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Comment by laurent123456 | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm the author of this app. The notes on each client are stored in an SQLite database for performance reason. If they were stored directly as text files it would be slow to query them, it would be very hard to make it work on mobile (and even slower), and you wouldn't be able to easily create relations between notes and tags, notes and notebooks, resource links, etc.

It's when exporting them or syncing them that all the app entities (notes, but also notebook metadata, tags, etc.) are converted to plain text files. One advantage of this is that the notes are not locked into an obscure format - it shouldn't take more than 1h to create a script that read and convert these text files to any other format.

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> If they were stored directly as text files it would be slow to query them, it would be very hard to make it work on mobile (and even slower), and you wouldn't be able to easily create relations between notes and tags, notes and notebooks, resource links, etc.

Zim uses plain text files and folders. You can have images, tags, link to other notes, links to the filesystem...

Maybe I am not using it with enough files for it to be a problem, but I cant say that it is slow.

I think Zim uses a two level approach, storing text files but also keeping an index database for doing full text search.

Thanks for the info!

I personally feel the only truly non obscure format are plain text files and it should be possible to use hierarchies, tags etc. with a combination of folders and front matter on the files itself. But I am a bit extreme in this, since I just don't like to migrate my notes yet again and have to install app after app on every device I need to access them. I was quite taken with projects like grav, that can provide functionality with just markdown files. But I haven't investigated to far on performance, especially not on mobile.

And you are right of course, that SQLite is quite preferable to most propitiatory cloud storage solutions.

You can use a database for queries without treating it as the canonical data store.

Whether that approach is a good idea is a different question than it being possible.

This is why open source is great. You should fork the project and prove your hypothesis to us instead of FUD-sniping in the thread. ;-)

There's no FUD in that comment.

Hi, I wonder if it convenient to ask questions here, but I can not figure out how to sync with local filesystem, could you help?

Hi, from the CLI app, you would need to set the sync target to the file system with:

    :config sync.target 2

Then you can specify the directory where the files should go with:

    :config sync.2.path /path/to/synced/dir/

Currently there's no config screen to do this in the desktop app, but it's possible to enable by changing the settings directly in the SQLite database (in the "settings" table).

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