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Comment by cam_l | Hacker News Reader

Workflowy is great for quick, structured, hierarchical note taking. It is basically a text only bulleted list of lists. Navigable by keyboard or mouse and syncs to whatever phone / desktop etc you have.

Too expensive by half, and I don't think it is client side encrypted which is a deal breaker for anything sensitive. I really enjoy the simplicity though, great for checklists, writing papers, and all those little rare but important non-calendar based lists, ie. books to read, music to buy, etc.

My ideal note-app would be like workflowy, but allow de-hierarch-ising the list mentality. I mean, workflowy is basically a database back end and I can link tags between lists. But why not just have all the tags separate in the first place? You could have the constructed hierarchy tree to the left (ie bullet list), and the links tree to the right so you can see how the entries both compose and decompose.

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That used to be me. Can I suggest you check out Dynalist? It's actually maintained and updated (unlike Workflowy at this point), with more useful features. I've been finding the colouring, headers and bookmarks very useful.

https://dynalist.io/

Love Dynalist for notes and todos.

Two things I dislike though, 1) as far as I can tell the dates/times can't trigger notifications. 2) the paid plan is expensive.. they give so much away for free, but then charge a lot for seemingly little. A $3/m tier is a good price point imo for a todo app. Right now it costs basically the same as Netflix..

Can you please expand a bit more on your ideal note app? Results sound intriguing, but I can't imagine what it would look like from this short description.

Sure..

The idea is that the issue with tags is they can be difficult to trace to all their referenced locations. I find myself not using them because they are difficult to keep track of.. you can't 'see' them at a glance.

But we don't need to see all the referenced locations, just the tree which leads away from the item you are looking at. So you get strict split between, and easy to understand, [left / right], [hierarchy / reference] organisation. Would make it easy to position and re-reference information. And would let you see referencing visually. Below for a really rough idea of what I am talking about.

  - list 1 - sub-list 1 - item A  |  - sub-list 1 - list 1
                        - item B  | 
                        - item C  |  - sub-list 1
                                  |  \ sub-list 3 - list 2
           - sub-list 2 - item D  |  - sub-list 2 - list 1
                                  |  \ sub-list 3 - list 2
                        - item E  |  
                        - item F  |  - sub-list 4 - list 2
  - list 2 - sub-list 3 - item G  |  - sub-list 3 - list 2
                        - item C  |  - sub-list 1 - list 1
                                  |  \ sub-list 3 - list 2
                        - item D  |  - sub-list 2 - list 1
                                  |  \ sub-list 3 - list 2

Oh, I see what you mean now. Left side shows which branches you used to get to leaf, and right sides show other paths to root. It might be very useful occasionally, but would probably have to stay hidden most of time because it would clutter UI with redundant information.

What you're describing sounds a lot like Gingko: https://gingkoapp.com/

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