[HN Gopher] Show HN: Eidos - Offline alternative to Notion
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Show HN: Eidos - Offline alternative to Notion
I'm a big fan of Notion, having used it for 7 years. When I first
met Notion, it was just a block document editor, and it didn't
excite me until it released the Database. Later, I learned about
Airtable, and a bunch of similar products, all of them are SaaS,
with such powerful tables but poor performance. Why isn't there a
personal offline version table? Most of the time, I don't need to
collaborate with others. What I really want is a personalized,
offline version of Notion with better performance and more
flexibility. So that I can have full control over my data. Notion,
like most SaaS products, is not open-source, so I can't customize
it to my heart's content. I can only wait and vote for new
features, but I can code, and I don't want to wait. I really like
the concepts of FOSS, solid, and local-first. SaaS could die. Long
may the SQLite. So, I built Eidos based on sqlite for managing my
personal data throughout my lifetime in one place. Eidos is a long-
term project for me. It looks like Notion, but the core is more
like "obsidian.sqlite" with a powerful extension system. Here are
a few key ideas: - Eidos is built based on sqlite-wasm and runs
entirely in the browser. It can be used immediately, with no
installation or configuration required. It's a pure PWA, with full
offline support. - A block-styled document editor and an Airtable-
like table, built on top of SQLite, where each table is a real
SQLite table. - A powerful extension system inspired by Figma
plugin and Cloudflare worker. You can write scripts in TypeScript
directly in the browser. It is easy to manipulate data in docs,
tables, and the file system. It also supports API. - If you're not
a developer, you're still in luck. We're living in an AI era. LLM
empowers people to craft their own software without writing any
code. Eidos deeply integrated with LLM. You can translate,
summarize, talk to your data, process table data in batches, and
more. It makes your life easier with AI. You can fully customize
your prompts and freely choose your LLM provider, without being
locked to any vendor. To be honest, so far, there are still some
bugs and shortcomings, and it hasn't yet reached my envisioned
perfection. There is still some work to be done, but the basic
framework has taken shape. I've been working on it for a year and
have eaten my own dog food for the past half year. To help Eidos
become better (and celebrate the release of the Elden Ring's DLC),
I've decided to make it open-source and gather more feedback. Now,
I'm going to take a break and play Shadow of the Erdtree. -
https://eidos.space
Author : mayne
Score : 62 points
Date : 2024-06-21 06:30 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| drio0 wrote:
| Congrats on the effort. Looking forward to have this expanded or
| further developed. The reason why I still use Notion is
| definitely for their database feature and an usable mobile app.
| It's hard coming back to desktop-only
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| You maybe want to check the trademarks for this name, there are
| some for it. Not that this must become a problem, but it's better
| to avoid potential problems early.
|
| Besides that, SQLite seems promising, but not sure how exactly
| this relates to everything. The website is talking about saving
| in browser, and there is no release on the GitHub. Is this
| something running in browser only?
| vr46 wrote:
| Yes, the first thing I thought was, "Tomb Raider"!
| mayne wrote:
| Thanks for the reminder. I know this makes SEO more
| challenging, and it also reminds people of a certain game
| company, but I really love this concept, which originates from
| the Plato's theory of forms, and it pairs perfectly with the
| eidos.space domain name. While it may not be a great business
| name, the concept itself is exciting.
|
| Eidos is deployed on Cloudflare Pages. it's a purely frontend
| project and the web is only used for distribution. In order to
| iterate faster, I didn't use GitHub's release yet.
|
| There are some enhanced experience services running on
| serverless, but they are not necessary. For instance, adding a
| bookmark block to a document requires fetching extra
| information through a URL. This relies on
| https://github.com/mayneyao/link-preview . Most of the CORS
| related work is implemented through Cloudflare worker. These
| services are not necessary. Moreover, they are open-sourced and
| can be self-deployed. For more details, see
| https://github.com/mayneyao/eidos/blob/main/lib/const.ts#L64
| ibdf wrote:
| I am a big fan of Notion but lately it's like they have been
| asleep on the driver seat. If they only offered custom extensions
| I think they would do so much better. I have recently switched to
| Obsidian but I am not fully committed yet, so i will give this a
| try.
|
| My only critic so far... It seems you copied one of my least
| favorite "features" from Notion which is to force a default
| "Title" column for the tables. I find that most of the time I
| don't need a Title column, but I can't turn it off nor can you
| change it's type.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| This is fantastic work. Will play around with it!
| obeavs wrote:
| Wow! Really awesome local-first work on a modern stack. Would
| love to know more about your experience with Glide and Lexical.
| tonymet wrote:
| What's the shortcoming in iOS that has spawned a million notes
| clones
| curtisblaine wrote:
| Some questions:
|
| 1. How to use extensions? I can create one (it looks like a
| javascript function getting some context and one argument) but I
| have no idea how to invoke it. I expected to be able to invoke
| them on selected text.
|
| 2. Does it sync on other computers / browsers or is it only
| local?
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