[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) - Structured note-taking...
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Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) - Structured note-taking for developers
and teams
Hi HN, I'm Kevin, the founder of Dendron (https://www.dendron.so).
Dendron is a local, open-source, markdown-based note-taking tool
that helps developers work with notes like they do with code. My
background is in software engineering. Before Dendron, I worked at
AWS for 5 years on systems that had grown more complicated than
what any one person (or team) could hope to understand. As someone
who doesn't have a great memory, I was always overwhelmed with
technology and the constant flux in programming languages,
frameworks, and techniques. I realized early on that I wouldn't be
able to keep everything in my head and so I wanted a better way of
externalizing this information in a way that could help me find it
again when needed. The problem with externalizing information is
that it becomes hard to find again later unless you're diligent
about maintaining a consistent structure. Search is a possible
solution, but doesn't work at the scale of personal data (too big
to keep in one's head but too small and too unstructured to
effectively index). I tried all the note-taking tools and found
that they too, to varying degrees, made it easy to get notes in,
but hard to get specific information back out again--especially
once the quantity of information grew beyond a certain threshold
(eg. 1k notes). Over a decade of experimenting, I found that the
only times when I've been able to find information both
consistently and quickly is when that information was well
organized and well structured. Whether it's a certain naming
convention or a precise hierarchy, once information was indexed in
a way that made sense in my head, I could find it again. This led
me to the structural approach that is now embedded in Dendron. I've
been using it successfully myself to manage a personal corpus of
over 30K notes. Organizing notes doesn't happen effortlessly or
become unnecessary with note-taking tools. What's different about
Dendron is that we accept that organization is necessary and
requires work -- we give you the structure and the tooling to do it
consistently. Dendron is the combination of two things: (1) a
structured superset of Markdown with a type system to map and
enforce the consistency of your notes, and (2) tooling built on top
of that structure - this is a growing set of commands and utilities
that let users refactor, lookup, and share their knowledge. We
borrow heavily from prior work in programming languages and
developer tooling which help developers organize and reference
millions of lines of code. The main way that users interact with
Dendron is as a VSCode plugin. When you start the plugin, Dendron
starts a local server that indexes and processes commands from the
plugin in a separate process. We have interactive graph views and a
note preview which is powered by React and NextJS. These are the
same components that go into our NextJS template which users can
export to publish their notes. Most of our users are developers.
Their use cases include daily journals, keeping track of tasks, and
implementing personal knowledge management systems. Many also take
advantage of our publishing feature to share their notes on Github
Pages and other platforms. Because notes are local, most of our
users use Dendron for both personal notes and work. They keep their
personal notes on a shared drive like Dropbox and work notes on
their work computer. We also have enterprise customers that use
Dendron to publish their content. For example, AWS uses Dendron to
host a YC specific manual to new YC batches. Currently, we have a
Patreon-like model where supporters can contribute to get access to
priority support, early builds and contributor-only chat. Next
year, we are launching a teams offering, to give technical teams a
better alternative to existing tools like Confluence and Notion.
Dendron is open source and self-hostable. The code is freely
available in Github and can be installed on all VSCode compatible
clients. You can get started by following the installation
instructions here:
https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/678c77d9-ef2c-4537-97b5-64556d.... We
also offer a CLI that has a subset of the functionality available
from the plugin, which is also open source. Whether you're just
getting into note-taking or are a seasoned veteran who has tried
all the tools, I would love to hear how you do knowledge
management. If you do try Dendron, please let me know how we can
make it better for you! I'll be responding to comments all day -
you're also free to email me directly at kevinlin@dendron.so or
message me in our discord server (https://discord.gg/AE3NRw9).
Thanks for reading!
Author : kevinslin
Score : 112 points
Date : 2021-11-10 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
| Jarlakxen wrote:
| Thanks I have been using Dendron for writing a D&D campaign. It
| was really useful to organize places, npcs and plot lines
| kevinslin wrote:
| Happy to hear!
|
| We actually have quite a number of D&D players using Dendron.
| was thinking of organizing something for world builders inside
| our discord. Let me know if you would be interested :)
| p1nkpineapple wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| I've been using Foam [1] for the last year, which is an open-
| source vscode-powered aternative to obsidian. There seems to be a
| large overlap in features. What benefits does Dendron have over
| Foam that would convince me to switch?
|
| [1] https://github.com/foambubble/foam/
| dang wrote:
| Previous HN threads, if anyone wants to follow the history:
|
| _Show HN: Dendron - fast open-source note-taking in VSCode_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26491764 - March 2021 (84
| comments)
|
| _Show HN: Dendron - A Hierarchical Tool for Thought_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24898373 - Oct 2020 (168
| comments)
|
| _Show HN: Dendron - open-source, local first, anti-roam note-
| taking tool_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517701 -
| Sept 2020 (9 comments)
|
| _Show HN: Dendron - a roam like open source markdown note taking
| app_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23890035 - July 2020
| (39 comments)
|
| _Show HN: Dendron - a local-first, markdown based, hierarchical
| note taking tool_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23824988
| - July 2020 (2 comments)
| kevinslin wrote:
| Thanks Dan for the extra context!
|
| In terms of what's changed since the last post - we have done a
| soft product pivot from note-taking for everyone to knowledge
| management for developers. This is because we found that non-
| developers struggled with a lot of development basics unrelated
| to Dendron (eg. navigating vscode, git, etc) which made us
| realize we still had more work to do to make Dendron intuitive
| for everyone.
|
| On a product side, we have also released a brand new publishing
| platform based on ReactJs and NextJS that developers can use to
| generate their static sites based on their Dendron notes.
| rememberlenny wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! I've love Dendron and the application to
| turn long timespan complex information into spatially organized
| formats.
|
| My wife is writing a book and a weekly newsletter, and I know she
| spent a lot of time to organize how she collects/documents what
| she reads, so that she can minimize the time to producing new
| content. In that vein, this makes total sense.
|
| What do you think are some other areas outside of software that
| can benefit from this kind of note taking? Are there any active
| users now that you can share about?
| kevinslin wrote:
| in a broad sense, any area where people struggle with having
| too much information can benefit (if that sounds like it could
| apply to everything, its because it can). the reason for our
| focus on developers is because the concepts we introduce (eg.
| schemas, type systems, refactoring, etc) are already familiar
| and so there's an easier onramp to a tool like dendorn. the
| goal is to make these fundamentals intuitive enough that
| everyone can use
|
| an analogy I use here is excel - no one was born knowing how to
| use a spreadsheet but the structure and functionality it
| provides make it a pre-requisite for anyone working with
| numbers today. dendron's end goal is to be like excel, but for
| general knowledge
|
| in terms of current non-software use cases, we actually have as
| many non-technical users using dendron as technical. some
| popular examples include authors (dendron is popular for world
| building), gamers (we have a professional street fighter user
| who uses dendron to keep track of different character
| movesets), and students (they use dendron for our ability to
| support math notation and diagrams)
| amichail wrote:
| Why not TeXmacs instead of VSCode? That way, you would have a
| WYSIWYG note taking system.
| kevinslin wrote:
| VSCode also supports WYSIWYG using either webviews or their
| custom editor API. that's actually something we're looking to
| implement soon!
| amichail wrote:
| Do you mean editing in one window and seeing the result in
| another? With TeXmacs, you edit in one WYSIWYG window.
| kevinslin wrote:
| that is how Dendron currently works. But VSCode supports
| WYSIWYG functioanlity inline. You can see an example of it
| here: https://github.com/tejasvi/markless we're planning on
| implementing something similar soon!
| wavesplash wrote:
| The scrolljacking on your site makes it nearly impossible to
| read. Please ask your web team to find a native scroll friendly
| solution.
| [deleted]
| kevinslin wrote:
| Could you elaborate? You mean how animations are tied to
| scrollevents? (our web team might be influenced by the apple
| landing page...)
| davidjgraph wrote:
| It's style over function. With Apple, everyone already knows
| what it does. I would concentrate on explaining what it does.
|
| You're targeting devs, we hate this stuff :). What I like is
| markdown based, VSCode based, open source, alternative to
| Confluence for tech teams. Make that clear.
| kevinslin wrote:
| Got it. Yeah this was something that was subject to
| internal soul searching. The landing page for Dendron was
| our wiki for the majority of its existence ->
| https://wiki.dendron.so/ We hired a design firm to make it
| pop but then went too far in the other direction. When we
| have cycles, we'll take another stab at finding a happy
| medium.
| jaequery wrote:
| how well does it handle media files?
|
| i find embedding media especially screenshots to be getting more
| and more of an important aspect of note-taking.
| kevinslin wrote:
| builtin support currently for images - we have a command to
| insert a copied image into an asset folder and link to it in
| Dendron. we also have custom syntax for controlling image
| styling (https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a91fd8da-6895-49fe-8164-
| a17acd...)
|
| for other assets, we current recommend that you drop into the
| assets folder and link to them. vscode provides a bunch of
| extensions that let you preview different assets (eg. mp4, pdf,
| etc)
| jaequery wrote:
| Is there a GUI based resize / crop functionality built in as
| well?
| kevinslin wrote:
| resizing can be done using our image syntax. eg. `{max-width:
| 300px}`. no support for cropping from inside dendron though
| I'm almost sure there's at least one vscode extension that
| can do that
| hyperupcall wrote:
| This is exactly what I'm looking for! After creating hundreds of
| markdown notes with Obsidian, it became rather hard to sift
| through and query knowledge. I can't wait to try Dendron out!
| angryasian wrote:
| thank you for the Obsidian recommendation.
| kevinslin wrote:
| obsidian is a great app and they have an excellent mobile
| client. if you ever want to explore the structural components
| of Dendron while using Obsidian, you can as we interop on
| most features
| zweiasakura wrote:
| this is a hallmark of good software, and a breath of fresh
| air to see, given the amount of proprietary lock-in in
| software today.
| kevinslin wrote:
| thanks! we try to be both compatible and open about
| everything we do. more details on that in our handbook ->
| https://handbook.dendron.so/
| kevinslin wrote:
| Awesome, let me know how it goes. We have an obsidian to
| dendron guide here ->
| https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f9b4fc21-7613-4c8a-9257-cec4c0...
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Seems like a fantastic solution - congrats
| kevinslin wrote:
| thanks! it started off as me trying to make a "better note
| taking tool for kevin" and just kept growing from there
| threatofrain wrote:
| What is the business model for Dendron? Is Dendron pursuing a
| paid feature for easily publishing your wiki?
| kevinslin wrote:
| Our beachhead market is to compete with tools like confluence
| to be the knowledge base for technical teams. To that end,
| we're building a managed backend for Dendron that will make it
| possible to sync your notes with teammates, provide a web ui,
| access control, private notes, and other team features.
|
| More details in our public handbook ->
| https://handbook.dendron.so/notes/f6d9bc09-04b7-4a02-a6aa-a2...
| Orionos wrote:
| Interesting idea I'll try to use this in a team setup.
|
| Quick remark about the site, I expected the site's tool
| presentation to be an actual video, with sound about the app and
| most importantly fullscreen capabilities. I can barely see the
| video's text on mobile (bigger font also needed). But no auto
| play if there's sound please. Congrats
| kevinslin wrote:
| Awesome! We have a dedicated teams support channel on Discord,
| if you ping me after you join or email me (kevinlin@dendron),
| I'll be sure to add you to it!
|
| It terms of the presentation - thanks for the tip. We have a
| backlog item to swap it out with a higher res video
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| Yey another note taking app! And YC no less!
|
| Not at all like previous YC-backed note taking app
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26565629
|
| Or any note taking app ever.. Seriously, is that the biggest
| thing bothering developers? Is this what you got into computing
| for? The best use for your AWS experience?
|
| The digital equivalent of making an ashtray in pottery class.
| [deleted]
| tighter_wires wrote:
| "Developers should work with notes the same way they work with
| code." Ok, so just put your notes in a git repo, and edit them
| in an IDE.
| kevinslin wrote:
| That is the start :) And if that's all you want to use
| Dendron for (eg. a markdown editor with better integration to
| vscode and git), then you can.
|
| But if you want to expand further (eg. you now have a few
| hundred or few thousand notes), Dendron adds additional
| syntax and structure to make that manageable.
| tra3 wrote:
| But there's more than just revision control, no? Compilers,
| linters, intellisence.
|
| I don't know what is to notes as compilers are to code, but
| certainly note taking could stand to use more tooling.
| kevinslin wrote:
| Yep. Developer tooling has been making massive strides over
| the last six decades, all focused on the problem of making
| information (aka code) easier to manage. Dendron builds on
| top of this and applies it notes.
|
| In terms of the compiler analogy to notes, in Dendron, this
| is the schema (aka type) system we use to help users define
| the structure of their notes: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes
| /c5e5adde-5459-409b-b34d-a0d75c...
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Yey another note taking app!
|
| You're posting on HN. I'm willing to bet you wouldn't be as
| interested in posting comments on r/housekeeping.
| Superficially, HN and r/housekeeping are the same thing since
| they both have a form to input comments. Obviously, there's
| more to it, and good reasons for both to exist.
|
| I disagree with your casually dismissive "digital equivalent of
| making an ashtray in pottery class". Dendron supports a
| specific workflow, something that takes a lot of effort to get
| right. And if they're going to get into syncing and
| collaboration, that's a challenge. As someone that has been
| watching this space for a long time, there's plenty of room for
| new entrants.
|
| Potentially of interest: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
| necovek wrote:
| I thought that was to-do apps?
|
| But the one you are making a comparison with is not really
| relevant: that's Apple-only it seems, and that, in itself, is
| enough incentive to look out for more.
|
| Ultimately, market can decide which are needed and which
| aren't. As for investors like YC, they usually bet into
| multiple products -- while YC might have a better hit rate than
| some other investors, there are likely still more failed
| investments than successful ones (by count). The important bit
| for YC is what the monetary equation is at the end.
| kevinslin wrote:
| I think there's now a blurred line between todo app and
| knowledge management, especially as tools like notion (and
| for that matter Dendron), are making it more viable to manage
| todos within your knowledge base.
|
| As for YC, I remember seeing at least two other note taking
| companies within our winter batch. At AWS, the mentality for
| new services is to "let 1000 flowers bloom" (and see which
| one's make it). Something similar is happening in the note
| taking space right now
| kevinslin wrote:
| Yeah, note taking apps are like mushrooms these days and it
| sometimes feels like everyone is doing it.
|
| I think the reason you're seeing all the development here is
| because how *humans* manage *knowledge at scale* is
| fundamentally an unsolved problem (this is why people keep
| building new tools).
|
| My friends give me grief about doing cloud computing for over
| half a decade to work on a local-first note-taking app. There
| is some overlap though - it is impossible to keep even a small
| subset of AWS (which now has over 200+ services) in one's head.
| The only way to use it effectively is externalizing the
| relevant details in a way that I, as a human, can retrieve. In
| many ways, trying to externalize my mental model of AWS was a
| great proving ground for many of the fundamental ideas around
| structure used in Dendron
| bachmeier wrote:
| Only reason I don't use Dendron more is because I'm not a fan of
| VS Code. Just not for me I guess.
|
| Something I've been exploring is using Dendron on my desktop at
| work (with dual monitors) and Obsidian on my Chromebook. I
| convert the notes from both into a TiddlyWiki site and view/query
| them at the same time.
|
| Apologies for interrupting the casual dismissals.
| kevinslin wrote:
| VSCode (or vscode compatible IDEs) is the main interface for
| Dendron. that being said, we do expose a CLI for a large subset
| of features and will ship and web version early next year!
|
| No apologies necessary :)
| listic wrote:
| What is TiddlyWiki good for?
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| Is there a way I can access dendron notes while working on some
| project in VSCode? It looks like it needs to open an another
| instance of VSCode. Closest thing I found is this Notes extension
| which let me access and edit notes from Activity Bar or Command
| pallet regardless of currently opened project.
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dionmunk...
| kevinslin wrote:
| so a couple of things you can do.
|
| dendron creates a `dendron.yml` file and a `dendron.code-
| workspace` file when you initialize a dendron workspace. if
| you're in a different vscode workspace, as long as one of the
| folders has a `dendron.yml` file, then dendron will treat that
| subdirectory as your dendron workspace.
|
| moving forward, we're looking to support the concept of a
| `global workspace` that you can access anywhere
| mcone wrote:
| Hey, congratulations on the launch! One thing I'm curious about
| is why you've raised so much money. Can you shed any light on
| other future products, or is the teams offering is the main thing
| in the works? I also thought you had a personal hosted offering
| (subscription), but I'm not immediately seeing that on your
| website anymore -- is that still a thing?
| kevinslin wrote:
| lots to say here, most of which is covered in our initial blog
| post about why we raised money ->
| https://blog.dendron.so/notes/N9VxT7G5SovmncezBAGO2/
|
| tldr: no one knows how to do knowledge management at scale.
| Dendron has a viable solution and we're building a team to
| become the knowledge base for every technical team in the world
|
| for the personal hosted offering - its still available though
| we don't advertise it as we're focused on polishing the local
| version this year
| omair_inam wrote:
| So a quick glance makes it seem fairly similar to Obsidian... as
| the docs note, it's built on top of VS Code vs Obsidian which is
| standalone...
|
| What are some reasons Obsidian users would want to switch?
| kevinslin wrote:
| so we have the split preview today (edit in one window, preview
| in another). vscode supports combining the two using either
| webviews or custom editors. you can see an example of that here
| -> https://github.com/tejasvi/markless
|
| we're planning on implementing a similar featureset
| mahalol wrote:
| For me, the reason was that I had found out Obsidian is not
| open source as I initially thought.
| kevinslin wrote:
| You're right - Dendron has a lot of similarities with Obsidian.
| A lot of our users come from people looking for open source
| obsidian alternatives. Our main differentiator is our focus on
| structure - we let users create their own taxonomies using
| "Dendron schemas" which they can use to both document and
| change their note hierarchies over time. A big focus in
| Dendron: how do you continue working with your knowledge base
| after you pass 1k notes? Our answer: by having a consistent
| structure to all your knowledge so you can quickly reference
| what you need
|
| More details here:
| https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a84ff014-e871-445d-9366-d97f1a...
| mynameismon wrote:
| Considering you are YC backed, are there any plans for
| monetisations that you would be willing to share? Because (as
| another comment said) notes apps are dime a dozen, and there
| doesn't seem much that differntiates you from Obsidian (which
| already has a revenue stream)
| kevinslin wrote:
| Yep. we actually share almost everything in terms of source
| code and strategy. For business plan, see https://handbook.
| dendron.so/notes/f6d9bc09-04b7-4a02-a6aa-a2...
| agustif wrote:
| I'm a happy user of Obsidian as other users have commented, but I
| must say having your Notes + IDE on the same app has its perks.
|
| I applied but submitted my code challenge, I must say being
| already familiar with TypeScript/React code bases and being a
| heavy user of VSCode, I don't know why, but after a few months
| passed I found again the code challenge in my mail and just did
| it in an hour or so, it was really easy to set up, iterate with,
| and develop what was asked for.
|
| I think it's a big enough market to have several winners, would
| hope so at least! should look into how to share files in between
| them all
| kevinslin wrote:
| we actually have a lot of users that use both Obsidian and
| Dendron. Dendron is mostly compatible with Obsidian (wiki
| links, note references aka obsidian embeddings, etc) and we
| have a lot of users that use Dendron's desktop vscode client
| and Obsidian's mobile client on the same set of notes to get
| the best of both worlds.
| [deleted]
| orang2tang wrote:
| Hey this looks awesome and will try. Congrats!
|
| I noticed on your site that the title is somehow getting pulled
| up into the nav area after initial load (it looks normal for a
| millisecond then shoots up there):
|
| https://i.ibb.co/VTSkNRH/Capturedendron.png
|
| I'm in Microsoft Edge on Windows 10, 100% zoom on a 1920x1080p
| laptop :)
| kevinslin wrote:
| Interesting - I'll make sure we fix that. Thanks for reporting!
| If you join our discord(https://discord.gg/AE3NRw9), mention
| this post and you'll earn a special badge :)
|
| https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/7c00d606-7b75-4d28-b563-d75f33...
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