Comment by benrbray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benrbray | Hacker News Reader

This looks great! Good timing too, since Roam has recently closed its doors to new signups. I've been looking for a new notetaking / PKM / Markdown app recently, but unfortunately all apps out there fall short in at least one of the following criteria:

* bidirectional [[wiki links]]

* support for both inline and display math

* customizable themes / CSS

* rich formatting beyond markdown (e.g. wrap content in <div> tags with custom formatting--useful for e.g. placing a box around text, etc.)

* WYSIWYG (crucial for documents with tons of math and rich formatting as above) including wysiwyg editing of tables

Tools I've tried that come close but aren't quite good enough:

* Jupyter Lab / Notebooks

* Typora

* Roam

* OneNote (just let me write $\LaTeX$ math!)

It's actually been quite frustrating. because some apps are soooo close to what I need, but they're closed-source so I'm powerless to make the small improvements I need. My current workflow for notetaking uses a pretty suboptimal combination of Overleaf, Typora, and OneNote. I'd really like to be able to replace all three with a single tool. At the moment, the only thing that comes close is a Chrome tab with document.designMode="on".

To the Obsidian team: Please add inline math support and consider WYSWIG!

Since roam was lamented, obligatory boost for org-roam:

https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

Apart from the learning curve org-roam is the answer.

I’m on week 2 with it and I can hardly sleep I’m so excited by how it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.

I love this, and used Deft and org-mode for a long while, but formatting and inline images aren't something that's non-hackily possible to do in Emacs. Would love to be wrong about this.

A quick search suggests it's doable https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=org%20mode%20pictures

Yep, I did use inline images in my days with org-mode, but I found it to be rather hacky. It's possible, I just found it unpleasant.

May I suggest contacting the emacs org-mode maintainers and chat. The emacs guys are very receptive I know, I imagine the org-mode guys will be just as good.

Resizing image is a pain, and inserting quick screenshots takes some hacking around.

Inline math is coming very soon! WYSIWYG unfortunately will take a while to get right, but we'll get there.

Give Obsidian a try and let us know what you think! :)

You didn't ask for advice, so feel free not to take it - but you should consider using a pre-baked editing solution like Quill.js or something similar. Rich text serialization is its own problem and you shouldn't waste your development time on it :)

As someone who was experimenting with text editing in a browser recently: I could not find any open source (non-commercial expensive license) text editors that could actually handle workloads I cared about. (and which are not also specialized on code, such as Ace Editor) While Quill (and friends) definitely provide some very nice functionality, the moment I tried to do something like shove a full novel into one, not only did it take quite a while to actually load that text, but it took 500ms+ to insert single characters. There is a serious lack of an open source text editing library for Javascript that can handle any amount of characters without completely bogging down.

I was actually seriously impressed that I was able to take a huge amount of text and shove it into Obsidian and the UI stayed completely smooth the entire time. Props to the Obsidian devs for that!

Have you looked at Trilium Notes?

It appears to match all of your requirements, and is scriptable. It's also strongly FOSS, in the AGPL sense. It also has the ability to self-host a sync server.

https://github.com/zadam/trilium

Have you looked into Zettlr(.com)? It ticks most of your boxes. Plain old markdown. And it's actually open source and a pretty decent community, so there's a good chance to get features in.

Looks very promising, thanks! I'm surprised I've never come across Zettlr before in all my research about editors. The features page and docs really are a testament to potential of OSS.

I felt the same way so have switched completely to taking nodes using https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook

I back everything up in a private git repo and then use various plugins built on top of mdbook to get all the functionality I want:

* rendering graphviz: https://github.com/dylanowen/mdbook-graphviz

* adding tags to the pages: https://github.com/dylanowen/mdbook-tag

* setting up sections to only render locally and not get published: https://github.com/dylanowen/mdbook-access

The plugin system is super easy to use and you don't need to code everything in rust. You can use any language.

I'm also working on a better renderer instead of just running the mdbook server all the time: https://github.com/dylanowen/mdnotes

I believe with plugins you can meet most of the requirements you have: * bidirectional: definitely could be a plugin

* math support: potentially this feature: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/blob/master/book-example...

* customizable themes: you can completely overwrite the wrapping html and CSS

* rich formatting beyond markdown: mdbook supports inline html/js as it's based on commonmark

* WYSIWYG: this is the main missing piece, my strategy is to just run my mdnotes application next to my text editor.

I too have been looking for a better note-taking app. I also signed up for Roam but I'm still on the waitlist. I've been trying out all kinds of programs and coincidentally enough tried Obsidian this last week.

I feel the same exact way as you in regards to all these apps. I currently use Joplin but I wish it was more "roam like" but looked like https://bear.app/.

So far I've settled on using Typora with Joplin.

Have you tried https://wiki.js.org/? Curious if it fits your needs, given they are open source.

P.S.

I use GitHub for all my personal writing and only now realized that a big part of it is due to its open source nature and data portability. I use emacs org-mode for my todo lists for the same reason. You're so right about how critical these features are.

I'm pretty sure org-mode can do just about all of those (except maybe for the custom formatting bit). Inline LaTEX was something I found super nice to have in org-mode.

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