
| * Zotero saves all the metadata about the object.
|
| In parallel, I keep project specific markdown files in the
| folder I create for every project.
|
| I tried Roam-like hyperlinked Markdown files for a couple of
| months, but found I kept wanting to keep them alongside other
| project-specific files.
| singhrac wrote:
| I use it a few ways, and I can be specific:
|
| - I will create a folder for a topic with multiple ideas (e.g.
| transformers), and then put inside it a few separate files. One
| might contain a link to a paper or blog post and then my notes
| from reading that (really the most important snippets,
| occasionally a summarizing statement by me). Another might
| contain a list of ideas to try, or a pros/cons list.
|
| - I have a folder called "book reviews" in which I put a single
| file per book I read. I try to write down a single sentence
| about each chapter, and I copy quotes I particularly like. I
| don't refer to these often, but it's reassuring to know that I
| won't have to reread the entire book to regain my state of
| mind.
|
| - Very often when putting together a written document I write
| drafts inside the editor. I know there are "better" tools, but
| the writing feels organic here, since it's adjacent to notes.
|
| - During meetings I'll sometimes make a document for the
| meeting, and then write down a todo list while we're
| discussing. This usually gets sent out as an email to the
| meeting participants (a very useful habit).
|
| I use Obsidian, and have really started this in the past year,
| when note taking apps took off on Hacker News. Fiddling too
| much is kind of a distraction (I spent a few too many hours
| tweaking themes).
| ncallaway wrote:
| I use Obsidian pretty regularly. I started in earnest about 6
| months ago, and I've been really enjoying it.
|
| I like it because it's a wrapper around a folder of markdown
| files. I really my notes being just a folder of markdown files,
| so that's the selling point of Obsidian to me. I can open my
| notes in VSCode just as well as Obsidian, if I'm editing.
| Obsidian gives me some nice functionality (backlinks, hotkeys
| for different notes formats mostly, and just being a separate
| application from VSCode), but it could disappear tomorrow and
| VSCode would take over as my notes.
|
| I setup a cron job to `git add .`, `git commit`, and `git push`
| every day, so I have my notes in a github repo that I can pull
| down if I ever need to switch devices. Or if I just want to
| look at my notes from a device, I can just browse the Github
| repo.
|
| I use it for two different things:
|
| - a daily log of my work for the day, including notes of what I
| did, and where each branch left off. All of my "four little
| things to finish this jira ticket" end up in the daily log. -
| notes on various personal projects. For example, if I am
| looking for a contractor to prune a tree I create a note for
| that. I put in all the contractors I'm contacting, their bids,
| etc, into the note.
|
| > 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.
|
| Maybe your mind does! My mind will often come back with: "there
| were _definitely_ 5 little todos that you needed to do to
| finish the branch, and I have _3_ of them here ready for you.
| Maybe do a `git diff` to try and remember the other 2? ", or
| "Hey, I was looking for a contractor to prune the tree. I
| called three of them, I think. Maybe four. Who knows. A couple
| sent in bids, but I don't remember which ones. Let's check
| gmail and see if we can find any there?".
|
| So, personally my use of notes isn't to stop my brain trying to
| _come up_ with a task to complete. My notes are basically an
| index for when I want to resolve a task, to all the information
| I need to pick it up again. Or, alternatively viewed, it's the
| context when I put a task down, to help resume the task when I
| context switch back to it.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| I believe this does not work well. At least it did not for me.
|
| We routinely conflate todos/plans ('need to do this') ,
| observations and patterns ('this is what i see happening
| when...'), events ('this happened...') and learnings ('this is
| what i did wrong, right...') as "notes".
|
| I started with dropping everything in notational velocity (till
| it broke on my Mac upgrade) and / or 'email thyself' and like
| you said, it builds and its there but of little or no use.
| Unless its in my brain, I can't make connections. Without
| connections I cannot recall when I need it. It really does not
| help. Its actually net negative with the effort that goes into
| putting it in there.
|
| I now use Google docs. One doc for each topic I am currently
| working on (e.g interview preparation, home purchase research,
| kubernetes, etc..) This builds topic wise documents which are
| exponentially faster to navigate/guess without needing text
| search or any filing system. I can skim through 1-2 documents
| and it provides context, history, insights, quotes in 1 place
| that I try and read more often which tends to stick in my head.
| Also given that I am more a visual learner, the place where
| something particular was on a document also brings in what was
| written next to it simply because I've seen it so often.
| drcursor wrote:
| Zettlr [1] with some custom CSS changes [2] has been working
| wonders for me.
|
| 1 - https://www.zettlr.com/ 2 -
| https://gist.github.com/drcursor/8dd91f28bf5a58dd5f23f828d48...
| prepend wrote:
| This looks like a great tool, thanks for linking it here.
| bachmeier wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-18a138...
| mcbishop wrote:
| 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/. 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 wrote:
| 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!
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Why? Isn't Obsidian better?
| kevinslin wrote:
| See here on the differences between Dendron and Obsidian
| 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
| jjice wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| scudd wrote:
| 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
|
| But as a VS Code extension.
| kevinslin wrote:
| Dendron supports mermaid diagrams:
| https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/eea2b078-1acc-4071-a14e-18299f...
| siproprio wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-8468-269def...
| georgyo wrote:
| This get's posted to HN fairly frequently, always as a new Show
| HN.
|
| 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.
| prepend wrote:
| Until then, I'll just keep having 50 draft documents open in
| BBEdit, occasionally saving them off somewhere permanent.
| kevinslin wrote:
| 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-4537-97b5-64556d...
|
| One of our users also made a great video series about Dendron
| on egghead: https://t.co/qIRvQqtttZ
| weaksauce wrote:
| 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.
| hobo_mark wrote:
| 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.
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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).
| slightwinder wrote:
| Have you tried obsidian? It's directly working on the
| filesystem, including folders. No vendor lockin.
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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...
| slightwinder wrote:
| It's up to you how you use it. If you want folders being
| categories and have index.md'd, then do it, create them.
| Obsidian is very liberal in it's usage and does not enforce
| a specific workflow or structure.
|
| I remember there is also a plugin which allows to use
| folder as notes, by loading a kind of index.md when opening
| the folder.
|
| But what do you mean with "bag of media" folder?
| kevinslin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dgreensp wrote:
| 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/#/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.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You might enjoy _plain text logging_ on top of git or Dropbox.
|
| Keep your markdown notes in one location, backed by git. Pull
| on any device for any reason. Use GitHub's / Dropbox's web
| interface when required.
|
| - Search with grep
|
| - Structured text + grep is _extremely powerful_
|
| - use vim / emacs customization for display
|
| - Display anything using, say dot or graphviz
|
| - Edit with VSCode _if you like vscode_. Anything else
| otherwise.
|
| I'm always surprised how few solutions manage to reach this
| basic level of functionality. Not that Dendron doesn't do a
| fine job!
| kevinslin wrote:
| Yeah, those are some of the core features that I can't live
| without. A lot of the reason for building in VSCode is
| because they have a good VIM extension :)
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Can't access my notes from mobile_
|
| On mobile (iPad anyway) try CodeSpaces:
|
| https://github.com/features/codespaces
|
| It's VS Code in your browser tab, and works great.
|
| Separately, I don't necessarily use that, since it's an online
| experience. I use Working Copy and Textastic (or other local
| native editor depending). Benefit of git sync and markdown. A
| smattering of local editors do have both Markdown and mermaid
| support.
|
| Rest of your feedback, I agree with.
| kevinslin wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Some additional details on the
| cons:
|
| - 1) Mobile support. We don't have a mobile app but you can
| access it on mobile using tools like GitJournal or IaWriter.
| Admitted this is not ideal but we do plan on a native mobile
| solution later this year. See FAQ here:
| https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def...
|
| - 2) As for navigating notes, this depends on your style. If
| your use case includes always having the preview side by side,
| then navigating with Dendron is not always consistent. If you
| mainly use the markdown view, navigation is our strong point
| since you can navigate and create links without leaving the
| keyboard
|
| - 3) Yes. We don't have full text search but vscode text search
| is quite good, especially if you combine it with the [search ed
| itor](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/692fa114-f798-467f-a0b9-3cc
| cc3...) which lets you create new docs from search results. we
| also have guides on how to use dendron with elasticsearch [here
| ](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def.
| ..)
|
| - 4) As for order with notes, there's a few thoughts here. You
| can embed notes into other notes using [note
| references](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f1af56bb-
| db27-47ae-8406-61a98d...) and control the order there. for how
| it displays in the hiearchy, its alphanumeric sorting. custom
| sorting is something we can implement if there's enough demand.
| for lots of short notes, this is where I would push back.
| VSCode has a fantastic windowing system which lets you split
| your editor into multiple panes (that can be automatically
| maximized). I regularly have 5-6 panes open at any given time
| that are views into different notes, sometimes the same notes.
| this is actually one of our strongest features since tools like
| notion only let you view one note at a time
|
| I'm thankful you gave us a chance and do know that we're
| working on all the points you mentioned!
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I think your tool might be helpful for documenting
| requirements, for teams that have not adopted something like
| BDD. And maybe for mapping the requirements to tests and
| source code. Have you seen examples of this?
| kevinslin wrote:
| Yep. We have quite a number of technical writers using
| Dendron. Dendron also integrates nicely with public
| projects - we support publishing docs as dendron pages with
| github links back to the original project. This results in
| publicly referencable docs that can be cloned and used
| locally. See example here: http://tldr.dendron.so/
| gervwyk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-8468-269def...
| gaucheph wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| nice find! just fixed
| atleta wrote:
| 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.
| kpats wrote:
| 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/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 wrote:
| 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.
| slightwinder wrote:
| 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.
| yaml-ops-guy wrote:
| Have you ever looked at jrnl? iirc it was debuted here on HN
|
| 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
| corobo wrote:
| I realise part of their marketing is in that their filetype
| is readable in 50 years when all the iPad apps are gone, but
| does anyone know of any iPad apps that are compatible in the
| meantime while it is still being used?
|
| Phone actually, specifically. I'd love to be able to just
| drop in a jrnl entry without faffing with text files on iOS
| batmanthehorse wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So Dendron does this. We have a shortcut to automatically embed
| images as well (https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a91fd8da-6895-49f
| e-8164-a17acd...).
|
| I describe Dendron as basically notepad with additional
| features :)
| inakarmacoma wrote:
| Would love to see a feature comparison between Dendron and
| Obsidian.md if anyone has experience with both.
| kpats wrote:
| 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-a1f4-1f140e...
| kevinslin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Did you find any features in particular lacking in Obsidian?
| kevinslin wrote:
| 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/683740e3-70c
| e-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...
| allenleein wrote:
| Thanks for sharing it. Here is another similar product:
|
| A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode
|
| https://github.com/foambubble/foam
| rektide wrote:
| 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
| kevinslin wrote:
| 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/683740e3-70c
| e-4a47-a1f4-1f140e...
| gegtik wrote:
| FYI, following that link brings us to a link about
| hierarchies https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f3a41725-c5e5-485
| 1-a6ed-5f5410... which then attempts to link to an 'axiom'
| which is 404: https://www.kevinslin.com/organizing/its_not_
| you_its_your_kn...
| gegtik wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-17 23:01 UTC)