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Comment by ericax | Hacker News Reader

I don't use emacs, but I love the concept of organizing your notes and knowledge in plain text, so much that I made my own thing. It's in private beta right now [1], and I've been dogfooding it for the past two months and really enjoying it.

The graph overview may seem like a gimmick, but it's surprisingly useful in reviewing stale notes. Tracing semantic connection is more fun than just browsing a folder.

It's also super nice to be able to embed local copies of PDFs, images, and voice notes, so I know as long as I back up my hard drive, I'll never lose them.

Next I want to add plugins to do periodic reviews of notes, and maybe space repetition for term/definition pairs. Honestly, these efforts only make sense when the data is available for the long haul.

[1]: https://obsidian.md/

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So this is interesting. I was ticked off when it says: "what platform do you use the most?"

I have been looking at a handful of projects in this space, including notion.so and Roam, but am seriously considering moving back to Markdown-folder backed by Dropbox, for which there are a variety of editors including The Archive, and mobile apps too.

I urge you to allow zero-friction bidirectional sync at the very least. For me, unless I have complete data portability, a note-taking app that might disappear in a year is a non-starter for me.

[edit: I read deeper and see you have it, thank you]

One insight when it comes to building note-taking apps with portability in mind is that when you want to build more rich features, like collaboration or backlinking, is that a database is more suitable to build upon than a basic filesystem. But that architectural choice is at conflicts with portability, because while bringing-your-own-file-system is possible with Google Drive and Dropbox, having your own personal database isn't as popular. Anyone share similar sentiments?

Yes and no. A database is just a layer. Using a dedicated database and storing your data in it is simple. But nothing prevents you from storing the data (including relevant metadata) outside of it, and use the database just as a caching-layer for it superior abilities in it's own realm.

Dividing layers is of course more work and has problems of it's own, but works well enough that AFAIK this org-roam here is doing under the hood too.

Have you had a look at Joplin (https://joplinapp.org)? It's mature, open-source, has e2e encryption, is markdown-backed, and supports syncing via Dropbox. Also supports attachments.

I actually switched to it from org-mode, but still edit the notes in emacs because of keymap (via "Edit in external editor" feature).

Yep I did look at Joplin, but it seems internal linking is not their focus, unfortunately.

Ah, sorry. I focused too much on the "seriously considering moving back to Markdown-folder backed by Dropbox". Joplin does support note linking (https://joplinapp.org/markdown/#links-to-other-notes), but it is quite clunky, to be honest. However, it does look like it's being addressed soon (https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/syntax-to-link-notes/5264/...).

There's no sync right now, the source of truth is your local folder.

P.S. When I read bidirectional sync I misread it as bidirectional links, which is something we're working on as well!

so, what's the difference with Zim which also stores your information on a wiki written with Markdown-ish syntax on your hard drive and is also extensible with plug-ins ? https://zim-wiki.org/

I'd say Obsidian is very similar to Zim. Zim is probably the closest thing I looked at before deciding to make my own thing.

I wanted a few things that Zim didn't offer, such as a quick PDF viewer, bib/reference entries, audio notes (embeddable), and space repetition for term/definition pairs. I realize these needs are highly personal and they will be plugins that you can enable/disable.

I didn't love the interface but it wasn't a deal breaker.

Curious why the special `[[wiki style links]]` syntax?

E.g., why not just use Markdown's existing syntax, like `[A File](a-file.md)`?

(Cool looking project by the way, all the values are right up my alley.)

Thanks!

There are 3 main reasons:

1) At least to me, "[Topic](Topic.md)" is the most typical case, where the name of the link is the same as the file name without the ".md", so I feel like not repeating the title twice is better.

Markdown supports "[](Topic.md)" but IMO the syntax doesn't look as nice.

2) Easier to distinguish between internal links and external links.

3) Personally, I think "[[note]]" blends into the sentence better.

[[wiki style links]] are not as portable as standard Markdown links, I have to admit that. We will support "[A File](a-file.md)" as well for maximum portability, and possibility provide conversion utilities if you decide to move away from the wiki style link syntax.

curious. how you deal with slugging topics with "Punctuation!". Also do both types of links provide the same affordances? If I write [[Topic]] vs [Topic](topic.md) is there any semantic difference?

Not sure I understand the first question, but if the topic itself contains "!", that's fine by the app, as long as it doesn't use the characters that the OS doesn't allow (like slashes).

The vertical bar syntax is also supported, so you can write [[Topic|display name]] and "display name" will show.

I usually leave punctuation out of the link, like `[[name]]'s`.

> Also do both types of links provide the same affordances? If I write [[Topic]] vs [Topic](topic.md) is there any semantic difference?

No semantic different.

UX-wise, right now [[ auto-completes from the list of files in your folder, whereas [Topic]( doesn't.

You answered both my questions! Also saw you created dynalist. Look forward to seeing this new project!

Roam does the same thing, so they may have just copied what was already established. I'm sure there's solid rationale on Roam's side fwiw, just don't know it :)

Yeah, I wonder why they decided on that as well.

The first time I learned about this syntax is from MediaWiki's internal link syntax [1], I wonder if there are any predecessors before them.

[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links

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